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That last clause means you don’t understand how to change it, and your idea of how it’s broken is a just-so theory that doesn’t work. What looks like “broken culture” is nearly always referred pain from something else invisible. “Culture” can’t actually break. It’s not a machine.
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In smaller orgs, the major issue is the board / C-suite not wanting to make hard choices: ie do a layoff + replace a lot of managers and start performance mgmt on ICs to turn the culture over. That's not an understanding problem, but a power/buy-in problem.
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Culture can "break" as in get dysfunctional. The questions are: Are your values / org systems still valid for your current mission/strategy? Are you actually hiring people / running things according to these values? It's pretty straightforward to know these things actually.
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You're describing certain problem diagnosis and solving behaviors that work for you in "culture" language, but it doesn't mean that's the "correct" way of thinking about them. It's a conceptual UI that works for you. IME it's a bad one that creates a cognitive tax.
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You have a surprising reference set then. Almost nobody I work with thinks about it this way, possibly because I generally work with larger companies where "culture" has been reified into a culturewashing theater run by HR, and line execs use other frames to avoid that morass
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And in like half the cases I think of as really well-run effective companies, the "culture" crowd would call the culture toxic/bad/broken/dysfunctional etc. (and in fact do exactly that). They can't recognize that it's actually working beautifully. They just don't belong there.
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The huge weakness of "culture" as a reference frame is that "not a fit for me" is VERY easy to confuse for "broken and doesn't work at all." Nearly all cultures work. They just may not be working for you. The answer is rarely "fix culture", but to move.
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