Culture Is Not Singular: Blending Meaning, Forefront, and Matrix

“Humans are the makeweights in the scales of time." - Michael Meade

Culture is not singular

For most of us, Culture is an amorphous, ambiguous thing. We never really know how it comes about - it seems to be just there, everywhere.

When it comes to organizational culture (or a societal one), how do we change a culture, if we feel like the current one is not serving us?

There are 3 ways to do this:

1. All meaningful change in culture begins with the individual
   
   "Humans are the makeweights in the scales of time" says Michael Meade.
   
   Makeweight is a reference to the weight that was used to measure precious things like gold and silver. So, the phrase, humans are the makeweights in the scales of time, means, that each person is a makeweight in this attempt to rebalance, whether it is an organization, or the world.
   
   We are the measure of what a culture looks like and how it functions. It is not elsewhere, or someone's doing - it is us, each of us.

2. Bringing culture to the forefront
   
   Organizations looking to change direction, create better output, or faster inventions, often overlook culture. Not that they neglect it, they just forget its part in the play. No different from us forgetting how important water is to our body or how not-good sugar is. It just slips to the back of the mind.
   
   Organizational transformation then truly begins by bringing the need for a culture shift to the forefront. And to remember that culture is nothing but an individual times x.
   

3. Remembering the current cultural matrix
   According to CCL , there are 3 types of organizational culture

   

   
   Before we change a culture, we must first understand what our current culture structure is and what style we want to move to. And understanding that agility is quote different from adaptability.
   
   Agility is a change of mindset, a mechanism to reconsider new possibilities, the capacity to move into a new space and do thing differently and adopt new ways of working.

   Adaptability on the other hand is implementing a planned process, shifting to a structured way of doing things. It is also a way of adopting new ways of working but it is more pre-determined than agile skill.

   Both agility and adaptability are necessary in the individual for meaningful change to occur.

Blending Them All A&A

The way forward if to blend meaning, bringing culture to the forefront, and starting with a recognition of what kind of matrix the organizational culture is at. .

If we can awaken something in the depth of the individual, bring out the meaning between that which is fading and that which is being created, then an intrinsic significant shift can happen.

A large part of change management is to bringing culture and change to the forefront within the organization, understanding that it takes time and requires the buy-in and awareness from all parties involved.

Lastly, the good news is agility and adaptability can be cultivated in people

If we are able to do this systematically, the people then become the makeweights of the cultural shift towards a thriving, adaptable organization.