What do we mean by culture?

A term taken for granted, by name and by nature.

What do we mean by culture? As an anthropologist by background who now works in organisational consultancy, responses to this question intrigue me greatly. I’ll admit that nothing creates frustrated friction in me more than the common phrase “we have a culture of X”.

Why does this frustrate me so?

Well, for a number of reasons. As an anthropologist, I spent five years studying not only “culture” but also the way that we define and write about culture. Going deep into the intricacies of emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives, the politics of representation and epistemic injustices in interpretation. I learnt to put “quotation marks” around any kind of a noun for fear of falling into the traps of definition (on whose terms?). I lost myself in ethnographies where curious outsiders spent months or even years in a place of quiet stillness, gently immersing themselves in a neighbourhood or town to understand the place and its human imprint, observing and describing everyday practices, rituals, ways of moving bodies in space, stories told of history and what they reveal about values, habits and ways of life.

The magic in the mundane.

Can “culture” ever truly be a noun, or are we better off opening it into more of a verb-like process of understanding? To me, “we have a culture of X” implies something rigid, something static, something to be defined and controlled within an institutional container of desirable outcomes. Enter my second pet peeve of a phrase: “we need to change the culture”

....I get it. It makes sense when we observe a certain undesirable behavioural pattern, and we are aware we cannot (yet) see what is contributing to it. In complexity speak, we might call this evidence of “dark constraints”, i.e. we can see there is an impact, but we need to dig deeper to understand why this is happening, and right now that doesn’t feel so available or visible. So let’s tackle culture… ok… but where do we begin?!

The notion of changing “culture” is a little like the idea of “changing the narrative”. Both are, in reality, far too big a task for comprehension, and we end up in the same head-scratching space that we often fall into when we label some big or intractable problem as “complex”. In my experience, often the acknowledgement of “complex” alone either amounts to a whole heap of overwhelm or a discursive closure as we cognitively neatly tuck the issue away as being too hot to handle.

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But the word culture, much like complex, still exists, and to me, they are still useful words to think with, precisely because they do not offer anything in the way of a neat answer.

So let’s attempt a definition…. I’ll lean into my anthropology here and bring in some words from two scholars, Clifford Geertz and Tim Ingold. Clifford Geertz is well known for describing culture as “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” Tim Ingold expands on this:

“Perhaps, instead of eliminating culture from perception, we should cease thinking of culture solely in terms of systems of representation, or of schemata for constructing them. What we have been accustomed to calling culture might be better seen to consist and persist in variable skills of perception and action.”

Ingold frames our definition of culture by drawing together perception and action. He draws on this idea of a process, verb as providing a more adequate means of understanding “culture”. Here, he entangles material with perceptive qualities, giving us something core to work on around the idea of culture change.

Let’s be clear, culture is always changing. It’s this change that, for me, is at the heart of its definition. We can observe and name cohesive patterns and trends, but as soon as we get into more granular everyday observations and feelings, we can understand that the reality is one of continual flux and adaptation.

So then we run into the problem, or rather question, of “what can we do?”.

What if culture is not a problem to be solved?

Bringing us back to an organisational focus, in my experience, many organisations treat culture like a puzzle to fix. We define our values, make everything explicit, offer more training and awareness building, and everyone will fall into line….?

But culture isn’t a “thing”, it’s a living, breathing process. It’s complex, relational, and storied. Culture is something that is embodied and embedded in our landscapes, as our past, present, and future come together in any one moment. Culture emerges from patterns in how people make sense of their day-to-day experience. We make sense of our worlds through the lens of culture, and in turn, are continually contributing to culture’s creation via our language and collective actions, what we hold on to and what we let go of.

A lot of this is extremely hard to name in an explicit manner, which makes seeing it from an engineering or behavioural change intervention lens next to impossible. A lot of what we do is personal, yes, but also informed by, and informing our worldviews, which Dougald Hine defines as:

“Worldviews, the background maps and stories that shape our perception of the world and our sense of what is possible, while mostly passing for just how things are” (At work in the ruins, page 43)

I love this quote, as it draws our attention to how difficult it can be to name things and the role of both implicit and embodied knowledge. Polanyi, of course, holds the most eloquent of phrases here to describe tacit forms of knowledge: “‘we know more than we can tell” and my Dad, Dave Snowden, adds “and we will always say more than we can write down.”

If I’m asked, “what is your worldview?”, then I don’t necessarily know how to answer this with much conviction. The question is too big, too shapeless, for something so context dependent. Whereas if I am asked something like “tell me a story about a time when you felt something was wrong this last week at work”, then I can draw on a more somatic response and intuitive observation where my values or beliefs may have been challenged in some way, and use my descriptive observation as an opening into perhaps a different set of questions.

