Culture Is How It Feels

As a new year kicks off, odds are, somebody at your job is going to bring up “culture.”

Maybe it’s to preserve your great culture. Maybe it’s to make culture better. No matter what, it’s worth thinking about the term and what it means for at least a second.

(You didn’t think I was called Cult-ish Creative for nothing, right? Culture and Cultish go hand in hand. More so than I imagined when I settled on the name, too.)

Culture always has 2 components. It includes people we do some activity with, and then what the byproduct of those activities are.

The simple “What we do is who we are” mostly captures this, but with some necessary nuance.

What we do implies more than one person, an activity, AND an emergent identity.

That identity shifts across culture types, though.

If we manufacture cars, then that’s the output. But the product is not culture. How we feel while we manufacture cars, before we start the day (nervous?), after we finish (proud?), as well as at the beginning of our careers (excited?) and long after our retirement party (bored?) factor in too.

If we are content creators, then our content, like this post, is the output. But the post is not culture. How I feel when I’m writing this, how you feel when it shows up in your inbox, the exchanges we have about an idea like this over time, that’s what counts.

Did we whistle while we work? Good culture!

Did we curse beneath our breath every day and mumble about our red stapler? Bad culture!

No culture conversation - or goal for that matter - is complete without a statement about who is involved, what we’re making together, and how it feels to be in it.

Don’t let it get shortchanged.

Culture depends on it.