Tag: CultureWeb

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Easier to talk about what we don’t want than what we do

This riff is a partner to my one this week on humour and sarcasm. If you’ve read that one you’ll spot the connection. 

I’ve noticed recently that workshop groups tend to find it much easier to talk about their shared pain than their shared hopes. I think this is almost certainly cultural. 

Culture is reinforced by rituals and routines. In the UK, we almost ritualistically complain about weather and transport. Another is control systems. 

Culture is also reinforced through control systems — and social media is one. It is no coincidence that social media algorithms long ago started prioritising negative stories over good — we love them.

There is a method of physical theatre training called via negativa, meaning the negative road. It is a method of teaching that doesn’t tell you how to be funny, but it tells you when you are not funny. The idea is that the teacher keeps telling you something is bad until you find something is good. Handled with sensitivity and care for the student it is a powerful teaching technique. It works because the student has to keep proposing ideas and in that process, discovers something that is uniquely theirs. 

But it requires a lot of the student — they’ve got to have the motivation to keep coming up with something new.

I think we can see a negative culture as a collective via negativa. 

Always finding the flaw, what’s going wrong. If an individual has the motivation to keep on showing up, they can overcome it, but that is a lot of effort. 

An alternative, more generous and easier to deploy method is to be encouraging, and inviting people to give something a try. 

Creative psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed that one the best ways to work on building a creative culture in an organisation is not to work on individual creativity, but rather on our culture of listening and encouraging. 

We can seed this culture by shifting the rituals and routines — asking what went right before asking what went wrong. And by shifting the control system — shifting away from doom-scrolling towards practices that tune is into what is possible.

Then we might find that our culture tilts in the direction of what is possible, of what we want to build together, rather than what we don’t.

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Does power support change?

Earlier this week I wrote about designers needing to understand the conditions for change. What enables change and what blocks it?

If we understand organisational culture as how things get done in an organisation, then culture gives us some strong clues about what – or who might be enabling or blocking change.

Power is one of the six lenses of culture in the Johnson and Scholes culture web. How people with power wield it in the organisation sets a strong signal for what is valued and what can be ignored. The policy may say one thing, but it is what management or leadership actually do that sets the culture.

And so back to change. Do the people with power visibly support change? If so, a culture of change will enable you to do your work more easily. If not, you will have more work to do.

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Mindset leverage

Are you excited about the possibilities of your next project? Or worried about the unknowns? Do you see the possibility for competition or collaboration? 

There is not a part of design that mindset does not affect. That is because design is an interaction between the outer world of reality and the inner world of perception, imagination and choice.

For me, our mindset is how we see the world – how it shows up for us. Our mindset affects what we look for and what we see when we gather data. It affects the sort of ideas we have. It affects what we hold important when we evaluate options. 

So if we want to change the outcomes of our work as designers, there is merit in considering mindsets. Both the mindsets we bring and the mindsets we create through the processes we set up. 

We shape our individual mindsets through reflective practice. We shape our collective mindsets through changing the working culture. These are invisible tools with huge leverage.

(This is an archive post from September 2024).

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All change or no change

How do we know if an organisation is really committed to change?

A big clue is to look at the culture of the organisation. Because in organisations, culture is how things get done.

The Johnson Scholes Culture Web gives us six lenses to read an organisation’s culture. Each gives us a way to test if they are really committed to change. 

Stories — Are they telling different stories about who they are and what they value?

Routines and rituals — Have day-to-day practices shifted? Has what they celebrate changed ?

Symbols — Has the visual language shifted? What’s being shown — or hidden?

Control systems – What are they measuring? Has the weight of KPIs shifted? How much R&D is allocated to this change? How are they measuring their supply chain?

Organisational structure — Where is the work of change located? Is it is the delivery teams or in the marketing team?

Power structure — Are senior leaders backing the change, asking questions about it and backing it even when it’s not the easy option?

These six lenses help us spot shifts in culture. 

What the culture is doing is a strong clue about whether the organisation is really committed to change — or actually planning on changing nothing.