Building a Sustainable Culture in a Chaordic Organisation

Building a sustainable culture forms the core that leads to the success of any organisation. However, building a sustainable culture can be a challenging task, one that requires continuous efforts, consciously and purposefully, from everyone involved.

Both sustainability and culture are terms that have their own interpretations. Sustainability is often associated with the environment - reducing, recycling, reusing, and refusing. On the other hand, culture has differing definitions that people resonate with. At Ather, we think of culture around the lines of what Margaret Heffernan says in her book Beyond Measure, “The paradox of organisational culture lies in the fact that, while it makes a big difference, it is comprised of small actions, habits, choices, and behaviours.”?

What does sustainable culture mean for businesses?

Is a work culture centred around sustainability one that focuses on reducing and recycling waste? Or coming up with products that don’t hurt the system? All of this, some of this, and beyond? We always assign sustainability a physical, materialistic nature. But inherently, sustainability is something that is very intrinsic to a human being. The concept of a ‘sustainable culture’ insinuates that sustainability beliefs are embedded at all levels of the organisation, including its values and underlying assumptions.

When we talk about sustainability in business, it is interlinked with the purpose of the organisation. Whenever we look at the human race, we inherently ask these questions - Who am I? Or a question in a mid-life crisis - What am I doing here? The same goes for a business. All this is an eternal search for the purpose which is deep-rooted within. Most importantly, profit cannot be the purpose of an organisation.

What is a chaordic organisation?

As the word suggests, chaordic consists of ‘chaos’ and ‘order’. The concept was devised by Dee Hock, Founder of Visa, in 1999. A clarity of shared purpose and principles forms the basis of a chaordic organisation. These organisations are agile in form and function, constructively harmonise conflict and paradox, and combine cooperation and competition. They learn, adapt, innovate, share and are ever-expanding.?

Creating a Chaordic Organisation

As an organisation, we should be able to create a joint statement of value, not one that's simply an instruction of what needs to be done, but a purpose of what we can become.?

Once a vision or purpose is in place, or at least widely known and accepted, it’s time to create a set of beliefs. These are conscious behaviours that people jointly agree with, ones that describe how to collaborate. These are not enforced procedures or something set in stone. They are innovative and ever-evolving. By coming to this belief jointly, we avoid the need for enforcement and start looking at it as a manifesto of collaboration.?

Such a chaordic organisation does not look at sustainability as a response to something going wrong in the environment or something that you should do to improve brand value. A chaordic organisation embeds sustainability in its purpose, communicates it in its shared beliefs and values, and lives it in its everyday practices.

How Ather lives as a chaordic organisation

If you have been following us, chances are you might have seen this yellow image about the building blocks of our culture - our value commandments - TAAS. At Ather, we Think As A Species !

When we started to think about the kind of culture we wanted to build, we tried not to go by words that seem intriguing but are, in reality, quite vague. We wanted to build a space that supports innovation and creativity, that emerges out of chaos and order, one where people align and imbibe themselves with the values and therefore do not need constant supervision.?

These values and principles were defined by how people at Ather experience Ather. This led to the need for ‘Culture Conversations’, a reflective space where people come together in 1x1s, dyads, triads, and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with the CHRO to describe their ‘here and now’ experience of culture.?

These conversations helped us understand principles or behaviours that we want to incorporate, take into consideration the realities of our moonshots, and arrive at the final picture as a collective. We continue to have these Culture Conversations every 18 months, to intentionally embed our values and reevaluate our behaviours. Culture Conversations 1.0 and 2.0 revealed values and behaviours being associated with defining Ather, the tendency to say “this is Ather” or point out something that is “not Ather”.?

With self-directed and self-organising groups (like our Learning Circuit that evaluates and supports the self-development needs of individuals, and the Scouts Network that supports content democracy by gathering stories and celebrating wins, from across the org), we at Ather want to weave our values and purpose in structure and practice.?

The decision-making process at Ather also resonates with the idea of a chaordic organisation. Conversations always begin with context setting, which sets the base for all elements that follow. Further, we follow a matrix org structure, where the verticals provide depth and expertise and horizontals chase execution. Our swimlane (cross-functional team) engagement actively evaluates and supports team members’ engagement with the swimlane way of working.?

Weaving culture is the responsibility of every person within the organisation and is not limited to leadership. At Ather, we are as equally obsessed with weaving culture as we are with numbers, growth, and scale.?

If there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, it was to accept and embrace uncertainty. In a growing organisation, certainty is not guaranteed and we can never rest easy thinking that ‘we have arrived’. It took us a while to get there, but the thing that got us through was the ability to focus on our True North. But most importantly, learning to be a chaordic organisation that sustains and lasts the test of time means being at peace with “figuring it out” and accepting the fact that we don’t know everything. There is no ultimate being, it's only the journey of ‘becoming’.?

This piece is inspired by a talk that Sunitha Lal, our CHRO, gave at IIM Bangalore as part of Drishti 2022