Culture work is soul work

A micro-essay.

Culture is not the same as civilization.* Civilization gives consistency and progress to our world. Culture arises and disappears, as if a breath, across and beyond this landscape of civilization.

In the work of organisational culture, we often mistake the civilization of the organisation (doctrines, codes, rules, habits) for the culture of the organisation. Culture is poetic. It emerges from the unconscious of the organisation. It is revealed in dreams and other works of the imagination.

In org culture work, we often want to change the culture for the better. We expect people to behave better, so that we can have better results. But that is about progress, which belongs to the world of civilization: culture as an object, or an instrument. Culture cannot be improved; it has no straight lines**. We cannot change a bad culture into a good culture, because there are no such things. What we call a bad culture is the absence of culture, so that all we have left is empty civilization.***

Culture reveals soul. “Who can distinguish darkness from the soul,” asked the great Yeats. The lotus flowers, its roots in the mud. The unconscious is, well, unconscious.

What can we do with (or about) culture? I hesitate before the abyss that opens beneath the demand for pragmatism. But we are at the edge now, with behind us only time done and dead.

Culture work is soul work. In what field would the imagination take root and shoot and reach its tendrils to entwine with what is wild and rich, as it raises itself into flower, into fruit? 

* This idea from James Hillman.

** “Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are the roads of Genius.” (William Blake)

*** I want to argue against this statement, too.