The Importance of Cultural Gardening
A short essay on what middle-status conformity is, why you should care, and what it means for your organization.
We regularly hear founders talk about how important the first N employees are to a company, especially with regards to how they shape culture. This is because it’s crucial for organizations to hear the truth—from the market, from customers, and from employees. Yet, in the interest of moving fast, these very same orgs have a tendency to ignore, deny, or suppress the truth from within. Leaders that know how important hearing the truth is will double down on fostering an environment where divergent perspectives can be expressed and interrogated safely. Leaders that ignore this tend to be among the last to arrive at the slow-moving train wreck. While this is easy to intuitively understand, it’s also empirically supported by a social phenomena known as “middle-status conformity.”
I’ll use the rest of this essay to talk about what middle-status conformity is, why it matters to organizations, and what you can do about it in your organization. (If you want the Twitter thread version, click here.)
Middle-status what?
In any group, you can imagine that people can occupy three different places along a status spectrum — high status, middle status, and low status. Depending on the group you’re talking about, these positions have different names, but perhaps the most common example in Western culture is the cool kids (high status), the average kids (middle status), and the kids who get picked on (low status).
In their paper, “Middle-Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets,” Damon Phillips and Ezra Zuckerman argue that someone’s likelihood to conform to cultural and/or social norms takes on an inverse U-shaped curve, with middle-status individuals most likely to conform and high and low-status individuals most likely to deviate in situations where conformity reinforces group membership and status (illustrated in Figure 1). In fewer words, this means that people who have something to lose tend to behave as expected in a group, unless they’re “untouchable” or “outsiders.”
Note: This paper is long and dense, with a number of important theoretical and empirical contributions. I am focused on the one that I found most compelling and relevant to the conversations about organizations that I’m having today. If any of this is interesting to you, I’d encourage you to dive into the piece itself because I’m sure you’ll find a number of important ideas.
I’m going to pause here and encourage you to think about someone you’ve worked with or are in a group with that deviated significantly from the group norms at some potential expense to themselves. To what degree did that individual have high or low status? Or, in a better case, were you in a healthy group that had normalized disagreement and free expression?
Let’s imagine that you are a part of a group where the conforming behavior is agreeing with the group leader. In those cases, you’re rewarding for being a yes-person, and the individuals who are most likely to speak up are those who are so high in status they are beyond reproach or those who have so little to lose they are willing to speak their minds. This is not a sustainable or healthy dynamic, but it is one that many of us have experienced in our organizations.
Why should I care?
As I mentioned in the beginning, it’s critical for organizations to hear the truth, and many suppress it. The situation I described above is illustrative of one of the key points I want to make: If group membership drives conformity, the healthiest groups will do their best to normalize the broadest range of perspectives and behaviors in service of their goals, so that “deviation” in small (but meaningful) ways is not only embraced, but celebrated, as it helps the group grow and evolve. This also means that organizations have an increased burden to cultivate the right set of cultural artifacts and rituals both at inception and as their organizations grow, because bad behaviors will become reinforced and normalized as conditions of group membership if they are not pruned appropriately.
Phillips and Zuckerman point out that new members (who are low status) overperform compared to their middle-status counterparts in hopes of being accepted into the group. In a fast-growing organization, this is something to be mindful of as new members will soon outnumber the original members who set the previous norms. This highlights the importance of individuals in groups who play the role of “cultural gardener” (I use “culture” here as it’s used by Stewart Brand with regard to pace layers).
“Cultural gardeners” are the individuals responsible for planting seeds of good practices and weeding out bad ones, which are occasionally formalized into roles/titles like “community manager” (though we don’t tend to have these titles in traditional organizations). These individuals have always been important with groups, but are of even greater importance in a distributed team or a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The lack of visibility that remote work has afforded us puts a greater burden on these individuals to regularly tend to and prune the organization.
What are the implications for my organization?
Now that you know what middle-status conformity is, what should you do about it?
