I agree Chris, it is complicated. In fact I would say it is complex. All these interactions are hard if not impossible to track and extend beyond normal corporate communications facets to include personal interactions, misinterpretations based on past experiences outside the business and of course interaction with norms and world-views gained from employees other cultural spheres like family, local community, sports organisations, etc.

However after having seen some amazingly dysfunctional companies manage to somehow be successful, I really believe these overlapping cultural pressures form a complex adaptive system.

As a result Bas, there will be different ways of trying to generalise the local culture and build principles or frameworks. These will sometimes be successful tools, however it seems transferring them into a different context and still expecting them to work is dangerous at best.

That said, these interactions aren’t chaotic, standing patterns are created for both long and short time-frames and small changes can have large effects, suggesting that there is a complex adaptive system at work (although Stephen may disagree with me after his last post!). In this case, I agree with Stephen’s concerns that senior managers see culture as a “thing” to be managed and that they should effect culture through their personal interactions and communications. However I would like to add another arrow to their quiver.

Once culture is seen as a complex adaptive system, complexity theory comes into play. This can be used not so much to control the culture, but to design your systems, policies and procedures in such a way to adapt themselves to the most effective configuration for your companies culture. David Snowden speaks about this with tools like safe-fail implementations and Andrew McAfee of Enterprise 2.0 fame captures this in his evolutionary software development methodologies.

This is in fact the real Best Practice. Not some idea that there is a perfect way to do a task, but that there is a way that your organisation’s culture can be most effective when harnessed in a certain way that must be progressively discovered.

I’m enjoying your thought process Stephen. Keep blogging and maybe if we both find ourselves in Melbourne one day we can discuss over a coffee?

I agree that everything depends on the perspective you take. A customer can have multiple perspectives of the organisation. As a customer of Telecom trying to fix my home phone, I find that the undertakings to get my phone connected by a certain date are not mixed. When I call directory service I can’t understand the accents of the people that answer my call, and they can’t understand what address I’m saying because the service has been outsourced to another country. Then I get a call from Telecom to say that the mobile pricing plan I’m on is not the best one for my needs, and would I like to change. I say “yes”, delighted to be saving some money.

This is one organisation, all with the same goals. As a customer, I have three different experiences of it. So the internal employee experience of different cultures (if there is such a thing) does affect the external customer, especially when there are multiple channels of contact.

Another approach is that culture is defined by its employees. Different employees, with different individual goals. How do employees perceive culture? It’s rather different than how clients perceive it in the first example.

It depends on the perspective you take.

Can you help me on habitus please? I am thinking about the relationship of habitus as thought of by Bourdieu, and its relationship to a Heidegger phenomenological view of the world, which would include background meaning, embodied intelligence, concern and the situation. Would habitus be equivalent to background meaning and concern, which I think are the main components of a disposition to act in a particular way? Very interested to hear your thoughts. Cheers, Stephen