Can We Talk Culture For A Moment?

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines culture as "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time."

The etymology of the word is fascinating, starting off as a metaphor used by Cicero in ancient Rome, 'cultura animi' and and taking in some weird and wonderful stops through religious 'cultus' and crossovers between agriculture and science descriptions 'cultivating cultures'. before arriving at the present anthropological meanings typified by Franz Boas.

It also looks like being the next 'big thing' when it comes to buzzwords in Experience Design.

Indeed by the power invested in me, by absolutely nobody, I declare this to be the Year Of The Word: Culture! It's everywhere, articles, job descriptions, political diatribes, culture is a big topic at the moment.

I’m both overjoyed and annoyed at this phenomenon.  

Overjoyed because understanding culture is something Experience Designers have a tendency to get positively evangelical about, especially when the alternative is being reduced to focussing on Interaction and UI Design and Information Architecture. So seeing its new found prominence in conversation is joyful.

Annoyed because the whole idea of culture is in danger of becoming little more than the old style Mission Statements that corporations used to love 20 years ago; simplistic and ignored right after being published, so allowing organisations to escape real understanding and therefore lose out on real benefits for them and for the people in the culture they’re supposed to be catering for. 

Culture Wars

I’ll explain.

At heart I’m an ethnologist, I love immersing myself in new cultures, seeking to understand not just shared behaviours but the causes of those behaviours. Encountering experiences that are completely divorced from my own. When you get to the core drivers of those behaviours and can meet them with valuable solutions to problems it makes your professional and personal life so much more rewarding. When you start to understand the nuances, the commonalities, the unpredictable outliers, the psychological underpinning, the group dynamics and that are unique to a new culture it holds a mirror up to your own and gives you an insight in to your own preconceptions that you wouldn’t otherwise have. It forces you to understand that there is no such thing as Common Sense, there is only a Common Cultural Sense. It’s the mental equivalent of working in another country where yours is the second language and you have to stop and consider whether what you mean is actually what is being understood. It is not a simple thing, indeed, there are Cultural Anthropologists who spend their entire lives just trying to understand a single culture never mind the multiple ones that most Experience Designers encounter over their career. Understanding culture is a full time, not for the squeamish, demanding and sprawling discipline.

It's also the latest fashion accessory when it comes to business.

Consumer Cultures

From an Experience Design perspective, the cultures we are most interested in are the collective experiences of the user type, (customer segment in marketing terms) that are the ideal consumers of the products and services that we provide. They might be builders, accountants, artists, shop staff, financial services customers, health workers, third-party providers, and basically any and every collective group that share an experience when it comes down to consuming our brand, products and services. Our purpose is to provide business solutions based on our understanding of the combined cultural experience of being our user type.

This is where we as Experience Designers need to hold our hands up and offer a Mea Culpa. We simplify the complex – it’s one of our core objectives – and we have maybe unwittingly encouraged the idea that culture itself can be simplified, simply in a rush to monetise that experience for business and get a solution to live.

I’m going to need to explain again, aren’t I?

The common understanding of culture is that it is a way of describing the interactions and behaviour of people within a particular social demographic. That’s why we talk about company culture, or a youth culture, or an open culture or even drug culture or gang culture, or any other number of definitions to delineate one segment of human behaviour from that of others. The problem with that is that we’ve stopped trying to understand the full nature of culture and even the fact that cultures overlap and have subcultures, and have instead started to just state that this demographic, that we have probably made-up, has a rigid predetermined culture made up of a predefined tick list of expected behaviours, that is easy for business to understand.

Commercially, what it means to be a customer is less important to the business than getting that customer to the point in the journey where the company wants them to be. The idea that the customer might want to be, even need to be, somewhere else based on their cultural needs, and that the company could benefit from that, matters not a jot for most companies when it comes to meeting commercial needs. Behaviour is something to be exploited not catered for.

This is the uncomfortable, unspoken truth of what most Experience Designers do. They provide slightly better user experiences for business solutions, not the best business solutions for user experiences.

Make no mistake, this approach does have merit, does have value, there is nothing wrong at all - and a great deal right - with being able to understand behavioural patterns and provide a valuable product or service to match them. It's when it has little or no value to the end user that it becomes a problem.

It’s also short-sighted. If you don’t understand why that behaviour is happening in the first place then your chances of being able to anticipate and meet, or mitigate, that behaviour before it becomes a business problem is substantively reduced. You’ll get a better solution by just understanding behaviour but you'll only get the best solution by understanding the culture that generated that behaviour.

So much for Consumer Cultures, I suspect there's nothing that I've described that most Experience Designers haven't come across, time to talk about another sort of culture, the kind that just recently has made it into job role descriptions and self-congratulatory press releases and is possibly the biggest area of growth when it comes to Experience Design.

Corporate Cultures

Can you smell that? Can you see the clouds on the horizon? That’s the scent and sight of many, many fine bridges I’m burning here.

Contractors, how many times have you accepted a gig at a company lauding their 'Agile Culture' only to discover that the place has all of the ceremonies and none of the thinking? It's a buzzword.

