What 70.000 years of organizational culture mean for founders

For more than 2 million years, early humans had been using language to exchange facts: "a lion is hiding there," "I found water to the north," "that's my cave." 

However, around 70,000 years ago, something peculiar happened. We started using language skills to tell each other fictional things. We began to tell stories. Moreover, we used those stories to structure how we organize our social groups. Noah Harari called this "the moment when history declared its independence from Biology," because until then, pretty much all behaviors could be explored from that perspective.

The stories we tell

It is notoriously hard to come up with a good definition of culture. Clifford Geertz has an excellent one:

"Culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves." 

Humans evolved (thanks to) telling stories. We are natural storytellers; that's how we make sense of our world and, in reflection, how we shape it. The use anthropologists give to the word "stories" is broader than the category of fairy tales or emotionally moving TED-style personal stories. The kind of stories that shape societies are more subtle and complex: myths, law codes, moral values, and philosophies.

Harari makes a parallel between the DNA of organisms and the culture of societies, positing that culture is the fabric that has allowed societies to grow this large. That parallel can be stretched to visualize the mutual dependency between cultures and stories. DNA affects how an organism behaves, the way it acts affects its environment, and its environment affects which DNA "survives." Similarly, culture affects the stories we tell and the stories we tell transform how individuals make decisions and act. And those actions, in turn, determine how cultures survive, evolve or collapse.

That is why it's important to distinguish between two facets of culture: descriptive and normative. Through the lens of descriptive culture, we can understand how people perceive the culture in which they are embedded. Normative culture is aspirational; it provides us with an ideal to which to strive. In Joseph Campbell words:

"All cultures are founded on myths. What these myths have given has been inspiration for aspiration."

In the micro-world of organizations, the founder –knowingly or unknowingly– seeds those founding myths (the beliefs and values; its ideas of the "stories" about how things work) that represent the aspiration for the organization. During the lifetime of the organization, that aspirational culture will be put to the test by the realities of the interaction between new members of the organization. If the organization flourishes, the culture can be called successful (much like the DNA of a well-adapted organism). If the organization struggles, its culture needs to be reviewed (an organism under external adaptation pressure). 

Culture's building blocks

There's a useful model developed by Schein that I'm going to simplify shamelessly. Schein models culture as a pyramid with three layers that build on top of the ones below:

1.  Artifacts: the visible qualities of organizations, like its perks: flexible times, ping-pong tables, flat management.
2.  Espoused values: the conscious understanding of ideal values: transparency, autonomy, efficiency.
3.  Underlying assumptions: unconscious beliefs that are not questioned and taken for granted

Collins famously insisted that "great" organizations define first who should join and then move onto exploring where to go. Under Schein's model, it's easy to see why that could hold water: under constant dynamic external forces, organizations need to remain flexible and adapt. That requires much less effort when its member share a set of common underlying beliefs that allows them to re-shape the rest of the pyramid.

Cultural contradictions as fuel for change

But what's the source of the "internal integration" change pressure that Schein describes? Back to Harari:

"Every human-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change." 

In his thinking, internal contradictions are not just a known imperfection of cultures; they are "the force that fuels change." (Inconsistencies is a technically more appropriate word than contradictions; each subsequent cultural model strives to integrate those seemingly contradictory ideas). It is because of –and thanks to– its internal inconsistencies that cultures evolve!

A key takeaway for anybody stewarding organizations (and most of us do it at smaller or larger scales) is that we should not shy away from conflict. Healthy organizations are not ones where there are no conflicts, and everybody is perfectly happy with the status-quo, but organizations that exercise the muscle to process those conflicts and to find ways to integrate the tensions.

Patrick Lencioni argues that cohesive teams are not afraid of conflict and engage in productive and unfiltered debate, that, though uncomfortable and stressful ultimately leads to growth. In his model, that ability to function under conflict builds on what he calls vulnerability-based trust: the mutual acknowledgment that there are things we don't know, that we all need help, that others have skills we do not and that we all make mistakes. 

Designing organizational culture

The beauty of this all is that unlike large societies, we have the chance to apply a design process to organizational culture, and the best place to start is with Brook's idea of design as constrained optimization. That means deciding what is that your Organizational Culture will optimize for and under what constraints it is operating. It is essential to understand here that while culture is a complex, dynamic and adaptive system, and will benefit from participatory design, it is not an exception to the design-by-committee pitfalls. In other words, while we all affect and are affected by the cultures that surround us, it is impossible to design them collectively with a specific intention (evidence in our large-scale experiments abounds).

The final "stone" in this construction, but the first one for anyone starting something, what Brooks called the "hardest part of design." And that is deciding what to design.

This article was originally published in Forbes.