The most interesting things I've learned about organisational culture

Value statements and culture books are more "culture theatre" than actual culture.  Culture is not visible artefacts nor behaviour but rather underlying, fundamental assumptions that people have about how things work.

People primarily learn culture from role modeling and systems.  Symbols (aka "culture theatre") are useful  only when they are congruent with how leaders behave and systems work.  For startups, culture is learned almost exclusively from founder role modeling, hiring practises, and collective experiences.  As organisations mature, more influence shifts to systems (training, assessment, rewards, punishments, etc.).

Doctrine is essentially culture, which means that there is the same phenomena of "doctrine theatre" vs actual doctrine.  When I was wondering about Agile doctrine as a set of fundamental principles (aka assumptions), I was essentially wondering about Agile culture.

Culture categorisations oversimplify culture.  Categorisations such as "command and control",  "democratic vs autocratic", the Schneider model, etc. are dangerously narrow.  Instead a nuanced view is more valuable:

• How do we thrive in our environment? Mission, Means, Measurement
• How do we effectively work together? Language and concepts, group boundaries, authority and relationships, rewards and status
• What is the nature of reality? How do humans relate to nature?  How is truth determined? What is human nature? What is the nature of human relationships? What is the nature of space and time? What is knowable and controllable and what is not?

Culture assessment is meaningless outside of a problem to solve.  Without a problem to solve, you cannot assess whether any particular assumption is helping or hindering a group from achieving its goals.  Instead you end up with a tendency to treat cultures as universally good or bad rather than more or less effective depending on context and specific problem.

In fact, you pretty much never need to change all of a culture, only the few assumptions that are not effective for the specific problem at hand. By attempting to change more of a culture than needed, you will create additional, unnecessary resistance.

This has always reminded me of the scene from Cool Runnings:

"...if we walk Jamaican, talk Jamaican, and is Jamaican, then we sure as hell better bobsled Jamaican." -- Sanka Coffie

Changing culture starts with undermining belief in assumptions.  People will need experiences that get them to question the aspects of their mythology that conflicts with the changes needed to solve the problem.  As those assumptions are disconfirmed, the alternative assumptions and behaviour are more readily accepted.

References: Edgar H. Schein (The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, Organizational Culture and Leadership), Systems Leadership (which is based on the work of Elliot Jaques)