Culture

I’m exploring ideas around culture at the moment, tying together a few disparate threads: this piece illustrates four aspects of culture that are related, but different.

We can see culture in terms of the offering and accessibility of opportunity. This may relate to retention and engagement, certainly it’s a function of how ‘trusted’ we are.

We can see it in terms of the shadows of legacy identities and fear. This relates to the long tail of behaviours, and learned helplessness or habit. It can be hard to escape a shadow.

We can see it as belief in leaders and our most local tribes. This relates to discretionary investment, trust, and the flows of knowledge, as well as sense of consequence.

We can see it as the space for exploration with agency. This relates to the collaborative and co-created nature of change.

‘Opportunity’ and ‘Space’ are different in that Opportunity may be offered, but Space may be discovered. In some ways we can see ‘shadows’ and ‘belief’ as two forces acting upon that landscape.

This is just a sketch: i’m using it to explore my own understanding and language. Sometimes a useful route into a topic is through the application of new or tangental language, to see if it helps us to find new ways to describe or understand a thing.

So i have my ‘familiar’ language (culture is a ‘common consensual delusion’, culture is ‘how we are with each other in every day’) but exploring a new one.