In search of culture fundamentals
To summarise the post in 3 words: it's about mission, character and principles
The exact definition of culture is notoriously elusive. This is a problem with all the concepts that have lots of history, and culture is obviously one of them. So I’m not going to argue that my definition is the correct one. I will just tell you what I mean when I write “culture” and please note that my definition is different from Edgar Schein’s, the scholar and practitioner who pretty much brought this subjects into the spotlight.
To me, culture is three things: thoughts & feelings, behaviours and artefacts.
1. Patterns of thinking and feeling, ether explicit or implicit. These could be ethical norms (what’s ought) or metaphysics (what is), major beliefs about what is real and what isn't. These two are clearly interlinked. Some cultures believe Sun revolves around Earth, others believe otherwise. If you change that belief you change culture. Changing this belief would change power structure, it will undermine authority and that's why people were persecuted during the Middle Ages for trying to change beliefs that seemingly had nothing with to do with ethics.
2. Patterns of behaviour. This is not what people believe, this is what they actually do. In the West, cultured person eats with a fork and knife. In the East it's rather about using chopsticks. Only barbarians eat with their hands, right? Of course barbarians are people of different cultures, it's not like they are beasts and have no culture at all. So, behaviour. Could be hunting, agricultural practices, rituals, ways of organising work, etc. To me, this is all culture.
3. Artefacts. Where can we find culture? It’s in the museum. That's where the most precious artefacts are. We bring children to the museum because we want to enculturate them. What does the Ministry of Culture do? Well, among other things it supervises the safe storage of old and production of new cultural artefacts: paintings, books, recordings, TV broadcasts.
So this is what culture is, but can you engineer it? To a degree, I believe you can. To do that you need to work on all the parts, however, I will be mostly talking about the first one, the thinking and feeling part. Even more specifically, about the ethical part, the “ought” part. As far as I'm concerned this is the most important part, it pretty much defines all the other parts. I would suggest calling it organisational or personal identity, although I do realise that a lot of people would disagree with me on that.
Neither of the above three parts exist in isolation. If our behaviours are wildly out of sync with our thinking, we experience cognitive dissonance and either one or another changes. It is also true that culture change is frequently predicated on change in artefacts, technological change. Like we get an advance in microscopy and next we get the germ theory of disease and that influences on our beliefs about hygiene and little by little we realise how stupid it was to burn witches because they really have nothing to do with our sick cattle. Or sometimes moving to a different office or reconfiguring space has some effect on culture. Still, I will be writing about the thinking and feeling mostly.
Culture also exists on a personal level. As individuals, we have a set of beliefs about how things are and how they ought to be. Next you have behaviours you were imbued with as a part of your upbringing and education. And then, of course, you have artefacts. Perhaps you own a car or a house, which were designed with aesthetic standards of your culture in mind. Or, perhaps as a Christian, you might wear a little cross to remind you of important things in your life, about who you are. Or perhaps you wear certain articles of clothing that communicate certain values. This is your “personal culture”, which borrows a great deal from the outside culture but is unique to you.
Important disclaimer
The word “culture” of course is related to the word “cult”. It was frequently uttered that under Steve Jobs Apple, like many other companies with strong cultures, was a bit of a cult. I would suggest one criteria to distinguish cults from non-cults: shared supernatural beliefs. Next, we can agree it is unlikely that employees at Apple shared any supernatural beliefs.
Steve did use the word “karma” in his presentations and Apple does have a slightly new-agey aura but I doubt that any internal documents seriously say something about karma, crystals, Tarot or The Divine. Not a cult then. I won't be saying anything about any supernatural stuff either. Even if it might sound sometimes like I talk about religion, I really don't. I'm an atheist-leaning agnostic, I don't believe in the supernatural, so let's leave this out of the equation.
Why do we need to work on culture?
For a corporation or a team, culture defines who you are as a group. It's not that culture eats strategy for lunch. Culture IS strategy. Culture defines your company’s particular results in a wider context of your industry, country, civilisation.
