Leading for Organisational Change

Chapter 3Milk and Mushrooms

Around an organisation's purpose grows its culture. Culture hides in and permeates everything – history, artefacts, rituals, language and metaphors, behaviour, metrics, recognition – and for that reason is both hard to direct and incredibly potent.

Edgar Schein defines culture as:

A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration … A product of joint learning.¹

There's a reason, jokes Tristram Carfrae of Arup,² that culture is called culture:

like the stuff that grows on milk – it takes a while to grow, but then it stays for ever.

Others describe it as being like a thick, pervasive layer of mycelium, with the ‘evidence’ of the culture popping up like mushrooms all over the place.

Milk, mushrooms – part of the potency and value of an organisation's culture is that it is unique. It informs its brand and reputation, it cannot be stolen or replicated. A great culture increases productivity and engagement and so, ultimately, drives improved performance.³

And yet. While survey after survey shows that around 86% of CEOs consider culture to be ‘important’ or ‘very important’ in determining performance,⁴ culture remains extraordinarily poorly defined or understood or managed. Part of the reason for this is that it is still a relatively new field of study (and of course, part of the reason for it being a relatively new field of study is that it is hard to define!).⁵ The earliest ...