Identify who currently plays the role of “cultural gardener” in your organization (if anyone), and support them in cultivating and reinforcing good behaviors, as well as pruning unwanated ones. You’re probably thinking “culture is everyone’s job.” Yes, everyone at your organization contributes to the culture — positive or negatively — but I bet very few people (if anyone) in your organization are regularly tending to it. When you see deviations in behaviors, determine whether they came from a place of safety and trust or a simply a high/low status individual and act accordingly.
Invest in onboarding. Then double your investment. Then add a little bit more. Seriously. You can’t (and I’d argue shouldn’t) manage or oversee every single thing people are doing in an organization, so you need to find a way to help people move in the right direction. Here you can learn a lot from game design. Use your onboarding to articulate the “laws of physics” that govern your organizational behavior and decision-making (assuming they are followed and reinforced). We know from prior research that empowered individuals and teams are not only the happiest, but most resilient, so set people up to successfully navigate the challenges ahead by giving them not only a map of the world, but helping them learn how to navigate it.
Healthy organizations are dynamic, living things, and — like gardens — they will become overgrown and unruly without people providing the right care and attention.
A big thank you to Nicole Zeng for sharing this paper with me and providing feedback on my thinking, and a thank you to Lena Blackstock for her feedback on drafts of this piece.
Tools are Divisive
End users and SDMs prioritize different organizational pace layers when they make decisions, especially about tools.
If you work in a software-as-a-service (SAAS) organization, you likely encounter a group of people that are (for better or worse) referred to as “Software Decision-Makers” (or SDMs). These are the people who can buy and/or approve the purchase of goods and services on behalf of the organization. In small organizations, the overlap between the “end user” of a piece of software and the SDM is quite large (think of a founder or early employee buying something for themselves/their team), whereas large organizations have incredible distance between SDMs and end users (i.e. finance, legal, and other individuals dedicated to “procurement”).
As I was riding with Max this morning, I shared a bit about this project and some of the insightful conversations I’ve had as a result already. Max — in addition to being a brilliant designer and product thinker — is in the middle of an organizational transformation himself as Uber has acquired his employer, Postmates.
I shared the organizational pace layers with him, and our conversation turned to the topic of SDMs and who was going to be making what decisions as Uber and Postmates moved forward. This conversation helped crystalize something that Nicole Zeng did incredible research on during our time at Slack (which I don’t have access to, but would love to share):
End users and SDMs prioritize different organizational pace layers when they make decisions, especially about tools.
This decision about tools and purchasing was top of mind at Slack as we’d seen incredible bottoms-up adoption (Slack starting with one team, then growing slowly to the entire organization) much before we (at least as I remember it) had a dedicated sales motion for large enterprises (what you’d consider “top down”).
When it comes to decisions about tools, end-users prioritize the layers of work and communication. They want the tools that will best support them in doing their jobs - often choosing those that reduce friction, provide leverage, or otherwise feel en vogue.
Unlike end-users, when SDMs make decisions about tools, they prioritize the layers of process and culture, considering the (human and capital) costs of implementation, integration, and maintenance (which you could argue are their layers of work and communication).
Both groups tend to assume that the other layers will adapt to the new tools. End-users probably underestimate the kind of inertia they need to overcome to make process and cultural change, and SDMs underestimate the importance of speed and control in work that employees want. Obviously, this is a bit of an oversimplification, since purchasing decisions also involve broader business relationships and financial considerations - and it’s unlikely that finance teams(or end-users to be fair) have a concept of “value” for a given tool. More often you’re talking about these decisions in terms of TCV or “total contract value” - which is much more about cost than value if we’re being honest.
Choosing your own tools
Something I’ve wanted to write about as it relates to starting Yet Another Studio (and working for yourself more broadly) is the freedom to choose your own tools. I’ve been operating the studio under the principle of “minimum necessary infrastructure,” which means that I’ve been choosing the tools that are best for me and my work - rather than the communication about and representation of work (as I might in a larger organization that needs such visibility). I build process on top of that, which is admittedly very limited at this point.
