You are. Me too. And you, over there.

Organisations have problems. It’s part of being an organisation in an era when the rules keep changing; where everything keeps changing. As long as we label them problems we’ll keep finding them. And when we do, it's someone's fault, especially in our British culture.

We used to blame the workers (aka the strikers). More recently we have blamed the City, and the fat cats. Fashions change and we now blame the culture.

Doctors inject the wrong dose, government ministers cover up, prison officers refuse to go along with new ideas, dodgy directors don’t get sacked, farmers cut corners on  hygiene: it wozn’t me guv, it woz the culture wot dun it!

The what? It sounds like a cop-out, some airy-fairy excuse. But is it?

People do behave differently at work from how they do outside. Not all people, and not all the time, but generally we recognise that we behave differently in groups from how we would if we were alone. Gangs of youths commit crimes, such as attacking other young men, that they might never dream of doing individually. It’s as if the values they normally operate by are overruled by the desire to be ‘one of the lads’; most of us want to belong, to be accepted by our peers.

How different is gang behaviour from the way that medical staffs close ranks when one of their number drops a clanger? In Bristol, the paediatric scandal was allowed to continue for some time. Who allowed it? Everyone who knew and said or did nothing. Doing nothing is a decision. Those who did nothing were choosing between alternatives. What motivated them to do nothing? Perhaps the desire to belong is as strong in 'professionals' as it is in the 'yob culture'? It's the shadow side of team spirit, and few of us want to let the side down.

People who step outside the cultural norms to tell the outside world what is happening are called ‘whistle-blowers’, and often are despised even by senior colleagues.

Culture is sometimes referred to as ‘the way we do things round here’. New appointees notice that the culture is different from where they worked previously: a different atmosphere, people treated differently, alternative ways of doing things, valuing punctuality, dress code and so forth.

Bosses may talk about the sort of culture they want, using terms like ‘can-do’, empowered, professional (notoriously difficult to define), customer-focussed and the like. These are not descriptions of their organisation’s culture. Rather, they are what they would like to think their culture is.

But the actual culture is revealed by behaviour. The day-to-day behaviour in an organisation is the culture made manifest. What people do or say, not do or not say. when perhaps they might have done or said something, are the indicators of the culture.

There is rarely a single culture. Usually there is an overarching one, with sub-cultures in different parts of an organisation. In one department there may be a specific culture influenced by a dominant personality, or by the absence of women colleagues, for example. In many companies the techies – computer support staff – are alleged to have a particular culture, or way of doing things (or of not getting round to doing things, according to popular myth).

Culture is not a problem per se. The problem is that its influence is little understood in most organisations. And when new bosses come in and decide to transform their organisation, they often end up complaining that nobody wants to change. Between the intention and the act, there lies the shadow, as Blake wrote.

The major problem with culture is in blinding us to alternative (perhaps better) ways of behaving. We feel comfortable in behaving in predictable ways. Change seems scary and needs effort.

In many organisations the culture has not been consciously planned, and so it is the result of historical accident. Some writers on organisations talk about firms sleep-walking their way into their present culture; what is referred to as the boiling frog syndrome. It is alleged that, if you were to place a frog in a pan of boiling water, it would jump out before it could suffer too much harm. If you were to put a frog into a pan of cold water and gradually raise the temperature to boiling point the frog would die. The reasoning is that the frog gets used to each new rise in temperature and so does not notice what is happening until it is too late.

Thus we find ourselves behaving in ways that we would otherwise find ridiculous. We didn't start out like this; it crept up on us. We become what is called 'acculturated'. We conform to the prevailing culture.

This blinds us. If we all keep our heads down, don't complain and behave in similar ways to everyone else, the organisation loses opportunities for considering alternative ways of behaving. It stops learning.

George Bernard Shaw wrote: 'the reasonable man (sic). adjusts himself to suit the world; the unreasonable man expects the world to adjust to suit him. Without the unreasonable man there is no progress.

In a blame culture, no-one is willing to take risks, so there is no creativity. Edward de Bono reminds us that it's impossible to be creative when you have both hands covering your arse.

Culture can also be thought of as the thinking habits that companies have got themselves into.

The press have got themselves into a particular habit of looking for problems; and so they find them: governments are always on the fiddle; spin is bad; sleaze is on the increase.

Management coaches find themselves listening to people with huge salaries complaining about how hard life is for them; teachers complain about how hard they work (but forget about the holidays); nurses have to complain about their pay and conditions because it has become part of their public identity (imagine how counter-cultural it would be for a nurse to say: well, it's quite a good job really).  They have gradually become accustomed to behaving in that way. We are blinded to the good things because so rarely does our culture reward good news. We love a good moan. Isn't it awful?

If we are always looking for problems, that’s what we shall find. Let’s be honest: how many of our organisations spend their time trying to catch them doing things right? Now, just imagine what sort of culture that would be…

© Julian Jordon 2002.