Companies fail when they lose the collective capacity for curiosity. Poor cultures develop through active promotion and rewarding of poor behaviours, subtle nudges and winks, inaction or by giving licence by turning a blind eye.
Despite vacuous claims of “flat” organisations and the encouragement of “two-way” communication, the reality is commonly quite the opposite. There is still a common assumption that those at the pointy end of the so-called flat organisation are the ones properly making the decisions. Curiosity is rarely fostered in organisations where there remains an emphasis on achieving agreement or consensus. Team meetings are structured to lead to a common resolution – too frequently some blather such as “we must all trust each other” or some other pretentious slogan.
The problem with anomalies is that they require time and effort to attend to and to understand. They can pose difficult challenges for organisations, and consequently, it is not hard to see why so many prefer simply to pretend they do not exist, or worse that they have in place procedures to “deal with” such matters.
Rather cultures, good and bad, emerge when the organisation creates the conditions for emergence. It is an unpredictable process, that cannot be tightly controlled. Simply coming up with a few empty core values and putting up posters in the lunchroom will not cut it.