Shaping How We Are Who We Are
- Adam
- Mar 22, 2018
- 3 min read
Peter Drucker famously said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Yet, there’s a significant caveat: only when culture is strategic does is overtake all other strategies. In this sense, culture must be strategic.
Before I get too far into this, let’s be clear, anytime people are gathered, there is a culture. It’s most obvious in businesses and sports teams. But our families also have a culture. It comes forth in how we spend quality time together, how we teach and discipline our children, how we balance work and other commitments, what we prioritise. So, it’s important to consider how culture emerges.
Culture exists in every group of people. It always exists, whether that group realises it or not. See, culture has two forms: the intended culture and the emergent culture.
Intended culture is what the group’s leaders plan their group to think, act and interact like. It’s their best hopes for the group. In businesses, the executives, managers or owners embody the culture in statements. The same goes for sporting teams. In families, at least in our family, our intended culture began to take shape as Jade and I dreamed about our future when we were engaged. It became more concrete when we made vows to one another on our wedding day. It will more fully take shape as we continue to plan the future of our family.
The thing with intended culture is that it is firstly intentional – it is not guaranteed to be actual. The leaders of a business intend for the culture in their organisation to be a certain way, yet the success of this culture and its existence is dependent on its adoption by employees. As with sports teams, the coach calls the plays, but the players make them happen. In a family, intended culture plays out as we move through life’s various stages. As newlyweds, our culture was focussed on discovering how life would look as a union rather than as separate individuals. Now, as we travel, we are broadening our horizons, which in turn pushes the boundaries of our intended culture.
So, how do we ensure that intention becomes reality?
Emergent culture is what we call the culture that actually exists. If staff or employees are the ones who actually embody the culture, how they live, work and act is the culture that emerges. And it can be a very different culture to what the leaders intended. If the culture isn’t planned well, or attentive to the needs of the people, then people will act very differently. In our families, culture emerges as events shape who and what we are becoming. Travel, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, sickness, new opportunities – there are so many things that can change and shift expectations. Of course, as we add to our families, new members bring different expectations than the those we intended.
The question then becomes: how do we align expectation with reality? How do we take an active part in shaping the culture that rules and guides our family?
The key is awareness and responsiveness. As our journey abroad winds along, Jade and I intend for this time not to be an escape, rather, for it to be a time to reshape our lifestyle (i.e. culture). Yet, what we set out at the beginning of our travels as the lifestyle we wanted to embody (intended culture) hasn’t always come to fruition. Living situations have been a significant determinant of how much of that lifestyle we have been able to pursue. So too are our energy levels and motivation. This is where awareness comes in: to see where our intentions aren’t being met and when other realities are emerging. Just this past weekend we had a conversation about what we want our day-to-day life to look more like. And so, responsiveness is also required. Simply seeing that intention and reality misalign is not enough, action must be taken to right the ship or to re-imagine new hopes and dreams.
If culture is crucial to the success of businesses and sports teams, how much more crucial is it in the infinitely more important institution of the family? We do get a choice in what our families look and feel like. Our hopes and dreams for our marriages and families do get to come true, with a lot of honest conversations, awareness and willingness to steer these relationships in the direction we intend for them.
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