Culture: Values, Beliefs & Assumptions
We’ve covered the artifacts of culture: physical structures and symbols, language, rituals and ceremonies, and stories and legends. When you start looking and trying to understand people, organisations and the world on this level there are a huge number of cues and clues at our disposal. But, in the end, this is just the tip of the culture iceberg because the real worth beneath those visible artifacts are their underlying values, beliefs and assumptions.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, none of this is rocket science. In fact, most of this is obvious, but we tend to not think about it in that level of detail by default. Instead we push down the road of demographic broad brushing the world around us to simplify things. Generalisations, while handy in their own context, can be a dangerous beast that brings out words like blacks, whites, asians, council workers, women, men… broad brush statements that rarely apply collectively. Yes, some white men are bastards. However, I recall a south african judge being told during apartheid, “Why do you call me black when I am brown? You are not white, you’re pink!”.
You can think of the external artifacts of culture like a rock pool where can you look in and see the reflected values, beliefs and assumptions that underlay real people. And you can think of the sub-cultures that we belong to as layers of paint or glaze that affects the way those underlying elements are mixed. There is really no Australian guy beyond a generalisation. However, there are Australian guys who collectively consist of numerous sub-cultural groups – boguns, for example, home owners, web designers, mothers and fathers, boy scouts, racists, sexists and students. We’re a malatto of cultures, every single one of us. The operative word at play here is shared values, beliefs and assumptions.
As a business, the stronger you hold to shared values, beliefs and assumptions the better your chances of economic success. Strong cultures perform better than weak cultures. And how you foster that shared belief is through working with the physical artifacts – create consistent structures and symbols throughout the organisation, use consistent language and communication, utilise rituals and ceremonies and tell appropriate stories and legends. When people join your organisation they need cultural indoctrination into the club, and they need diversity training so they can understand and better work with people with differing values, beliefs and assumptions from their own worldview.
Similarly, the closer you get to customer interaction and when you’re out there marketing, the rest of the world is applying their own worldview to their perspective of you and your business.
Hopefully, I’ve explained to you why culture is more than demographics and how culture makes us all that little more interesting. All the more important with the increasingly globalised world we operate in.