This situation highlights the fact that as I am both the end-user and the SDM, I can think about making the best tool decisions with work in mind and build the process to support that, rather than try and pick tools with process in mind, in hopes that such a process will be flexible enough to adapt to the changing pace and needs of new work and new clients. It’s almost as though the pace layers have collapsed/blurred for me as an “organization of one” (though they are much more visible as I work with clients) because “process” is simply patterns of work/ways of working that I’m repeating.
Some things I’d be interested in hearing from folks about as it relates to the above:
Where have you run into challenges as you try to bring a new tool into your organization? How/where were these expected or unexpected?
Which organizational pace layers provided the most inertia? How did you overcome them?
What are your strategies for easing adoption of new tools into your organization - besides having an SDM as a champion or sponsor?
Thanks to Max and Kevin for providing feedback on these ideas.
Debt and Time
After sharing Dancing with Pace Layers with the folks in !&, Tom Critchlow pointed me to Clay Parker Jones’ post “Onward!” In the post, Jones shares about leaving August and heading to R/GA, and in doing so talks about the pace layers at which organizations learn, sharing this wonderful image and snippet:
We landed on "August helps clients win on teaming" – which, while important, isn't what I wanted to do anymore as the thing I sell to people. I'm much happier today finishing that sentence with words like strategy, innovation, and design. Now, in a self-organizing context, it would have been possible and plausible for me to pull August toward that evolution in purpose, but at least in my mind, at the cost of a lack of focus.
Another way of thinking about this is in terms of the pace layers describing how organizations learn. At Undercurrent, we frequently played at the Annual Operating Plan layer, and occasionally at the Functional Advantage layer. At August, we were mostly in Role Management and Training. Consulting at that layer requires significant (maybe even software-driven) scale, because fees can't ever be that high – the leverage is too low. Now, today R/GA is known for its marketing work. But more and more, particularly but not only in the Innovation Consulting department, we're impacting the deepest, highest-leverage layers of our clients. This deep work isn't always easy to point to in the moment, but it's exciting for me, and for the team.
FWIW, I’m with Clay - I love the deep work that is hard to point to and is also high leverage.
The diagram was both interesting and unfamiliar, and I hadn’t heard of either Drotter or Jacques. Thanks to the Internet, I learned that they both have thought and written a lot about organizations - some of which looks very interesting (if you have strong feelings about what to read or not to read, please let me know).
Something I have been thinking about - thanks to Brand and Meadows - is “What kinds of debt do organizations have?” Specifically, what does debt look like at each layer?
I started scribbling notes on what these may be on top of the Organizational Pace Layers I shared previously. Some things that came up (certainly a starting point that needs some work) for each layer:
Work: Debt at this layer is about a lack of work - a gap between what you should have done and what you did. In tech companies we often call this “technical debt” because it’s work that the current teams need to pay down that’s been incurred along the way.
Communication: Debt here seems to come in two forms - there’s insufficient communication pathways/channels and insufficient communication outcomes/artifacts. The former is about siloing or directions of communication - the inability for people to communicate, whether that’s a result of tools, process, culture, or otherwise - and the latter is about the organization’s record keeping and knowledge. How communication is captured, stored, and retrieved.
Tools: Debt at this layer seemed… the least interesting to me as I initially thought about it. The optimist in me said “constraints breed creativity” but the pragmatist in me said “when you only have hammers, everything looks like a nail.” Infrastructural debt (tools, tool bets, working benches, etc) probably manifest in a lot of different ways from creating friction to truly limiting an organization from being able to communicate or do certain kinds of work. I don’t have a good name for what this is, but I recognize that it matters.
As I got to this point in my notes, I revisited Jones’ image to stop and think about the kinds of debt that build up over time and only become visible on those time scales. Instead of simply asking what does it mean to “lack process” I asked myself a different set of questions:
What kinds of “work debt” are visible within 90 days?
