Despite mainstream claims, organizational culture is not a ‘thing’ that can be designed and built in a planned way. In reality, it is continuously re-emerging in the ongoing process of interaction between people. This self-organizing, patterning process creates expectancy that things will happen in certain ways and not others. It is this that enables people to go on together, and organization to function. This deeply embodied process tends to channel people’s ongoing interactions, without conscious awareness or intent, down ‘well-trodden pathways’ of thinking, feeling and acting.
In this way, a generalized tendency emerges for people to behave in characteristic ways that reflect (and thus reinforce) those patterns of interaction that have emerged through past sense-making-cum-action-taking. This means, for example, that the more that we make sense of things and act in certain ways, the more likely it is that we will continue to make similar sense and act in similar ways going forward. It also explains how certain ways of thinking and acting are imperceptibly sustained, further strengthened, and become institutionalized over time.
Shifting these habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action can be difficult, since this same self-organizing process tends to inhibit novelty and change. This means that, in the normal course of everyday organizational life, other possibilities tend to remain unseen – unless and until the characteristic flow of interaction is interrupted in some way. This might arise, for example, from an unexpected turn of events; a mistake in ‘processing’ that exposes a previously taken-for-granted way of thinking and acting; or through deliberate attempts to ‘shift the pattern’. At the same time, this generalized tendency to think and act in certain ways is particularized in the moment of interaction, leading to subtle shifts over time.
This also explains why culture is necessarily fragmentary rather than unitary. Even though some characteristic aspects of people’s interactions are likely to be observable across a broad population, the overall patterning of their thoughts and actions will be highly conditioned by their local interactions – many of which might be geographically and/or functionally specific.
By virtue of their formal roles, managers (from CEO to the front line) are relatively powerful participants in this complex social process of everyday interaction. However, they are not in control of what emerges. Actively engaging with this everyday conversational process, which is channelling sense-making along particular pathways of understanding and action, is an important aspect of their leadership practice. In seeking to surface, and potentially shift, those themes that are organizing people’s interactions, this is about – as Ralph Stacey once said – “having the courage to go on participating creatively, despite not knowing”.
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