You know that moment when you realise that your carefully planned culture initiative is being quietly undermined by the very people it's meant to help? Or when you see teams somehow pulling together brilliantly during a crisis, despite all your formal processes saying they shouldn't be doing what they are doing?
Think about your own workplace for a moment. Beneath the surface of formal structures and processes, there's this wonderful tapestry of unwritten rules, shared assumptions, and collective wisdom that somehow makes everything tick. It's rather like a river, isn't it? While you can map its general course, the specific patterns of flow and eddy have their own beautiful unpredictability.
And that unpredictability? It's actually where the magic happens.
Understanding Organisational Culture
Consider how your organisation's founding story might still echo through its corridors (perhaps in ways that would surprise even the founders themselves), while simultaneously, new cultural patterns are being woven through today's water-cooler conversations and virtual chat channels. It's this fascinating dance between intention and emergence, between what we carefully plan and what naturally evolves, that gives organisational culture its unique vitality.
You see, understanding culture isn't about creating rigid categorisations or etching definitions in marble (goodness knows we've all seen how well that tends to work). Instead, it's about developing a keen eye for patterns and possibilities. Notice how certain teams consistently find creative solutions during crisis moments, or how specific stories keep circulating that perfectly capture 'how we do things here'. These aren't just interesting anecdotes - they're valuable clues about your cultural DNA.
And yet, this cultural DNA isn't set in stone. Each new person who joins your organisation, each external shift in the market, each internal change in strategy - they all create ripples in your cultural pond. Sometimes these ripples might feel unsettling (change often does), but they're also where new possibilities emerge.
Think of it rather like being a skilled gardener instead of an architect. You can't control exactly how things will grow, but you can create conditions that encourage healthy growth and resilience. This might mean:
- Creating spaces for those valuable informal interactions you've noticed working well
- Amplifying the stories that reflect the best of your organisation's potential
- Working with your measurement and reward systems to ensure they're nurturing the patterns you want to see more of
I recently worked with a CEO of an organisation that makes life-changing differences to its customers. To ensure that she could see where problems might come from, she'd built multiple reporting systems for people to raise problems - and yet she still kept getting surprises (and not good ones.) Together, we worked out that further down the organisation there was a tendency for staff to feel that there were repercussions for raising issues - and so no-one did.
The Impact Of Organisational Culture
What's particularly fascinating is how these various influences interact and sometimes create unexpected outcomes. A company might intentionally design certain cultural elements, only to find that organic, employee-driven cultural expressions emerge alongside them. And perhaps that's the beauty of organisational culture - it's both designed and emergent, both stable and constantly evolving. The most resilient cultures, after all, aren't those that resist change, but those that learn to dance with it. They find ways to maintain their essential character while evolving to meet new challenges and opportunities. In this delicate balance between stability and change, between predictability and emergence, lies the true art of cultural leadership.
So perhaps the next time you're in one of those impromptu corridor conversations, or watching teams naturally collaborate across boundaries, take a moment to appreciate the cultural story being written. What patterns might you notice if you looked with fresh eyes? Which positive elements could you help amplify? And most importantly, how might you engage others in this ongoing exploration of your shared cultural landscape?
The leaders who get this right aren’t the ones with the best culture statements or the right set of corporate values/principles–they’re the ones who’ve learned to listen to the informal stories in the organisation and are choosing to work with them rather than against them. Not making the tellers wrong, not choosing to prove the stories wrong, but exploring what they might be showing them about the organisation. So what stories are your people telling each other about “how things really work around here”?
After all, we're not just observers of our organisational culture - we're active participants in its continuing evolution. What story might you help write next?
Ready to shape your culture's story? Get in touch with us for a conversation about your organisation.
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