Culture is Complex - Let's Not Kid Ourselves!

The oft-quoted statement: 

“Culture is the most over-used, yet least understood concept in business today” points to a profound truth - organisational culture is a complex phenomenon.  

We misunderstand culture when we try to oversimplify it. For example, the simplistic social media posts promising “a high-performance team culture if you follow these 5 easy steps” is misleading. 

An important insight for working successfully with culture is to recognise its complexity. As Pettigrew (1979), one of the early culture theorists, puts it:  

“Part of the problem with defining culture is that it is not just a concept but the source of a family of concepts.” 

To work successfully with culture, we need to recognise which “family” of concepts our personal perspective comes from – with what professional paradigms do we approach culture and attempt to influence it? What are the strengths or limits of these paradigms?  

A parable about understanding complexity

Recently I was reflecting on my own paradigms, i.e., what assumptions and perspectives I bring to my practice of culture change.  And In my musings, I remembered a story about complexity that one of my early OD mentors often told. It’s the story of The Blind Men and the Elephant. 

It’s a beautiful story from India which tells us about the concept of partial reality that we experience. The earliest parable of this story is found in Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu texts. 

The story goes like this:  

Once upon a time, there were 6 blind people who lived in a village. An animal named elephant has been brought to the village. One of the villagers told these six blind men that there is an elephant in the village today. 

When the blind men heard this, out of curiosity, they wanted to experience it by touching it as they had no idea what an elephant is. 

When the first person touched the side of the elephant, he said, “It is like a wall.” 

The second person touched the tusk of the elephant, he told everyone that it is strong and smooth, just like a spear. 

When the third person touched the trunk of the elephant, he said, “It is like a snake.” 

But the fourth person experienced something different. He said, “It is like a tree” when he touched the feet of the elephant. 

The fifth one then touched the ear of the elephant, it felt like a fan to him. 

Lastly, when the sixth person touched the tail of the elephant, he said, “It is like a rope.” 

Each of the six men starts suspecting each other, thinking that the remaining five were lying. They start arguing with each other. 

A wise man passing by saw them. He enquires about why they are arguing with each other. They tell him what they think about the elephant. They ask him to decide who is correct among them about the description of the elephant. 

The wise man said, “All of you are correct!” They were shocked after hearing this and ask him how it is possible that all of them are correct. 

The wise man continues, “Each of you has touched a different part of the elephant. That’s why all of you are correct as an elephant consists of all those characteristics that you have described.” 

The moral of the story… 

Like the blind men, we all have our own perspectives on culture based on our experiences and training. We run the risk of judging others’ approaches as being wrong. And we fail to remember the important lesson that our own view is likely partial and incomplete and needs to incorporate other realities to gain a better view of the whole.  

Schneider & Barbera (2014) identified three broad academic traditions that inform today’s culture theorists and subsequently us as practitioners:  

• Psychology 
• Sociology 
• Anthropology 

Psychology has given us a rich tradition in psychometrics measuring an “individual’s perceptions of the organisation’s practices, policies, and procedures” that subsequently shape behaviour. This tradition is seen most commonly in the ubiquitous climate/employee opinion surveys that organisations conduct on a regular basis. Importantly, this tradition has contributed significantly to measurements that predict and improve important organisational “outcomes” such as employee engagement, safety, customer service, and the like.  

Sociology focuses on the space between people. If psychologists focus on the individual, the “I,” sociologists focus on the “we,” the relationships between individuals in a community. Social psychologists are increasingly contributing to organisational culture theory and practice by their focus on social norms. Many leading authors and even Australian regulators, e.g. APRA, are adopting social norms as the definition of culture (Chatman & O’Reilly, 2016; Gelfand, 2018). Social norms emerge from factors measured by “climate” surveys. For example, if decision-making practices are “perceived” as rarely delegated to front line leaders and employees, social norms will emerge that encourage passivity.  

Aspects of social norms can be measured using diagnostics such as the Circumplex Culture Scan (Locke, 2019) 

Anthropology focuses on “how people live their daily lives.” The image of khaki clad anthropologists hacking through the jungle to find and study lost tribes comes to mind. But the modern-day organisational anthropologist, best articulated by the grandfather of organisational culture, Edgar Schein, is the study of the essential values and basic assumptions that characterise social groupings, be they nations or corporate tribes. 

Arguably, anthropology goes the deepest but is the messiest. These “deeper manifestations are not visible per se” but become visible through surface-level artefacts, including symbols (e.g., logos and physical space), organisational language (e.g., jargon and slogans), narratives (e.g., stories and sagas), and practices (e.g., rituals and ceremonies). The job of the organisational anthropologist is to study the surface artefacts and interpret deeper hidden and often unspoken rules for survival and success. For example, I worked with a very passive culture where one of the artefacts was a behaviour norm to keep your head down and not speak up when the CEO was in the room. On further digging, it was unearthed that the norms for passivity had nothing to do with the new CEO but rather the overly aggressive and punitive behaviour of the previous business owner.  

Stepping back to see the whole 

Like the blind men and women examining the elephant, let’s interrogate our own assumptions about culture and how these mindsets might blind and limit us in seeing the whole system and effectively working with it.  

To work effectively with culture, we need to master all three traditions – psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The complexity of culture demands this, or we will continue to argue from our narrow view of the elephant.   

Question – which of the three traditions are you strongest in? What perspectives do you need to develop?  

PS. I recently shared The Blindmen and The Elephant metaphor with a client’s HR team. It made sense but they wonderfully added their own perspectives… 

“Culture is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about.” 

Elephants are large and slow to move – like culture – at least in their organisation.  

References and further reading: 

Chatman, J.A. & O’Reilly, C.A. (in press). Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture, to appear in B. Staw (Ed.), Research in organizational behavior, Vol 38, JAI Press. 

Gelfand, M. (2018). Rule Makes, Rule Breakers: How Culture Wires Our Minds, Shapes Our Nations, and Drives Our Differences. London: Robinson. 

Locke, K. D. (2019). Development and Validation of a Circumplex Measure of the Interpersonal Culture in Work Teams and Organizations. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 850. 

Pettigrew, A. M. (1979). On Studying Organisational Cultures. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, 570-581. 

Schein, E. H. (2010). Organisational Culture and Leadership, 4th Ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Schneider, B. & Barbera, K. M. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Climate and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.