Organizational Culture by Design — Personal Manifesto

“Draw the art you want to see, make the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read.” — Austin Kleon

If I were to write a business book, it would be titled along these lines:

• Designing Collaborative Organizational Cultures: ABCs for Beginners
• or How to Design a Collaborative Organizational Culture, Step by Step
• or Collaborative Organizational Culture by Design, not by Accident

Why specifically ‘collaborative‘ organizational cultures

There are multiple ways to go about designing an organizational culture intentionally. Some teams choose to do it top-down, defining everything by the small group of top managers, by the founder/CEO alone, or with the help of a People/Operations team. This approach has existed for many years and it’s widely described already.

I come from a different background. The cultures I love, worked with, and helped build are rooted in the idea of collaboration, co-creation, and teamwork. Designing a collaborative culture in a top-down manner is an oxymoron, it defeats the purpose of a collaborative culture. Instead, we design those types of cultures bottoms-up, engaging many voices in the process, and carefully phasing and facilitating collective design experiences. Experiences that in their essence become a manifestation of a collaborative culture itself.

Simply put, to design a culture rooted in collaboration, you need a collaborative design process. Doing it the opposite way is a mockery.

Collaborative design isn’t easy but the good news is, that there are frameworks, mental models, and design sprint templates from other domains of the business (like UX design, product design, human-centered design, design thinking, etc) where it’s already widely used, tested and proved to work.

Why the “How” matters

I am truly fascinated by the “how” aspect of the subject. Frameworks, templates, mental models, and guides that turn abstract and fluffy concepts into practical tools and tangible outcomes but don’t lose the “magic” in between.

Why “magic”? We’ve created a world (especially, a business world) where we can’t rely on magic anymore. Or, at least, can’t rely solely on magic. And by magic, I don’t mean fairies, spells, and dragons. I mean accidental discoveries, organically forming flawless structures, revelations, and random moments that propel us and our organizations somehow, by themselves. We basically can’t rely on luck and a go-with-the-flow attitude much. We simply can’t afford to rely on letting things shape up naturally by themselves.

We either don’t have time for that (e.g. we want to increase the speed of innovation and use culture as an innovation enabler and amplifier, therefore we can’t wait because competition is high and markets are uncertain, we need it now) or we don’t have the right scale where the nature could still work its magic. Organizations become too big too fast, and natural culture-forming forces that could work organically with 5, 10, 50, or even 100 people break down significantly and cause negative or unpredictable ripple effects on other sides of the business when we go past 100–150 employees or if we double in size every year. Left unattended at this scale and pace of hypergrowth, culture rarely shapes up by itself effectively but rather becomes a bottleneck.

If we can’t rely on Mother Nature and its magic and aren’t willing to slow down, we need special “mechanisms” to make it work. But the problem with mechanisms is — if they aren’t sustainably designed they harm the natural flow of things, and the whole thing becomes artificial, mechanistic, and loses its power once left unattended. It can’t sustain itself because it’s not alive.

So, here I am: attempting to codify culture design into scalable frameworks and practical tools, yet trying to find the balance and keep the system alive and self-sustaining.

That’s why the frameworks I will be writing about should equally consist of practical operational step-by-step guides that you can easily launch as structured “projects”, as well as moments of listening and observing the system and learning to pick the subtle signals of those “live”, natural, organically emerging elements that could be intentionally and thoughtfully integrated into the system. The body and the soul of an org culture, if you want.

I believe this blended approach might spark innovation in the domain of organizational culture and help us unlock new ways of designing, managing, and transforming business cultures.

Mechanics and Magic sneak peek

To make it tangible and real, let’s start with naming those two aspects of the toolkit, both “mechanical” aka structured and rational, and “magical” aka unstructured and emergent.

The Mechanics of Culture Design are those scalable frameworks, models, and templates you can easily codify and replicate:

• Cultural Frameworks descriptions and templates
• Project timelines with crucial milestones explained
• Question banks for stakeholder interviews
• Checklists for kicking off a culture design project
• Employee co-creation sessions templates
• Working group sessions outlines with timing
• Leadership workshops templates and scenarios
• Methodology for working with qualitative and quantitive culture-related data
• A list of People Management processes to integrate your organizational values and behaviors into, to make it real and not just a poster on the wall
• And examples of those culture-integrated artifacts for each of those People processes (starting with hiring and all the way to the end of an employee journey)
• Culture project team/working group RACI and skill matrix
• Change management frameworks to drive adoption and transformation, if needed
• Culture-related comms and learning tactics, building principles
• Cultural rituals and events examples
• Culture Code document structure and examples
• Metrics of success for a culture project
• Tech tools to use for all of that

The Magic of Culture Design is a bit more tricky to describe but let’s give it a first try:

• Signals from the organization and how to tune in to listen to them and inform your design choices
• Unstructured conversations that can give you more insight than the most robust employee survey or facilitated workshop
• Employee behavior observations in real life and what to do with those observations
• Presence and awareness: creating enough empty space to allow things to reveal more of themselves
• Capturing emerging unplanned but powerful applications of culture and leveraging momentum to foster the adoption of “mechanically” designed elements
• When a structured project doesn’t go as planned, how could we avoid becoming defensive, learn from this experience, listen to what the “resistant” part of the org is trying to signal us, and leverage that energy for the end goal. Maybe even applying a bit of improvisation skills

…and probably a lot more we are yet to discover.

Culture by Design, for impact

Organizational culture doesn’t exist for the sake of it, it has to contribute to greater outcomes, and it should generate a positive impact on the rest of the business. Otherwise, it’s not organizational culture design, it’s a playful experiment.

Design is always intentional. It’s creativity at the service of a specific objective, function, or experience you want others to have.

Organizational culture design to me should eventually lead to higher productivity, faster and easier decision-making, more engaged employees, and a better sense of well-being at work. And all of that should enable speed and quality of innovation, happier customers, better-designed products, and, ultimately, better business outcomes. Revenue growth, winning a market, mission fulfillment.

That’s why I don’t want to focus on the “why” of culture by design. If a business doesn’t understand why it needs a strong culture and sees ways to achieve the same through other means — fine, we are from two different worlds.

But if culture is treated as a competitive advantage, a strategic priority, and an enabler of other business objectives— join the tribe, and let’s make it happen.