Culture: Stories and Legends
So if the outward artifacts of culture include physical structure and symbols, language, rituals and ceremonies, obviously they also involve our use of stories and legends as an adhesive force.
The stories we tell serve as prescribed pathways for showing people in our organisation how to perform tomorrow’s actions. Real stories, genuine stories, are worth their weight in gold. The repeated story of the salesman who made the impossible sales quota; the soldior who fought bare handed against 18 of the enemy and survived through dogged tenacity and a refusal to die; the story about the girl on the fifth floor who photocopied her butt and posted it on her Facebook (stories can also convey how not to act).
Stories and legends, especially if they’re true and about real living human beings, are powerful tools for enriching culture. We’re natural story tellers by design. It’s like mixing jam with a crushed up aspirin, in a sense.
The culture and sub-cultures we belong to can be identified by the stories we tell, the jokes, the cautions. Again, a boguns stories and legends will be entirely different than the card holding yachtie. Pay attention to the stories people are telling you. If you’re a small business out there struggling – what is your authentic story? I don’t mean your advertising campaign or what you tell people in meetings. I mean consider sharing the real authentic story of who you are and see how people respond to it. Is it a good enough story that others will naturally buy into it and become customers? Tomorrow I’ll rip out a few lines about the rest of organisational culture – beliefs, values and assumptions.
