Understanding Culture: The art of seeing small
There are four somewhat unrelated, yet similar, perspectives on considering small things.
The first is a biblical verse that states, “Catch the foxes for us, The little foxes that are ruining the vineyards, While our vineyards are in blossom.”[i] In every-day life this is generally used to indicate that the small things destroy the end result.
A second perspective that links to this is from total quality management training, where there was often a saying of “Think big but see small.” Here the focus was to see the overall objective but to identify the detail that aids or hinders in achieving it.
The third perspective comes from economics and finance. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010), while studying market fluctuations, provided a new system for measuring and understanding nature. He is sometimes referred to as the “father of fractals,” having discovered the concept of self-similarity.[ii] This idea of self-similarity shows how natural objects—like coastlines, clouds, mountains, and snowflakes—look similar no matter how much you zoom in or out. Based on his work, and using computer graphics, he mapped a famous visual plot of complex numbers that creates an infinite, intricate pattern.[iii] The Mandelbrot set is a famous mathematical shape that creates endless, beautiful patterns from a very simple repeating rule. Without going into the mathematics, self-similarity shows how simple rules create infinitely complex, unpredictable behaviour.
The fourth consideration is the butterfly effect described by Edward Lorenz (1917–2008) after finding that small changes could have a big effect somewhere else in the long term.[iv]
Simplicity
In the book Simplexity,[v] Jeffrey Kluger explores how simple rules can produce surprisingly complex outcomes. He explains how systems made up of relatively simple components can interact to create behaviour that is difficult to predict or understand. The central idea is that complexity does not necessarily require complex causes. Small changes, feedback loops and interactions between individuals can generate large-scale patterns.
John Gribbin, in Deep Simplicity,[vi] takes a more scientific approach, using ideas from chaos theory, complexity science and evolutionary biology to explore how the apparent complexity of the natural world can arise from surprisingly simple underlying rules. He argues that nature often does not need an elaborate blueprint to produce intricate structures and behaviour. His central theme is that beneath apparent complexity there may be a surprisingly simple set of principles.
Simplicity and culture
When thinking about culture, it cannot always be simplified. Systems, complexity and chaos theories however show that something complex can emerge from relatively simple underlying assumptions and rules. The first part of this reflection highlights the need to consider the small thing. The small interactions and seemingly irrelevant rules can result in a collection of complicated organisational characteristics.
The key is that you don’t necessarily need a complicated explanation to explain complex behaviour. A complex organisation can often be understood by identifying the relatively small number of underlying rules, assumptions and relationships that generate what people see and experience. In understanding culture, the biggest issue is trying to understand which small things work together in creating it. The risk is producing a list of symptoms rather than an explanation.
Culture is a complex system of interactions but the generative logic underneath it may be relatively simple. The problem is that this simplicity is usually not visible, hence the many different approaches to describing—and attempting to understand—it.
Turning to personality
In psychology there are a few key schools of thought on personality, what it is, and how it forms or develops. Each has a core focus.
- Psychodynamic School – Unconscious drives, childhood experiences and conflicts.
- Trait School – There are stable, measurable characteristics and behavioural patterns.
- Social-learning School – Personality is the result of everything an individual has learned from their external environment.
- Social Cognitive School – Personality develops through continuous interaction between a person’s cognitive thinking, their behaviour, and the social environment.
- Behavioural School – Personality is the result of a mix of internal cognitive and external environmental factors.
Two aspects these schools agree on are that personality describes the internal, enduring blend of thoughts, values, and traits of an individual. These thoughts and traits manifest in behaviours, actions and responses. The key difference between the schools seems to be the origin—or source—of the thoughts, values and traits. They do, however, seem to agree that traits act as predispositions—modified by the environment—making certain behaviours much more likely across different situations.
The question can now be asked whether the traits and predispositions manifest in organisations, and the answer can only be that they do. The next question is whether the concept of traits can be applied to groups and thus organisations.
Culture is often described through typologies or styles. These are useful descriptions of what a culture looks, and perhaps even feels, like. But they don’t necessarily explain why those characteristics occur together or how they form. The simplicity perspective suggests looking for the underlying relationships. Applying simplicity to culture requires looking at the behaviours and working back to identify the origins. The only way to identify the origins is to turn to psychological behaviours. What appears to be seven or eight different cultural characteristics may actually be different expressions of a smaller underlying cultural logic. This fits particularly well with the concept of archetypes, a term used by the psychologist Carl Jung.
