Culture is embodied
It's not an intellectual propositional construct
“Attempts to get employees to value quality, teamwork, cross-functional cooperation, business focus, or environmental issues all run the risk that they do not correspond to what actually feels important to the majority involved. This leads to corporate lip service. On the surface people agree. They may genuinely agree — intellectually. But day-to-day it does not feel important.” — Peter Scott-Morgan1
People experience organisational culture as “the way we do things around here”.
But what are the factors that influence how people infer “the way we do things”?
Ask an academic, and you’ll likely get a complex salad of words like values, beliefs, climate, symbols, artefacts, totems, and myths.
Ordinary people don’t think about organisational culture in such terms.
Why is culture so seemingly hard to pin down..?
That’s the topic addressed in the 10 minute Future-Fit Culture Frequently Asked Questions video below.
The above video references this previous article:
Peter Scott-Morgan The Unwritten Rules of the Game p48. McGraw-Hill’s Business Book of the Year 1994 (ISBN 0-07-057075-2). I worked closely with Peter from the early 1990’s onwards, helping clients all around the world create focused, pragmatic culture change, until Peter’s retirement in 2007.