Designers have you ever walked into a place with a well-publicised ‘Design Culture’ only to discover that design is about meeting Dev requirements or following the design demands of a Product Owner with not even half your experience or skill but ten times your authority? It's a buzzword.

How many of us work in a place with an ‘Open Culture’ where the management are so divorced from the staff that the only 'open' bit about it is the open hostility between the two? It's a buzzword.

How many of us work in an ‘Inclusive Culture’ where the management team all look like, well, they look like me? It's a buzzword.

Side note: I’m good, given time I like to believe that I can understand the needs and motivations and behaviours of most cultures. Does that mean that I, as a white, married, middle-aged, middle-class, CIS male can truly understand what it means to be, for an extreme example, a young, black, single-mother, with a girl friend working a zero-hours contract?

Not a bloody chance!

I can understand the needs of an Investment Banker without being one, but I'm not an Investment Banker and if I really want to understand their needs I'm going to need have them front and centre of any research I undertake. Same with any other culture I want to understand.

If you want to understand a culture the first thing you need to do is give that culture a voice and listen to it. That's really basic inclusion. If you want to be part of that culture, such as in a corporate setting, give that voice a seat at the table. That's really basic inclusion, too.

How many places do you know that still push a ‘People Culture’ focussed on career advancement without understanding that a lot of people just want to do the job they have and want more personal rewards when it comes to home and family? I suspect this one is going to bite a lot of places in the butt now that a substantial amount of the workforce is used to spending more time with family while working remotely and still delivering.

I know I’ve had first-hand experience of all of those.

This is what happens when you over-simplify culture to the point where it becomes a buzzword. It’s what happens when it becomes a selling tool, a throwaway term for having a foosball table, beer Friday, free breakfast cereals, and after work meetings down the pub (where experience tells me that the conversation is usually about how bad working for the company is).

Just recently I’ve been asked to consult on a number of roles that were about building an ‘Internal Culture’ (Oh the number of times that I’ve forced myself to not say, “Have you tried probiotics?”) this concept is a wonderful one to suggest to an Experience Designer and one that, as I said, I'm overjoyed to see more of.

The problem is, of course, that the majority of places offering these roles don't really understand what culture is and certainly not the full scope of their own culture, but often they have a real understanding of the value of the buzzword in terms of PR.

My hope is this that this will change, that it’s just the usual growing pains that happen when a new approach makes itself known. Both Agile and Experience Design suffer from this, but you only need to see them done right once to know that when they are done right there is nothing like them when it comes to results. Cultural Change should be the same.

I hope that it will change. My experience, so far, differs from my hope, but hope remains.

Invariably when you start to have tentative conversations about cultural change it means changing from the top down, has a fairly large financial outlay or at least short-term negative impact, and none of that goes down well with decision makers. 

The conversation becomes stilted when you start asking questions about what type of culture they want and then start pointing out the major strategic changes that are required to make it happen and the potential losses of change averse staff, who might have valuable skills. 

The conversation grinds to a halt when you start talking about why they think they have problems with their existing culture, what is the research they’d done at every level of employment and what they’ve done already to alleviate the cause of the problems highlighted by that research. 

The silence becomes truly deafening when you start talking actionable corrections to their processes and approaches in relationships with and to staff concerns.

In that silence you can mentally feel the unspoken panic when you start talking about how it will reflect in external interactions, like social-media behaviour, leaver and joiner messaging, brand values, media scrutiny and all the other variables and perceptions that come when you associate a brand with a culture.

My last conversation, even at this high-level, ended abruptly when I asked the obvious question, ‘What is it you mean by a Personal Advancement Culture?’ and had the COO angrily answer, without a hint of self-awareness, “Shouldn’t you be telling us that!”

That’s right, they were recruiting for somebody to drive a culture change that had a label but absolutely no understanding of their existing culture and even less of the one they wanted to achieve. If they didn’t understand that very basic premise what chance did the person being charged with making that change have? What chance did their employees, customers and company itself have of benefitting from it?

Disappointing? Yes. The fact that these conversations are happening at all though and are moving beyond the idea of self-promotion? That is incredibly promising and has huge potential. Like I said, I'm hopeful.

What’s The Conclusion Here?

Understanding the nature of your current consumers'/users' culture will provide you with major solution breakthroughs that you can’t imagine and do so before they’re needed. Accept the fact that you can't change that culture as well, the only change you can make is to your ways of working with that culture to really see benefits.

Understanding the nature of your own organisation’s culture (and that it probably differs considerably from what you think it is) is just as beneficial, because only then can you understand what actually makes your employees feel valued and empowered and only then will they produce the results you currently can only dream of.

You can’t be part of a culture and control it. Culture is by its very nature, influenced and grown by all its participants in ways that are totally out of your control. The best you can hope for is to understand it, facilitate it, cater for its needs and help it grow, just as everybody else in that culture does too.

Embrace culture, not just behaviour stemming from that culture but the whole diverse, often chaotic, wide and deep nature of the culture. The value in doing so, for you, your customers, your company and your staff is beyond measure. 

Culture is not simple. Cultural change even more so. Pretending it isn’t helps absolutely nobody. Culture is not a sales term, stop using it as one.