Jung stated that there are innate, universal patterns that live inside the collective unconscious—a shared, deep layer of the human mind—present in all people.[vii] Applying this to groups, archetypes can be thought of as a deeper organising pattern that gives rise to several cultural constructs and, ultimately, observable cultural styles.
Personality and organisational culture
There is a useful parallel between personality theory and the study of group functioning and organisational culture. The comparison is useful because, in both cases, observable behaviour is only the surface expression of deeper patterns. Organisation culture is also at times described and referred to as the “personality” of an organisation. Both are concerned with understanding patterns that lie beneath individual behaviours. Some authors also emphasise that an organisation’s personality or culture is heavily shaped by its founders or CEOs.[viii]
Personality theory seeks to explain why individuals tend to think, feel and behave in relatively consistent ways. Culture assessment seeks to understand why groups and organisations tend to develop recurring ways of making decisions, relating to one another, exercising authority and responding to their environment.
Personality theory attempts to identify the relatively enduring characteristics that help explain these tendencies. Culture theory attempts to identify the underlying patterns that give rise to these organisational characteristics.
Although the terms used might differ, the parallel between personality and culture can be expressed as: Underlying characteristics → tendencies → observable behaviour.
This provides a useful reason for looking beyond a simple description of what an organisation does. A deeper assessment asks what the underlying assumptions are. Both personality and culture have a level between what is observable and what is underlying.
When studying culture, it must be kept in mind that collective environments influence individuals just as individuals contribute to the collective environment. Culture is therefore not simply the average personality of the workforce. It is a collectively maintained pattern of meaning, expectation and behaviour.
This distinction is particularly important for culture measurement. A culture instrument should not attempt to turn an organisation into a single personality profile. Instead, it should identify the underlying patterns that shape collective behaviour.
In an organisation people are interacting within a system, sharing assumptions and constructs and developing collective tendencies that lead to cultural styles and behaviour. This makes organisational culture a dynamic and emergent phenomenon, rather than a fixed organisational personality.
The comparison nevertheless highlights an important principle: surface behaviour becomes more meaningful when it can be related to deeper patterns. Personality theory does this for individuals. A sophisticated culture assessment should do something analogous for groups—while recognising that what is being measured is fundamentally different.
The aim, therefore, is not to give an organisation a personality type. It is to understand the cultural patterns and underlying assumptions through which a group collectively makes sense of its world and organises its behaviour.
Where simplicity becomes useful
It is easy to become overwhelmed when trying to understand culture. The reflection started with the idea of simplicity. A word of caution, however, is that simple is not the same as simplistic. Culture is at times viewed at a very simple level but that does not aid organisation decision making in the longer term.
Complex systems often produce relatively simple patterns. As indicated in the beginning, the fact that something is complex does not mean that its behaviour must be described in an equally complex way. A good model seeks maximum explanatory usefulness with minimum unnecessary complexity. A simplistic model removes complexity that matters. A useful model removes the complexity that doesn’t help in answering the question being asked.
Simplicity is different from just reducing everything to a handful of categories. It requires the discipline of not trying to measure everything that happens in an organisation. Instead, the objective could be to identify the smallest meaningful set of cultural structures that explains a large proportion of what happens. Attempting to identify the smallest set of items gives you a very different approach. It requires identifying the underlying patterns that generate those characteristics.
On a personal note: It is around identifying the underlying patterns of organisation culture that the CulturodynamicsTM Indicator took almost 35 years of research and fieldwork before being made publicly available. For more information on the CulturodynamicsTM Indicator. Visit www.culturodynamics.com’
[i] Song of Solomon 2:15 (New American Standard Bible, 1995 update).
[ii] Benoit B. Mandelbrot, “The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices,” Journal of Business 36, no. 4 (1963): 394–419.
[iii] Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
[iv] Edward N. Lorenz, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” (paper presented at the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, December 29, 1972).
[v] Jeffrey Kluger, Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) (New York: Hyperion, 2008).
[vi] John Gribbin, Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity (New York: Random House, 2004).
[vii] C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., vol. 9, part 1 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).
[viii] Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017).
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