What Is Culture?

Businesses, I suppose in an effort to make themselves sound more important, often overuse words and use them improperly. I’m somewhat famously opposed to the phrase on-premise to refer to technology assets that are located on-premises, because the word premise already has a perfectly good meaning that is entirely unrelated to asset location. But culture, as used in phrases like a culture of learning, is actually a really, really good use of the word. In fact, a culture is exactly what we’re trying to build. The phrase is so common though, that I think a lot of people use it without really thinking about all that it means, which causes them to miss a lot of important and subtle points.

So, what is culture?

Culture is a noun. It’s best meaning, for our purposes, is something like, “the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.” Or, “the attitudes and behavior characteristics of a particular social group.”

When we speak of a culture in the social studies sense, we often speak of things like language, food, traditional dress, holiday observances, typical architecture, social traditions, and so on. Culture embodies all of those things. As we seek to build a culture of learning, we need to account for those things. We need, in other words, to build a true culture, one that encompasses all of the elements usually associated with cultures. It isn’t just adopting a set of corporate policies or whipping up some motivational posters. We need the whole cultural package:

• Social organization, which describes how we organize ourselves as a group and how members of the group relate to one another.
• Customs and traditions, which describe how we behave, what typical activities we engage in, and, in large part, describe what we consider “normal.”
• Language, which describes how we communicate with one another.
• Arts and literature, which describe the things we produce for entertainment and education.
• Forms of government, which describe our means of creating rules, along with how we promote and enforce those rules.
• Economic systems, which describe our means of assigning value, conducting trade, and so forth.
• Belief systems, which describe things like shared values, share opinions, and so on.

You might wonder what something like “belief systems” has to do with a culture of learning. In fact, if we are truly building an actual culture, then we have to consider everything that culture entails, which includes things like belief systems, forms of government, and so on. The difference between our culture of learning and most human cultures is that our culture of learning will be built deliberately, rather than evolving organically over hundreds or thousands of years. We will choose the kind of culture we create.

Each of the following chapters will address one of these seven cultural elements. Each chapter will help you understand how these elements contribute to a successful, self-sustaining, and healthy culture of learning, and how these elements can address the practical, day-to-day challenges around lifelong learning.

Our Cultural Driver

Before we begin, it’s worth a few minutes to define exactly what it is we’re trying to solve with a culture of learning.

The ability to learn is the trait that has enabled humanity to survive, grow, and thrive through the centuries. Our ability to learn makes us adaptable and enables us to continually build on the accomplishments of our ancestors and contemporaries. But too often we reach a point where we feel we “know enough” and our learning activity slows or stops. We become complacent. We often forget how to learn, as if learning is a muscle that can atrophy with disuse.

For an employee holding down a job, simply knowing what they need to be successful in that job may seem like “enough.” After all, if the job is what it is and you already know everything needed to do the job, what is there left to learn? What benefit is there to learning anything more? Why spend the time on learning, rather than on leisure?

For an employer, that attitude can be deadly. While many businesses can continue “as-is” for years and years, most businesses need to continually make small adjustments in order to stay ahead of their competition. Revised processes, new products, and so on all keep a business healthy; and a healthy business can cut its employees’ paychecks on a regular basis. But when employees stop learning, or resist learning, then the employer loses agility. The business is less able to react to market conditions, take advantage of market opportunities, and improve itself. Unless the business exists in an entirely static market–which is a true rarity–then the business must continue to evolve, which means the business’ employees must continue to learn.

So that is both our problem and our driver: businesses need their teams to always be learning, so that the business can always be evolving in a changing marketplace. And even if you’re not running a business, the same principles apply: we need to be continually learning so that we can be continually improving. There is no, “good enough;” there is always something better, just within reach.

Our Cultural Goal

Our goal, then, is to solve the problem of continual learning and improvement. We want to create an environment where learning is an accepted, desired, usual part of everyday life. No, more than an environment; we want to create a shared expectation that learning is as much a part of daily life as that first cup of coffee, that lunchtime power walk, or the commute home. We want our language, our traditions, our habits, and our shared beliefs to all reflect the value of learning. We want our systems of internal government, our social interactions, and our work products to all reflect a desire to continually learn. We want learning to become as much a part of our workplace as our work itself, not something that we only engage in when we are not working.