For individuals culture contains their ethical core, something which allows them to co-operate with other individuals and thrive in their respective cultural surroundings. Every person is unique, everybody is a uniquely cultured person. When people say “I'm a man” or “I'm a mother” what they really mean is their own unique way of understanding what these words mean. Yes, it borrows a great deal from the culture around them. It is unlikely that a male in Pakistan and a male in the Denmark mean the same thing when they say “I'm a man”. Their views on masculinity are vastly different. But also, within the same culture this understanding is unique to every person. This individual uniqueness brings possibility for larger cultural change, be it for the better or worse.
Views diverge, but who is wrong and who is right? We don't know. There used to be The Book where everything was written. This is no longer the case. So many hairs were split over interpretations, so many wars were — and still are — fought about which Book is the best one, that betting you life on a single book seems like less and less of a good idea. Of course there still are a lot of highly devout religious people, there are religious companies, yet they are becoming more and more of a rarity.
In the 21st century we can't completely rely on the elders on our tribe, on oral myths or on the books that came down through generations. This is the work that we have to do ourselves. We do stand on the shoulders of giants, but there are so many giants to chose from. We have to pick our giants. And this is exactly what is happening. People and companies now are striving to create their unique culture in hope that it will get them competitive edge, bring meaning to their lives, infuse them with enthusiasm, a word which literally means "filled with god substance".
How do we do it?
For quite a while the dominant approach was three words: Mission, Vision, Values. I think it was Peter Drucker who came up with this combination. I have no idea why this caught on. The trio seems wildly unintuitive and it's very removed from the visible behaviours, which is what we really care about. And, it didn't last too long.
As years went by, few people replaced Mission with Purpose. What's the difference? Also, what’s the difference between Mission and Vision? There's an enormous amount of consultants on the internet trying to distinguish between the two with little to no avail.
Next, almost nobody was able to formulate a sensible Vision. Visionaries are rare, and most of them are bonkers, let's admit it. In myth and fiction, good guys rarely have visions, it's mostly the villains who are the visionaries. When you write down your Vision (ever tried?) it looks like a complete disaster. When you re-read it after a couple of years it makes you cringe very-very hard.
Then come Values. Some people had one-word Values: like “Trust” or “Integrity” or, I don't know, “Teamwork”. But since they had a lot of trouble translating these words into behaviours, other people started writing Values in full sentences: “Put the customer first” or “We are not a family, we're a team.” The latter was Netflix, by the way. Is this still a Value? What is a Value exactly? These clearly aren't the same thing so people started calling these Principles. Sounds reasonable, but one more entity to account for.
Then some companies like Patreon said “we don't need Values, we need Behaviours”, others also have Rituals and Metrics is part of their culture frameworks too, so where do we stop. I think all this is utter nonsense, there's no system here. I am about to propose you a system.
Philosophy
Let me confess that now when I see it, I am having trouble understanding why that was so bloody hard. Let's begin with philosophy though it doesn't matter where we begin, it's the same pattern everywhere.
As I said, I'm mostly going to talk about Ethics. Historically, there were three major normative approaches to Ethics: Deontology, Consequentialism and Virtue Ethics. On a surface, they contradict one another although there are people (and I'm one of them) who believe that they are actually quite compatible.
Virtue Ethics is the oldest approach, it's the one embraced by Aristotle and other classical Greek philosophers, the philosophers of China and the Indian subcontinent. In a nutshell (Warning: gross oversimplification ahead), here you have a list of virtues, character traits and you exercise them. Like you have to be brave but also respectful. Charitable but also prudent. Ethics is mostly about adjectives here. Imagine you're designing a character in a role-playing game. You begin by defining their character traits, their virtues. What is your list of virtues?
Plato said it's being brave, wise, just and temperate. Thomas Aquinas said yes, but also loving, faithful and hopeful. Confucius had his own list, beginning with love for people and filial piety. In the 21st century you have to make your own list. You don't have to agree with all the wise men before you, but ignoring them completely, perhaps, isn't wise either. Well, that's only important when wisdom is one of the virtues.
