You Don't Make Your Culture (Because Your Culture Makes You)
A 3 level framework for understanding emergent behavior in commercial organisms
Ask 100 different founders what “culture” means, and you’ll get 100 different answers.
Level 1 Culture (L1) - is identifiable by a naive belief in the ability of top-down, prescriptive fiat to shape the actions and outcomes of the agents within an organization. If the following has ever happened in your company, your leadership has L1 beliefs:
(1) Founder gets team together and announces “here is a list of our values” like Moses bringing down the stone tablets from Mount Sinai.
(2) Team takes turns reading the values out loud while everybody else pantomimes contemplation by nodding with furrowed brows
(3) ????
(4) CULTURE!
You all leave high-fiving about your “great culture”, but when it comes time to get to work...nobody has any idea what the pretty board slides actually mean.
Level 2 Culture (L2) - The next step comes by bridging between intention and action. Ben Horowitz summarizes with succinct clarity: “What you do is who you are.” Level 2 Culture takes the platitudes from L1 and ties them to concrete action - “Nobody outworks us” becomes “Reps are required to log 200 dials a week”. In the absence of a strong L2 culture, people will interpret L1 differently, which also means leadership will enforce differently.
Level 3 Culture (L3) - L3 is where things get really interesting. Where L1 declares “say it and it is so”, L2 says “do it and it is so”, L3 says “what have L1 and L2 together actually produced, what variables might we be leaving out of this model, and how is the outcome feeding back to the inputs?”
A few additional axioms:
Your organization will have a culture - you cannot avoid this
Your organization’s culture will be some dynamic combination of L1 fiat, L2 execution and the interaction of the individual agents and teams doing the interpretation of L1 and 2.
All of the above are dynamic variables that work on each other in unpredictable ways that will always be in flux.
L3 recognizes that culture is an emergent behavior - a complex, shifting reality that comes from rational, self interested agents interacting and interpreting both written and unwritten rules to maximize their individual utility.
The implication: Culture takes on a life of its own. And once the feedback loop gets going...functions like an inorganic, sentient intelligence that shapes the very agents seeking to shape it
We’ve asked “how do we control culture?” for so long that we forget to ask “how does culture control us?”
If this sounds disturbing, that’s because it is. Future long form articles will dive in to how to formally model emergent behavior inside of commercial organisms.
CN