Writing for culture
Today marked a new moment when the topic of organizational structure was turned back to us as it pertains to defining our own. The topic of culture was immediately thrusted upon us — a new cohort — and establishing and navigating a process was of utmost importance. It was like one of those video games where you are following along a tutorial when all of a sudden the world opens to reveal endless possibilities. With no right or wrong — only what we deem "good enough" — we proceeded.
Topic areas were thrown out. I took it upon myself to walk down to the front of the class to write down the various ideas, without judgement, in a brainstorming fashion. We ended with about 12 areas, which we wittled down to three.
There were two takeaways for me:
- Culture and conduct was conflated
- Not everyone bought into the need (speculation)
To address the first item, I have been viewing culture through this lens: that which defines success, defines culture. To that extent, getting into how an individual should behave gets too grainular to me. If success is achieving a goal, and there are many ways to acheive a goal, we would be foolish to explicitly state how someone should approach a problem or behave during it. Such issues or conflicts can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
The second item hit on an unconfirmed observation, an intuition. Ultimately, I think that we are perceived as trying to anticipate problems where there aren't any, and this work seems superfluous to some. We either need to scale back or be able to provide convincing evidence as to why this process yeilds a better outcome.
On the matter of writing our culture, we had a good committee discussion. While some were quick to identify things we should and should not do, I thoguht this oversimplified our task. We should be articulating ideals. We should be focusing on the characteristics, qualities, and behaviors for which we strive, avoiding a listing of do's and don'ts. A culture code should prescribe the values we hold. This isn't to say the list of do's and don'ts is unnecessary, however it may be better suited for a code of conduct.