If you accept the idea that culture IS the organization, then the participants ‘co-construct’ the culture through their shared experiences.  This introduces a real challenge for change management professionals, management types, and others who like to use transmission model techniques to get people and groups to act in prescribed ways. The lack of formality and predictability introduces difficulty and makes it feel very soft.

But, the fact that it is unpredictable, hard to measure, and hard to control doesn’t make it nonexistent, and it doesn’t mean that those techniques will eventually work if we just keep trying, and by trying I mean getting more and more discrete with the tasks and controls.  I suggest that we need to try letting go of those techniques a bit if we really want to get to who defines the culture.

Accepting culture as a group phenomena that does not exist outside of its context is tough for management types who take comfort in clear lines and rules. But, doing so also allows us to see the opportunity to apply new and different techniques that might have a shot at impacting culture in positive ways.