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Insight Organizational culture

How an organizational culture is actually built

Nobody decides one morning what their organization's culture will be. It settles, decision after decision, until no one needs to ask how things are done here.

Mosaïca ConseilsAugust 17, 20267 min read

Martin Lépine standing in front of a board, facing managers seated around a meeting table.
A Mosaïca workshop on the structures that support a culture: without them, an intention never repeats long enough to become a norm.

THE STARTING POINT

A culture does not begin with a value. It begins with a situation.

A question comes up, an error occurs, two priorities collide. Someone decides. On that day nothing has settled yet: an isolated decision is still an event.

What follows decides everything. Depending on whether that response is recognized, tolerated, corrected or repeated, it will disappear or become the normal way of doing things. A culture is the sediment of those successive responses, not the sum of the intentions that preceded them.

FROM ACT TO NORM

A one-off decision does not create a culture. Its repetition does.

  1. Decision

    A question comes up, an error occurs, one priority collides with another. Someone chooses a way of acting.

  2. Reaction

    The response is recognized, tolerated, corrected or repeated. What the organization does with it teaches more than the decision itself.

  3. Repetition

    The same situation returns. People gradually work out what is really expected in a similar case.

  4. Reinforcement

    What gets recognized gets repeated; what is never taken up becomes ordinary. The second channel is the quieter of the two.

  5. Norm

    The response becomes a habitual way of acting, even when no rule explicitly requires it.

What an organization allows to repeat eventually teaches something.

WHAT ACCELERATES THE SEDIMENT

Three conditions make one response repeat faster than the others.

  1. It is visible. A decision taken in front of the team teaches more than ten emails. What is seen gets copied.
  2. It carries no consequence. A behaviour that has never cost anyone anything becomes, by default, a permitted behaviour.
  3. It is supported by the structure. A practice that roles, tools and indicators make easy repeats on its own, even without conviction.

An intention that no structure supports never repeats long enough to become a culture.

WHAT THIS CHANGES FOR A LEADERSHIP TEAM

You do not build a culture by naming it. You build it by deciding the same way twice.

In practice, that moves the work to three precise places: the situations that come up most often, how managers respond to them, and what the organization does with those responses.

It is also good news. A mechanism that installs a norm without anyone wanting it can, once understood, install another one — provided you accept that it will take just as many repetitions.

This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The situations that make this mechanism visible, how we read it and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.

Organizational culture

CONTINUE

Other insights on organizational culture.

Which response has your organization given twice in a row, without thinking about it?

That is often where the real culture is, and rarely in the document that describes it.

Talk with Mosaïca