What kinds of “communication debt” are only visible after a period of months?
What kinds of “tool debt” are only visible after a year or so?
What kinds of “process debt” are only visible after a few years?
What kinds of “cultural debt” are only visible after 5+ years?
What kinds of “orientation debt” are only visible after a decade?
While I recognize that in doing this I am force-fitting Jones’ image and my own layers together, I also feel like these questions are MUCH more interesting to me than simply “what debt existed at each layer?” (Though maybe I should/need to answer that too.) The upside about this pairing is that Jones also provided me with a head start on some answers (or at least interesting places to look) by matching time periods and levels of work. For example:
A lack of vision is “orientation debt” that is visible after a decade.
I’m happy to agree that you can see signs of a lack of vision at points that are much closer than a decade out, but distinguishing between outcome A versus outcome B is much harder to the untrained eye.
From there we go. I’ll be sitting with these questions about debt and time as I continue this journey. As always, if you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them!
References:
5. Onward! by Clay Parker Jones
Dancing with Pace Layers
The first two pieces I dug into for Organizations as Ecosystems - thanks to the volume of recommendations from many of you - were Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now and Donella Meadows' Dancing With Systems. Brand's work, especially the concept of pace layers, seems to be highly cited in my orbits, so I almost felt compelled to read that first. Thankfully, many of you sent over recommendations not just for Brand's writing, but also your own interpretations [3][4].
The Clock of the Long Now / Pace Layers
For the uninitiated, Brand proposes "six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are:
Fashion/art
Commerce
Infrastructure
Governance
Culture
Nature" [1]
He goes on to note that the layers must respect the differences in pace and that change which works too suddenly can do critical damage to the system, and that “the total effect of the pace layers is that they provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing negative feedback throughout the system. It is precisely in the apparent contradictions of pace that civilization finds its surest health.” [1]
I love this framing and was immediately drawn to exploring where my own work has succeeded or failed through this lens. I thought about a recent client project where my research identified a need to make changes in both governance and infrastructure. What was less clear to me then, but pace layers helps explain, is that the biggest objections to these changes came from teams where there were differences in culture.
In this organization, Team A was onboard and excited about the changes, because the new governance and infrastructure aligned to their world view and culture. Team B was less excited because their foundational (literally, the layer below governance here) way of being/acting in the organization was less compatible with these changes. Successfully navigating this new world would require them to adapt - not just what tools they used and how they used them, but the way they viewed the role that the tools played overall, and their orientation to the system. For us to move things forward, we had to not only have the discussion about the changes (governance and infrastructure), but make visible the differences in culture - and reconcile those.
Organizational Pace Layers
If I was to map these pace layers out against an organization (and I'm sure that someone has and even more sure that one of you will point me towards it), V0.1 would probably look like:
(Individual) Work
Communication
Tools
Process
Culture
Orientation* Niche
* (I don't want to call this mission or strategy, since it’s about the general orientation of the company - what you’re trying to do, in what industry/space, etc - so if you have suggestions, I’m all ears)
I don't love this yet, but I'm putting it out here because part of this project is about being wrong in public to spark a discussion. So, here's my "wrong" version of "Organizational Pace Layers." (Note - Brand himself chimed in on Twitter to suggest “Niche” instead of Orientation. I’m keeping the original image above for archival purposes. This is the joy of writing in public.)
Pushing on this made me wonder what are examples of simultaneous changes to two or more layers? Corporate reorganizations (or "reorgs") are arguably some of the most destructive things that happen within a company and often simultaneously impact multiple layers - governance, infrastructure, and commerce at a minimum (or process, tools, and communication if you'll let me inject my own layers). What are other examples of shocks to the system - for good or for bad? Would love to hear people's thoughts.
There's a lot more I could say about Pace Layers, but that's enough for now.
Dancing with Systems
This piece from Donella Meadows was recommended by Tom Critchlow (thanks!) and immediately drew me in.
