Culture Shaper
In my practice as a coach, consultant and facilitator, I do a lot of work around this concept of culture. I happen to believe that culture is shaped by whomever is in it, and those with power get to determine what is considered true, good, right, and acceptable within that cultural container - and what to push down, ignore, and make irrelevant.
We must understand what it is and how it functions in order to disrupt the systems of power that benefit some but not others, such as racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Only by seeing it can we disrupt it, and only by disrupting it can we shape something new and more inclusive.
Merriam Webster says culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize an institution or organization. It can be seen as the social environment that shapes the way we think and act. It is created through communication, language, customs, and action.
I like to call these social environments “culture containers”, any unit that can define itself as a unique entity. It could be a school, a household, a neighborhood block, or a family unit. Cultural containers come in all shapes and sizes.
Within those containers, culture is often not immediately visible. A well-known framework called The Cultural Iceberg helps us to see that so much of what defines a culture is below the surface. When you encounter a cultural container for the first time or infrequently, it may take a while to understand what differences make a difference, and what certain exchanges and interactions mean.
In other words, what are the patterns in this cultural container? Going back to the dictionary, a pattern is a reliable sample of traits, acts, tendencies, or other observable characteristics of a person, group, or institution. I have learned to look for patterns in the cultural containers that I encounter, and to be relentlessly curious about what they mean.
What patterns do I notice? What do these patterns tell me about what is true, good, right, and acceptable in this culture? Who is left out?
Here’s an example:
In my household, we have a pattern of sitting down for dinner together most nights of the week. After dinner, the entire table gets cleared, the dishes get washed and put away, and the floors get swept. This pattern symbolizes a value around routine, cleanliness, family time, wholesome meals, and teaching our daughter to start and finish a task. But there’s more: it's part of a deeper and more complex pattern related to our sense of comfort and safety. We call it “shutting down the house”. We put the food away to keep the pests away, we lock the doors and turn on the alarm to prevent intruders from entering. By the end of the night when we go upstairs, the house is shut down. This is a very important practice for us, and unless you know the depth of this practice and why we do it, it’s hard to see clearly. When my brother relocated to Kansas City from Colorado, he stayed in our home while he got settled. He’s a bit of a night owl, so often he’d stay up late after the rest of the family had gone upstairs for bed, watching movies or catching up with friends on the phone. Some mornings, we would come downstairs and see remnants of a late night snack on the counter – a dirty dish in the sink, perhaps, or a bag of chips on the counter. It was annoyingly disruptive - I didn’t want this to bother me, but it did. Meanwhile, he was wondering what the big deal was. Eventually, two things happened: we learned not to be so disrupted by a bag of chips on the counter, and he learned why it mattered to us and tried hard to follow suit.
In more complex culture containers, giving voice to what’s below the surface of the cultural iceberg is critical to ensuring that people don’t get left behind - especially those who have not had the power to make the rules. I work with leaders in cultural containers of all kinds, from small and decentralized networks to large philanthropic organizations. The barriers to growth and progress can look like strategy problems, or missed deadlines, or even unmotivated team members - on the surface. By consciously and compassionately chipping away at the cultural iceberg, by going deeper and deeper with curiosity, I can help leaders see and disrupt the cultural patterns that are keeping them stuck.
Maybe the strategy keeps failing because there’s a culture of perfectionism, and people are afraid to take risks and make mistakes.
Maybe we miss deadlines because they are unrealistic, and don’t consider the fact that the world is moving on a different timeline now than it used to.
Maybe the team is unmotivated because there's paternalism, and they don’t feel empowered to make decisions.
Maybe it's time for a new pattern.
Once again, I happen to believe that culture is shaped by whomever is in the container. I also believe that power - the ability to make the rules in a culture container - is not fixed but dynamic and always available to claim. Culture Shapers recognize that they have the power to, at any time, disrupt patterns that are harmful, inequitable, or traumatic. This includes patterns that perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia.
The key to being a Culture Shaper is knowing that the patterns visible on the surface are just a symbol of a deeper set of cultural values and priorities.
Here’s some other tips for shaping culture:
Check yourself. If you want to shape culture, start by examining what you are bringing into the cultural container. How do your biases, beliefs, and the way you interact with others and your environment contribute to the culture?
Be curious about why things are the way they are in the culture container, and what values may be present underneath. Look for patterns of behavior, thought or action and interrogate them.
Speak up when you notice a pattern that is harmful, inequitable, or traumatic. Learning to vocalize patterns that you notice so that others notice them requires courage and, most of all, practice.
Offer an alternative to the current pattern of thinking, behaving, or acting that people are used to. Experiment with new ways of doing things, even if they don't work out perfectly the first time. Here are some ideas descended from Tema Okun’s work on disrupting White supremacy culture.
The opportunity to shape culture is ours, especially in the places that are most proximate to us.
How can you disrupt patterns that are harmful to yourself and the cultural containers that you encounter?
What alternatives will you offer to create something new?