The Security Culture Playbook

Chapter 11Culture Sticking Points

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

Audre Lorde

Each one of us is embedded in our own culture so completely that it is difficult to observe how our specific cultural influences impact the way we view everything around us. This cultural immersion is often so powerful that we are even blind to how our own culture constantly shifts and changes.

There is a common belief that changing culture is very difficult, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Culture is everchanging. The only constant in culture is change. That's good news. It means that an undesirable culture can be changed for the better. It's also challenging, however, in that it can be difficult to observe changes, and it is difficult to fully control the way a culture evolves.

This is true for any type of culture: from the culture of a country or region to the cultural mindsets and expressions of an age group, to the culture of an organization, department, or a subgroup of an organization. And sometimes we make missteps. Our immersion in our own culture creates biases and blind spots, allows for miscommunication and misinterpretation of motives, and can have the power to nullify an organization's otherwise well-intentioned and well-designed security program.

Our immersion in our own culture creates biases and blind spots, allows for miscommunication and misinterpretation of motives, and can have ...