Next is Consequentialism, the ethics of consequences, of harm and care. Being brave is no good if people we care about (like ourselves or our close kin) get hurt as a result. So we have to look not just at traits but also at the consequences of our actions and their influence on us and other people. We have to define people we care about. After all, Sic nos non nobis (thus we labour but not for ourselves), or as Van Gogh said in a similar vein, “We're not here for ourselves alone”. I know this because I have a magnet on my fridge with the quote, a gift from a friend.
However, we can't care about everyone to the same extent. There was a Stoic philosopher Hierocles, who proposed the idea of concentric circles, like your sphere of responsibility emanates outwards from you. First there's you, then your family, then your friends, your city, your nation-state — oh, wait, that didn't quite arrive until modernity — and the world itself, the Kosmos. People capable of caring about the Kosmos were called Cosmopolites. In Utilitarianism, the most popular branch of Consequentialist ethics, one strives to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. That's quite Cosmopolitan.
In short, the second part is about identifying people you care about and why do they need your care. What is the problem that you're trying to solve for them? This is your Mission. Again, imagine this is a role-playing game. After you design a character, what do you do next? You get on a Quest to save the princess. What's your Quest?
Finally, there's Deontology. This is ethics as we mostly know it, the ethics of rules. Could be commandments given by God, “Thou shalt and shalt not”, or, like in Kantian ethics, something we were able to reason out ourselves. “Never use people as means but only as ends in themselves”, that kind of stuff. Principles, commandments or, as Kant called them, maxims. If — then — else constructs.
Your hero should have a list of rules to follow, The Code, a set of principles they take close to their heart. Principles are necessary, because while on a Quest, your hero will be presented with ethical dilemmas. They will be offered a choice by the Devil: save the princess but lose one's soul. But of course there's rule #1 in the Big Book of Rules: “Whatever happens, don't lose your soul”. And the character should demonstrate a bit of a moral imagination to get out of this predicament.
So, three parts: Character, Circles of Care and Decision Rules. Ultimately, what you get as a result is a narrative, life's story. This this is the pattern that just keeps repeating across other domains of knowledge.
Anthropology
Anthropologists, of course have a lot to say about culture. Trouble with anthropologists is their methods. In-depth interviews, ethnography and observational studies are extremely subjective and prone to bias. As far as I'm concerned, they are studying shamanism with shamanism. They invented their own kind of shamanism and use it as an instrument of study of the actual shamanism. This is exactly why I find anthropological theory "Morality as cooperation" by Oliver Scott Curry fascinating. This is an anthropological theory which is actually based on data.
What Curry and his coauthors did, they analysed 60 moral codes of various societies across the globe and came up with 7 ethical universals:
Family: give your family special treatment
Group: be loyal to your group/tribe
Reciprocity: return favours and injuries
Heroism: display your power
Deference: submit to your superiors
Equality: divide disputed resources
Property: respect property rights
Now, this looks like an almost complete theory to me, because it addresses three major areas I talk about:
Moral Character: Heroism, Deference
Care/Mission: Family Values, Group Loyalty
Principles: Reciprocity, Equality, Property
I say “almost complete”, because after all, they analysed rather simple moral codes which didn't quite figure out the non-tribal religions, nation-states and the Kosmos part yet. Moral progress in this theory means more sophisticated combinations of these 7 moral molecules. Like, for instance, Cristian Brotherhood = Family + Group + Equality. Love it!
Psychology
Nice try Alexei, but what about Jonathan Haidt and his theory of moral foundations? What about other theories of moral psychology like Dyadic Morality or Moral Motives? What about Spiral Dynamics and Cook-Greuter's developmental model? There are many attempts to find moral universals, what makes you think you found the right ones?
Right, let’s take Haidt's moral foundations and look at them closely. Haidt's theory postulates five moral universals: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Purity/Sanctity, Ingroup/Loyalty, and Authority/Respect. Taken at face value, these are simply moral values. The loyalty foundation doesn't specify what is it you should be loyal to. It's just abstract loyalty. It's a value.
Values are fine. They were more or less invented by Nietzsche in the 19th century. They are a slightly more cognitive, less emotional cousin of character traits. It terms of ease of change they occupy a spot between character traits and beliefs. Values are not beliefs. “Power” is a value, but it's not a belief. A belief would be “You have to look powerful in order to be powerful”. Contemporary conservatives probably have the same conservative values as their conservative counterparts a century ago, but they have vastly different beliefs. These are related but they are not the same.
