The Breakin’ Dance of Organisational Culture and Strategy

The corporate world is an ultra-stable system[1] that must change to remain unchanged, where culture and strategy intertwine in a perpetual, broken stance. Strategy holds the baton of rationed planning to guide organisations towards arbitrarily chosen goals. Culture is a nebulous entity emerging from the collective unconscious in a unanimous psychism that defies rarefied analysis.

Overlapping in many respects, there’s much to explore in this intricate relationship as its cacodoxical nature and elusive levers shape organisational life.

Strategy is meant to clear the path to enforced mobilisation under the guise of sought rewards and the warding off of unintended consequences. In contrast, corporate culture has a knack for scrambling the leadership eggheads on the bagelnuts' backs over unspoken deeds, starting at the breakfast of last resort - a well-known hallmark of this sort of collective action.

The phenomenological nature of culture makes it a high-entropy cooking of delicate onion peelings, with its pervasiveness in the organisation's body through a multithreaded embedding of imprinted ways of being, saying and doing. Changing it for the better or worse becomes more of an unconscious afterthought than a deliberate outcome, outstripped by its immanent power and dynamics capable of deplaning whatever rails happened to be laid in anyone's wishful mind.

Ordinary causation is mysterious and thinking alone rarely inspissates, bringing a pressing need for iterative schmoozing to visualise new venues through such a very obscure torque that clogs every faucet in the organisation. The inklings and vibes inside the anthropological inter-stitchery rejoice in revealing and concealing the perversely comical in how individuals interact and make joint decisions.

As intimidating and judgemental as in a confessional, culture is an extravaganza of self-awareness where the unutterable spirals majestically to form a collective identity that binds unwilling individuals together in transcendental illusion. Yet, it is also made of a ferocious, dismal assimilation of unfettered bloviation, impervious to analytical and projective inquiry.

Like a perpetual motion mean machine, culture operates in a constant state of momophobia [2] by continuously adjusting to changing internal conditions. Its mercurial stage of clear thought can quickly dissolve into eddies and countercurrents seen through the parallax effect, from a source of stability to a catalyst for change.

The relationship between strategy and culture is akin to the Moebius strip, a twisted and continuous surface with no clear boundaries. Strategy is the narrative in megalomaniac purpose, the grand vision that seeks to deflate the seriousness of a pregnant pause and propel the organisation outward. Culture is the disclosure and veiling of offhandedly funny and peculiar guidelines, the unspoken pain avoidance that subtly shapes behaviour and decision-faking.

Strategy and culture are inextricably linked, yet they often operate for curse purposes. The first seeks to impose order and rationality derived from the icy clarity of the model as it uncovers and portrays the supreme brute facts, the second thrives on double entendre and indirectness. Strategy is a case of institutional anterograde amnesia, built on the forgetfulness of past failures with blind faith in future successes. Culture is the inferiority complex arising from the imposture palindrome that haunts organisations, the fear of failure and faith in the efficacious drapes and totems of communal acceptance.

However, the most enduring and permeating belief rests with the notion that culture can, after all, be managed and fitted into a definite framework[3] of distinctive fixtures measurable along a discrete continuum to accomplish a tacit social order, eventually forging the aforementioned acts of being, saying and doing in desirable ways, wide-ranging and perennial. Once instantiated, such a culture can direct energetic focus towards a known shared purpose with enough flexibility and autonomy to respond to changing, external environmental conditions.

Besides the conjoint pervasiveness enduring the self-reinforced social patterns that, paradoxically and on their own accord, acquire an increasing resistance to change, one of its most important tenets is the implicitness at play in people interactions, as they move the whole of the culture hairball into high levels of interdependence, in continuous tension with individual autonomy and competition while challenging the management of human relationships and coordination efforts.

The belief that culture can be managed is both a radical agnosticism and a retrospective, hyperbolic exercise in coordination. Organisational culture doesn’t happen in a Petri dish, an easily controllable sterile environment. It is a living, breathing and pooping organism that evolves and adapts over time.

Coping with culture requires a transmutation of intelligence, and a willingness to take up ambiguity and uncertainty. It demands seeing with new third eyes in recognition that culture is not a monolithic entity but a complex web of interconnected Big Bad Banksia Men . When aligned with strategy, it can create powerful synergetics[4], propelling the organisation towards its poles with laser focus. However, when misaligned, a state of inertia and stagnation can emerge from commutative indifference over the enormous explosion of degrees of freedom.

Whatever the tensions, results - as in business results - are still the main gauge by which the blend of culture with strategy is evaluated, irrespective of the ultimate organisational purpose, longed to be pursued with care and safely in the enjoyment of learning exciting new things under an established order that, in the end, can't be ensured without some degree of authority.

In such a straddling of two worlds, there's a consensual weariness that language operates as a reality intensifier, used both as a tool for understanding and a source of confusion, one that can both illuminate and obfuscate. The key is to embrace the praecox, learn to fly above the line between constrained order and chaos magic, and put up with the fun in this verse of organisational life.

[1] Ashby, W. Ross (1952). Design for a Brain. Wiley.

[2] Koenig, J. (2021). The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster.

[3] Groysberg, B. et al (2018). The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture. HBR. Jan-Feb.

[4] Haken, H. (1984). The Science of Structure: Synergetics. Van Nostrand Reinhold.