Notes on Fixing Work Culture

Imagine for a moment that Earth was visited by beings from a distant galaxy, one that had it’s own laws of physics. This group of intergalactic tourists may very well view Earth and it’s inhabitants as one homogeneous culture. In the beginning, at least.

In time, as more alien visitors arrived, one could imagine that these earthropologists begin to realize what they assumed was a homogeneous culture, is in fact composed of many thousands of smaller sub-cultures, which in turn breakdown to even smaller units until what was left were a few atomic blocks like behavior and environment – elements that are in constant flux.

As I’m writing this, Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind, comes to um… mind. The idea that highly evolved cognitive systems may be the result of the interactions of a society of plainer, individual agents – that simple processes may emerge as more complex phenomena.

Team Culture as an Emergent Phenomenon

The ways in which Organizational Culture functions appears similar to me. For one, there is no such thing as a monolithic Work Culture. It is an emergent phenomenon, a collection of many tiny little sub-cultures that are formed in individual business units, then departments, teams, all the way down to individuals.

Building a culture then is a combination of encouraging, discouraging, ignoring, observing – ground level behaviors and interactions, while also keeping an eye on the cumulative, emergent effects of such low level actions.

I worked with with teams from Randstad, a large placement and recruitment agency on a Culture Project. As modern AI driven technology becomes better at plugging the gaps in HR demand and supply, individual agents find themselves at sea, trying to locate themselves in the overall picture. Effective Interventions require directly working with the atomic units of an organization – the people.

Reverse Engineering Disruption

So, if culture is a higher level emergent property of low level individual actions, could the opposite hold good as well? Could higher level actions have an impact on individual agents?

I’ve observed how an optimizing process, designed for efficiency gains can inexplicably wind up having the opposite effect. An initial spurt in team productivity is followed by a long tail of employee downtime, as individuals come to terms with what the optimizing process does to their habits, convictions and motivations.

Sometime in 2014, I worked with the management team at Flipkart to design a program called Reboot. One of the problems we were trying to solve is how sub-cultures could interfere with each other when working towards a common goal. In this example, cross-functional teams had a very different working culture to the tech teams.

The knee-jerk reaction to fixing such problems is to try and attack the optimizing process itself – but this is a mistake. Such processes are themselves the results of other processes – an infinite warren of rabbit holes.

In my opinion, the way to mitigate the effects of rouge processes is to go back to the atomic building blocks. Alter environments to alter behaviors. Reinforce these with rituals, and try to aim for a result that is similar to what the rogue process was aiming for, but different in that, it is the result of self-organization.

My reasoning behind this can be summed up by Seymour Papert, Minsky’s collaborator. This is how Marvin Minsky puts it:

“Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.”

Of course, he uses it in the context of child psychology. I see if from the POV of organizational design. At it’s very foundation, organizational behavior consists of a handful of rules, much of it – social. Collaboration, Communication and Chain of Command for instance are extremely basic, fundamental handles. Tiny cogs that move the massive gears of organisational work culture. It is rarely about introducing new processes as it is about re-configuring the existing ones.

Gaming and Management

On a side note, I find that Video Games are useful in that they provide analogies for good management practices. Being a shot-caller in gaming for instance pretty much sums up the day to day of a manager in an high intensity startup environment.

Since we’re on gaming analogies, I also regularly put select individuals from my various teams on side quests. In games, side quests are a handy way for the player to level up their abilities without hampering game-plot or continuity. Well designed side quests provide a boost in operating context and abilities to the individual at the atomic level, and for the organization, it creates strategic optionality, at the higher level.

There is some nuance to designing good side quests, and maybe that is material for the next post.