Moral foundations are moral Values. They show meaningful correlations with respective values in Schwartz Value Theory, the most popular and well-supported psychological theory of values. Arguably, they are not the same thing, but that's because not all values are moral to the same degree.
The classic example is money — a lot of people believe that “Money don't smell”, that is, they are morally neutral. A lot of economists I know see money as something good. To them more money means more prosperity. Some people believe that money is the root of all evil. So there's considerable disagreement here — unlike childhood mortality, where most people tend to agree it's a bad thing. Among non-material values, openness to change in Schwartz Value Theory is not very moral and quite undeservedly, I might add. Tradition, on the other hand, is intensely moral. People have high emotional attachment to the old ways.
So I would say that Haidt's theory is not a complete theory of morality, since it focused on Values only. It doesn't deal with Character or Beliefs or Stakeholders really. It says “Fairness” without specifying what fairness is exactly, and of course there are heated debates about just that. Values are important, they are linked to Character and Beliefs, but they are not enough. They are easy to illicit, but they are hard to apply in practice, they don't exactly tell you what to do.
What about Dyadic Morality then? This is a promising new theory which basically says that there are two moral foundations: Care and Harm. The effect is assessed through the lens of norm violation (think Deontology), perceived harm (think Consequentialism) and affect (think Virtue Ethics). So we have roughly the same three things here. Stunning, huh?
Post-Kohlbergian theories and Vertical development theories like Spiral Dynamics have the same problem: as moral universals they list stages of development and we know that these stages are not discreet. You can have 7, 14, or one thousand stages, it is all very subjective.
Also, Spiral Dynamics merge values and beliefs to produce levels/archetypes which are culture-relative. Spiral Dynamics Green in the US as of 1972 and Spiral Dynamics Green in China as of 2022 are two systems of thought with substantial differences between them. Are they both Green? How do we account for these differences?
In the end, some of these archetypes probably do exist, but they are not foundational. You can break them further apart and see that they are made of the same matter: principles, circles of care and ideal character traits.
Corporate Culture Studies
Most corporate culture models I know about deal with values. If you take a closer look at Competing Values Framework, one of the most popular approaches to corporate culture, you will see stunning similarities to Spiral Dynamics. They have four culture archetypes: Hierarchy, which is analogous to SD Blue (I am using the original SD colour designations, not the new Wilber's), Market is Orange, Clan is Green/Purple and Create is Red/Yellow.
So same as above, these archetypes are probably there — although you might as well have much more of them — but they are not foundational. If we want to change things we would need to break them down into smaller instances. Perhaps I need to write a better literature review here, but most corporate culture frameworks are about Values. They use scales like Authoritarian-Egalitarian and they seldom deal with group mission, character or principles.
Leadership Studies
The most popular approach to values-based leadership in the West is called Transformational leadership. It's a messy concept which jumbles together many things. This fact that lead to proliferation of other, more specialised values-based concepts, the most popular among which are ethical leadership, authentic leadership and servant leadership. As you can see from the Google Ngram chart which tracks citations, these concepts are less popular but they are in the same league.
Servant leadership is about caring for your stakeholders, i.e. it's Consequentialism, circles of care. Authentic leadership is about knowing who you are and listening to your inner impulses, i.e. it's about character, Virtue Ethics. Finally, ethical leadership stresses ethical norms, rules, principles — Deontology there. These three approaches together are now called “moral leadership” in the literature.
Ok, so what?
It seems like to define the culture, or more specifically, the identity of your organisation — or your own personal ethical code (your personal identity is mostly moral), you need to answer these fundamental questions in these domains:
What are we?
— What are the traits I/we admire in our heroes?
— What are the traits that I/we want for my/ourself?
— Wait, why aren't these lists the same?
What we do?
— Who is my/our client?
— What is their moral problem? A moral problem is the one that produces a very strong emotional response.
— What is the proposed solution?
How we do it?
— What are my/our principles, 10 commandments or maybe 12 rules for life?
What are considered to be good answers to that? I will explore that in my subsequent posts.