Magritte and pipes: aligning your values and culture using the Culture Canvas
Lots of organisations are improving their culture these days, by embracing diversity, inclusion, psychological safety, and so on. But how can we transform our work culture, by design rather than by default? Can we even?
Magritte and his pipe
I’m a long-time fan of Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte, and I often think of his painting The Treachery of Images, otherwise known as Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe (This is Not a Pipe).
It’s a whimsical comment on the paradox of attaching meaning to words and things. The picture of the pipe and the word ‘pipe’ are not the actual pipe. We can get overly enamoured with the representation of things, more than the things themselves.
The values written on the wall are not actually your values
In this way, the values displayed on your organisation’s walls are just representations of the values. For example at Atlassian where I work, one of the values (and they’re displayed EVERYWHERE) is ‘Play, as a team’. This actually invokes slightly different ideas in the heads of staff:
- Work hard, but don’t forget to schedule down-time as a team
- It’s okay to goof off a bit, as long as you get your work done
- It’s important that we get out of the building and do fun thing as a team together
All of these are true, and encapsulated in those 4 words: ‘Play, as a team’.
This is partly why some people get twitchy when it comes to organisations displaying their values on their walls. Values might be (too) open to interpretation. And having the values written out and nicely illustrated doesn’t guarantee that those values are practiced (or practiced well enough… and what’s ‘enough’ anyway?). It can come off looking cheesy at best, and completely hypocritical at worst.
The values written on the wall are postcards of the past
Also, organisational values can change over time. An organisation’s values are a time capsule of what that organisation was going through and what it thought of itself back when the values were designed. Those values are postcards from a past holiday. And just like postcards on a fridge, some postcards we collectively keep on the metaphorical fridge of our minds and hearts forever because they are still valuable and still hold true. Others no longer seem… valuable enough… and we discard them. And that’s okay.
And yet, displaying the values on the walls is an excellent constant visual reminder of what an organisation says really matters to that organisation. If you’re new to the organisation, it’s the best way to get up to speed with those values. And for everyone else, they’re a clarification, compass, and a constant reminder for us to check in on our own beliefs and behaviour, and if we’re still aligned.
Culture is an expression of values
And right there, I think, is the key to this dilemma of whether to display values on walls or not. We can never actually separate our actions from our values. We can never actually separate what we do from what we believe and what matters to us, just like the image and word ‘pipe’ can’t be separated from the actual physical object of a pipe, and the idea in your head right now about what a pipe is.
If the values posters on the walls are the postcards, then the activities we do, the people we’re with, and the places we go are the actual holiday. It’s the holiday that actually matters. And that’s where culture comes in.
There are lots of definitions around for organisational culture (and may they all flourish), but for me: organisational culture is the outward expression of the inward beliefs we agree to hold together.
Our behaviours spring from our beliefs, and collectively our behaviours all munge together in a messy cocktail that is our culture.
And just like our friend René’s pipe is rendered in visual language and written language (French), culture — that cocktail of collective behaviours — has several ‘languages’. The more that we are fluent in these languages, the more we can track how we are living out organisational values, and where we need to check and change our behaviour from time to time.
These ‘languages’ — or elements — were codified as The Cultural Web, developed by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes in 1992 (and you can read more in their book Fundamentals of Strategy). The languages are:
- Stories - Past events we talk about, share a laugh or a knowing wink about. This also includes heroes and heroines at particular times
- Symbols - Logos and branding, what we wear, our office spaces (and yes those values posters on the wall)
- Rituals - Formal and informal work patterns that we all endorse as the ‘right way to get things done’, the funny little things that teams do together
- Power structures - The people and places of real power and influence around the organisation; where direction really comes from
- Relationships - Connections between teams and other groups of people, internally and externally
- Controls (or organisational structures) - Systems that give people rails for getting work done; processes, performance reviews, budgets, satisfaction surveys
We can visually map these languages, behaviours and beliefs as a canvas, so that it’s easier to see the connections between them. I give you: the Culture Canvas.
There’s actually a few Culture Canvases around, but I needed one that helped me and others to map these well-documented elements against behaviours and beliefs in one handy format. This canvas lets you plot a particular behaviour in your organisation in the centre, plot the beliefs upon which that behaviour is based, and plot how that behaviour is manifesting itself as one or more of those 6 ‘languages’.
You can use this Culture Canvas to:
- Better understand the spread of behaviours going on in your organisation, and how they contribute to your culture
- Better diagnose where something might not be right, at a team level or organisation level
- Focus on what part of your culture you want to change, according to the behaviours that are driving that part of the culture
Culture Canvas example: ‘reading’ healthy behaviour
Here’s an example of using the Culture Canvas to ‘read’ a healthy behaviour. The meeting rooms at strategic consultancy Second Road are named after inspiring design thinkers, with their faces on the glass. Rather than booking rooms for an hour, they book them for a month.
They keep all of the project work up on the wall so it’s always visible and within reach. The whole team (usually 3 to 4 people) parks themselves in the room for days. Clients and hosts of others come in and spend time with them for days. They top and tail each day at hot-desks to do the individual stuff and other meetings, and then spend the bulk of the day doing the project work face-to-face. Why?
They truly believe that focusing in a physical space with all of the people involved in a problem talking, drawing and solving the problem together, uninterrupted, is the most efficient effective way to get work done. And it’s awesome!
This is how it would look on the Culture Canvas:
Whenever anyone had a new idea for how to work together more effectively, they would pass the idea through the lens of this belief, i.e.: will this idea help us focus in a physical space, to get the best outcome?
Culture Canvas example: ‘diagnosing’ unhealthy behaviour
Here’s an example of how to use the Culture Canvas to diagnose an unhealthy behaviour. I recently did a workshop with some care workers and management at a service organisation, to work out how to improve their services. An awkward thing happened: they weren’t aligned on what the problems actually were.
I captured the stories they were telling on the Culture Canvas. What we found together was that the care workers really wanted to have a say in the way services were provided, but felt locked out of that by management. And management thought the care workers just didn’t understand the organisation strategy enough (I’m simplifying here).
What it boiled down to was a culture of learned helplessness and a bit of blaming going on. How did it manifest itself? Care workers would gather in the downstairs kitchen where management never went, and swap ideas for how to improve the services they provided. They never shared them with management because they were always too busy, because the shifts were too long for them to get downtime and capture their ideas.
Here’s how it looked on the Culture Canvas:
Seeing the issue mapped out this way helped ‘both sides’ to realise what was actually going on. Together, they changed what was being spoken in the languages:
- Management installed a whiteboard in the kitchen for care workers to capture ideas
- Shift times were changed to allow more reflection and learning time
- A care worker delegate would feed ideas from the board to management at the end of every month
Try the Culture Canvas yourself
You can draw up this canvas on paper, and use it individually or in a group to navigate how healthy or unhealthy behaviours are being expressed, or you might like to just draw it up on a whiteboard and use it to structure a group discussion.
I hope this helps you spot any areas of your culture that aren’t lining up with the values you have displayed on your organisation’s walls. That way, the ‘pipe’ displayed on your organisation’s walls will always truly reflect the ‘idea of pipe’ that is in the heads and hearts of everyone you work with. :)
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