So here are a few sound bytes to hopefully express how we might look at culture and culture change in a more granular, realistic, and actionable way:

#1 Culture is a complex adaptive system.

In anthropology, we observe culture not as something that can be engineered, but as something that learns, adapts, and evolves. In complexity science, we refer to this as a complex adaptive system: a dynamic, context-sensitive system shaped by interactions and feedback.

It’s not about fixing people or behaviours, it’s about understanding the conditions shaping behaviour. Furthermore, it’s understanding that understanding the conditions may require us to pay attention to the more-than-human: space, tools, roles, history, infrastructures, affective atmospheres, and how humans interact with them.

Culture isn’t simply an outcome of individual decisions. It emerges from the interplay of habits, stories, physical environments, power dynamics, technologies, and implicit norms, values and belief systems. These are not static inputs but highly interdependent and locally enacted forces. A small shift over here, such as a new person joining a team or an unspoken tension, can ripple in unexpected ways.

This is why attempts to "roll out" culture change through a linear plan often fall flat. Culture doesn’t respond well to top-down directives. It responds to insider/outsider interpretations, to ongoing sensing and noticing, to the shaping of constraints, to feedback loops, and to iterative learning. Just like ecosystems, it thrives when conditions for healthy interactions are nurtured, not prescribed.

#2 Narrative is data. Data is story.

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Story often gets a bad rep. We are told of the importance of “changing the narrative”, whether this be on a grand scale or challenging those spun from our more internal shadows. But the reality is that humans are natural-born storytellers, or homonarrans, and alongside our fairytales and meta-narrative containers, we are continually using small stories as a means of making sense of the world around us in ways that are both personal and collective.

In my work as a researcher and facilitator at The Cynefin Company, we believe stories are more than anecdotes; they’re data points in motion. Many of our facilitated methods and our SenseMaker® survey approach centre around bringing voices from multiple people and perspectives across a system to the table via the idea of a micro-narratives, asking them to interpret their experiences through their own lenses.

This builds a live map of meaning, identity, and values, without needing to “ask the right questions.” It’s a fundamentally anthropological approach. And it lets leaders respond to emergent realities, not assumptions.

#3 You don’t change culture by naming values

You change it by changing what gets rewarded, noticed, and made possible. And this first requires a little bit of digging to truly understand the likelihood of change in the here and now, before we even think about intervention.

In complex systems, we manage change through shifting constraints, enabling new patterns to emerge. The idea here is that change happens in elements of the broader environment, not solely in the individual or from a top-down directive.

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With this approach, we hope to understand the quality of the soil, tending to the present-moment context first, and, in the process, both getting a bit more information as well as engaging others in the process of defining what is important now, and where we want to move towards in the future. This helps you to:

• See dominant and subversive cultural patterns

• Spot tensions and possibilities

• Explore change as a chance to learn, via safe-to-fail experimentation

Think ethnography + systems thinking + collective sense-making combined.

#4 Culture isn’t static. Neither is understanding it.

Culture shifts in conversation, gesture, silence, and resistance. As anthropologists know, what isn’t said often tells us more than what is and at any time and place we are weaving between macro and micro narratives; dominant and demotic discourses (ref Baumann) that territorialise and deterritorialise into patterns of meaning and action.

Culture is not something to define as X, Y, or Z. The reality is X, Y, and Z are all intermingling at any one moment, their emergent properties forming into new ways of knowing, being and action.

But this doesn’t mean we can’t understand culture, or measure it. We just have to accept that in our measurements, we are operating from partial knowledge (see Donna Harraway). This acknowledgement opens us up to the danger of a single story, relying on one person’s grand narrative blinds us in ways we often cannot see.

I’ll bring in Tyson Yunkaporta’s idea of “diverse ignorance” here - we need as many stories as possible about one thing, and equally as many people interpreting those stories; otherwise, we are ignorant. Enter another quote, this time from Michael Taussig (2006):

“Anthropology is blind to how much its practice relies on the art of telling other people's stories, badly.”

So culture is materiality, it is perception in action. Our interpretations of self, other and world and in turn the ways we are known and understood, all come together in one juicy, messy, complex landscape of movement and potential….. 😰

Layers weaving through layers.

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So rather than seeking to define or fix culture, perhaps our task is to attune to it, through story, through pattern, through relationship. By staying curious, by noticing what’s shifting and what resists change, we can work with culture as something alive, not a problem to solve but a terrain to navigate together. In this way, culture change becomes less about control and more about collective sense-making.