Before you rush on to the next task of the day, we encourage you to stop. Give yourself permission to challenge the status quo, and to think about ‘great objects.’ Carve out the time to look beyond the day-in and day-out stressors and think differently about something that really matters to you and your people. We encourage you to prioritize intentional cultivation of the purposes, the structures, the behaviors and the stories that make up your organization. That is to say, think slowly and deeply about your culture.
Have you ever seen the film Amazing Grace? It’s about William Wilberforce, the British statesman, who is credited with the abolition of the slave trade, along with the Clapham Sect. He famously referred to his life’s mission as the pursuit of “great objects.” And how he and colleagues changed the world was through culture creation.
The root of ‘culture’ is the same as ‘cultivation’—an agrarian term that reminds us culture is about the organic, which is why “organization” has the same root as “organism.” It’s alive, with varying degrees of health. In fact, we reject the post-modern idea that local government is like a factory – it’s not a business and can’t really be thought of that way. If anything, it’s more like a farm than a factory. We’re talking about cultivating life through a combination of conditions, nutrients, weeding, preparation – ultimately about bearing good fruit.
As a leader in your organization, the single most important thing you can do is create lifegiving culture. Edwin Friedman, the author of Failure of Nerve, makes the analogy that the leader’s role is similar to that of an immune system in a body. Just as a healthy immune system guards the body against pathogens and maintains its overall health, a leader’s presence, decisions, and emotional demeanor act to protect and regulate the health of the organizational culture.
Peter Drucker’s assertion that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ underscores the importance of culture, even for a strategy-focused company like our’s. That is to say, that culture is penultimate – even strategy, planning, hard work, and so many other virtues, while important, thrive only when rooted in a strong, vibrant culture.
It’s also unavoidable. The question isn’t whether you create culture or not, but the degree to which it is good culture. As Andy Crouch writes in Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling: “The beginning of culture and the beginning of humanity are one and the same because culture is what we were made to do. There is no withdrawing from culture. Culture is inescapable.”
It’s also done in community. Crouch makes this point about the communal aspect when he writes:
So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless… And then, together, make something of the world.
Our creations oughtn’t be solitary monuments to ourselves but bridges that connect, inviting dialogue, understanding, and innovation. At our firm, we try to foster an environment where everything we cultivate or create – that is, every strategic plan, every grant application, every financial analysis, every workshop and every interaction – plants seeds for our clients to nurture and bear good fruit.
That was all an introduction to set the stage for a series of reflections on our view of cultural distinctives. Hopefully, these posts give you insight into your charge—a call to action—to continually reform and cultivate the precious inheritance you’ve been entrusted with in your local government.
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Vivid images and stories are so much more capable of conveying meaning than rote words. A list of corporate “values,” for instance, feels didactic and ethereal to the point of buzzwords with little meaning. So, we are experimenting with an analogous way of defining the behaviors and principles we value and seek. And actually, that’s one of our values – a Culture of Experimentation. We’re constantly cultivating new ideas and analogies, but here is a brief synopsis:
- A Culture of Gardening
We value seasonality, planning, nurturing, patience, weeding, growth, sustainability, diversity, resilience, and adaptability.
- A Culture of Dancing
We value cadence, harmony, gentle leadership, complementarianism, teamwork, practice, expression, creativity, flexibility, rhythm, and balance.
- A Culture of Experimenting
We value hypothesizing, research, organization, records, innovation, curiosity, critical thinking, validation, and adaptability.
- A Culture of Adventuring
We value exploration, courage, resilience, curiosity, adaptability, discovery, risk-taking, endurance, and spontaneity
- A Culture of Healing
We value the broken, empathy, compassion, recovery, wellness, resilience, grace, and mindfulness.
- A Culture of Peacemaking
We value civility, decorum, nuance, peace, co-belligerence, understanding, empathy, resolution, respect, and dialogue.
- A Culture of Benchmarking
We value clarity, comparison, surveying, efficiency, progress, standards, improvement, analysis, performance, and strategy.