The Act of Culture Weaving

Today i am drawing together some of my work on Culture, and specifically the notion of ‘Culture Weaving’. This is a stance on, or view of, leadership which considers influence and interconnection as key capabilities. It is not an ‘answer’ to culture (if there could be such a thing), but perhaps best viewed as a guiding principle of leadership. A conscious choice and behavioural approach which, i guess, could compliment more traditional and structural ones.

This work speaks to how leaders create culture, act within it, help find cohesion, support change, ensure inclusion (or interconnection), and navigate the landscape.

It’s a model of service and a form of humility, held within motion, and at the boundaries, in that we do not ‘own’ or ‘change’ anything directly, but rather connect, listen, and calibrate.

Here is am sharing some assertions, ideas, and rough framework around this view. This work is very much early stage #WorkingOutLoud, and hence not definitive.

As a foundation we should ask ourselves what culture is, but recognise that our answers may be contextual. So we do not need to ‘solve’ it forever, but rather to ‘solve’ it well enough for our current intent.

The notion that culture is contextual – that it is visualised in the moment, and then reformulated by context, is important. It may be the specific mechanism of elasticity that we need to understand how such broad arrays of behaviour are held within a nominally coherent structure.

Inevitably it tips us to views of culture as a three dimensional space – a landscape or web – with an overall boundary, but no single point of compression. Hence the view that we are ‘distributed within culture’, not all sat upon or within it (like a bus).

Some ideas of what culture could be:

[1] Culture is a common consensual delusion – something that is not ‘real’, in the physical sense, but nonetheless acts upon us like gravity (which, for clarity, is real… even if invisible…). We see it in the shadows it casts and effects that it exhibits, as opposed to seeing the actual ‘thing’ itself.

[2] Culture is some shared beliefs, behaviours, and shared sense of understanding – and hence something with clear boundaries and a perception of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. Culture is therefore ‘learned’ and ‘conformed’ to. Or rejected and opposed.

[3] Culture is something bestowed and controlled – culture is like an access badge, ‘given’ to you. Membership is controlled, either formally or by others. You hence cannot belong without ‘permission’.

[4] Culture is inherently undefinable and cannot be ‘changed’, but it acts as a platform that we build upon. To work with ‘culture’ is therefore to understand the landscape, not to change it. This is an ecosystem or agricultural view.

[5] Culture is an abstraction, and hence something we have full control of. We can re-author or imagine it. The ‘work’ is done by individuals who choose to subscribe, believe, or adhere to it. Everything else is just noise.

This work is built upon some key elements of understanding:

Culture consists of three key elements:

[1] The ‘Structural’ – the visible, physical, owned and controlled – hence the branding, offices, formal technology, uniforms, published material – anything said in a ‘formal’ voice, explicit structures of power, written rules etc

[2] The ‘Social’ – normalised behaviours, common rituals, learned mythology, persistent stories, dependencies, implicit power, unwritten rules.

[3] Our ‘Individual’ perception – the personal cognitive aspect of culture, consisting of our beliefs, sense of belonging, webs of trust, sources and location of pride, our various identities, and our mental schema.

Any act of ‘building’, ‘changing’ or ‘merging’ cultures hence operates in a triangulated relationship between these things: the things we do TO it, the ways we act WITHIN it, and how we THINK about it, or understand it.

Within this understanding, we can consider, from a leadership perspective:

[1] The things that we can control – there are aspects of the Structural, Social, and even Individual perception that we can directly alter or clearly change. E.g. i can change the brand, establish or break up teams, and hire or fire people, shattering or changing the sense of identity and belonging.

[2] The things we can influence – whilst anything in the Structural domain can be changed, ‘influence’ is more likely in the social – although for completeness we should also include terms like ‘coerce’, as part of cultural change is to introduce fear of being left out or behind. This includes creating programmes or social movements of change, talking about ‘driving’ or ‘being on board’, and seeking to create or impose new vocabularies and representations of behaviour and understanding.

[3] The things that we live with – either from need, or from a recognition that the uncertain, divergent, and unfocussed can support resilience, innovation, co-creation, and hence our ability to navigate ambiguity and change.

[4] The unknown – the distributed, tribal, tacit, individual, and hidden. As culture is not ‘one’ thing, it is naive to imagine we can visualise it all, and. Nor should we. To change it is simply to change the manifestation, in a specific context. Knowing what we really need to know, as opposed to what we seek or want to control, is important. We often conflate knowledge, visibility, and control for true capability.

The Act of Culture Weaving

Culture Weaving is a form of our individual leadership practice. It is both mindset and behaviour, belief and action.

Culture Weaving is an aspect of Social Leadership: in service of our community, but within the context of our formal Organisation. It is purposeful, not abstract. And a premise of this work is that we can learn to do this.

Influenced by my broader work on Social Leadership, i will describe Culture Weaving as dialogic: a dialogue with our ‘selves’ and with our varied communities. This ties into my own belief of culture itself being narrative, co-authored, and distributed. Inevitably this means that a model of culture that is co-created and negotiated is also a model that is tolerated and diverse. It’s not a unified model on how to impose a culture, but rather an ecosystem model of how to grow one.

It may be helpful to take a perspective that says ‘Culture’ will remain undefined, but that we will see a pattern woven upon it.

The inspiration for this is tapestry, which is laid down upon a substrate. A mesh or net which the individual fibres are ‘woven’ through. Come the final image, the substrate is hidden, but we cannot have the picture without it. The act of Culture Weaving is hence at the level of the individual – helping each individual to ‘weave themselves’ into the tapestry – but it is also at the level of the artists, visualising the overall picture. It is the micro and the macro, but with a tolerance for the emergent.

Culture work is sometimes described as a journey, with longer timeframes and short term actions, with milestones in place for transformation.

I would situate Culture Weaving, as a practice and dialogue, in the short to medium term, in that it is held in conversations and actions today, but situated within longer narrative arcs. However, it is not simply dialogic without structure: alongside the interaction with the individual is the interaction at the structural level, both within leadership populations (culture within the Organisation) but also beyond it (Culture as broad social phenomena, and related to the social context, responsibility, and accountability of our Organisations).

So this model of Culture Weaving explicitly engages with broader social narratives of social justice, inclusion, fairness, and purpose, as well as with individual narratives of belonging, identity, trust, and inclusion.

The Social Leader sits between these things – at the intersection of systems – so operating at the structural and social levels, both listening and monitoring, but also acting. Knowing when to do each is a specific capability.

We can also relate this work to the measurement of culture, in a qualitative and objective way: Culture Weaving involves the evolution of narratives at the individual, collective, and formal levels, and hence we can measure change through self reporting and observation. Measurement is across domains, so a specific capability here is in generating narratives around this. Again, this is dialogic.

My next steps with this work are to start formalising some structures, behaviours, and the underlying framework.

#WorkingOutLoud on Culture