Meadows' primary argument is that people study systems thinking that doing so will allow them to "Make Systems Work." [2] Sadly, that's not what really happens, because - as we all know - "systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.” Instead of feeling disheartened by this, Meadows takes the optimistic view and says that we can (and I'd argue should) learn to dance with them.
She goes on to lay out 13 rules for "dancing with systems" - all of which I love, though 1, 12, and 13 are probably my favorites:
1. Get the beat.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
In rule 1, Meadows doubles down on her argument, reminding us that it's our job to observe a system's behavior before we interrupt. Not only that, but ignoring behavior will lead us to confirmation bias at best, and ignorance at worst.
Starting with the behavior of the system directs one’s thoughts to dynamic, not static analysis–not only to “what’swrong?” but also to “how did we get there?” and “what behavior modes are possible?” and “if we don’t change direction, where are we going to end up?”
I'm going to repost all of rule 12 here, because it's excellent:
Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.
In rule 13, Meadows shares what I'll consider to be her systems version of Jared Diamonds' "nasty, brutish, and short" - nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic:
Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.
What I love about the idea of the organizations being "nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic" as a starting point is that it reminds us that when things are "working well" it's an outlier, not the norm. In fact, chaos is all around us, though it may be at a different level, have just passed or be on the horizon, or be invisible from our perspective. But it's there.
Outro
This idea of systems being consistently (though perhaps invisibly) chaotic brings us back to Brand's Pace Layers. The "robust and adaptable" organization is one that is resilient enough through the turbulence between layers that the chaos is controlled - to a degree. Or perhaps only made visible when leadership wants it to be and in the ways they can manage.
This leads me to questions I'll leave you all with to think about for your organizations - To what extent do you think your organization’s leadership knows about, cares about, and/or has the ability to successfully dance with systems? Which layers (Brand’s or mine) do they pay the most attention to and/or operate at?
That’s all for now. Thanks for making it this far and an even bigger thanks for all the wonderful reading suggestions that are coming my way. I’m excited for the journey ahead and grateful for your companionship.
References:
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand [Book]
Dancing with Systems by Donella Meadows [Post]
Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast by Leon Lin [Post]
The Culture Layer by Jorge Arango [Post]
Welcome to Organizations as Ecosystems
OAE is my exploration into the way that human and non-human actors work and work together, where I’ll use a variety of lenses and metaphors taken from other disciplines.
Welcome! Thanks for being here.
I'm not sure how you arrived here, but I'm glad that you did. Here being "Organizations As Ecosystems" - a semi-public research and writing project. OAE is my exploration into the way that human and non-human actors work and work together, where I’ll use a variety of lenses and metaphors taken from other disciplines. While there's a lot of literature within organization and management sciences that seems valuable (and I may wade through), I'm much more interested in looking at "organizations" using different frames of reference. The plan is to spend this year meandering. I’ll be reading a lot (feel free to send me suggestions) and sharing notes as I go.
Some of the questions that excite me include:
How do we think about the different pace layers within an organization and the way that those layers interact?
How do organizations keep time? How do they keep score? How are those connected?
What is "decay" in an organization? When is decay waste versus compost?
What is the organizational equivalent of a virus? Of antibodies?
If we were to look at a company like a rainforest, how would we look at it differently?
These are not exhaustive nor prioritized. They’re simply a start.
What I’ve realized through the conversations I've had with people about the democratization of research (and the practice of research more broadly) is that organizations are all beautifully diverse, and the dialogue that excites me is not about tactics and answers. I’m interested in the laws of physics that govern an organization, the frameworks that the organization uses to govern itself, how an organization learns and knowns - and the incentives for all of these things.
Organizations are both harmonious and chaotic, depending on where and how you look at them. As I’ve spent more time thinking about how research as a practice can be more open across an organization, I’ve found myself looking for different ways to think about organizations themselves. I wonder what I can borrow from biology or how trying to thinking about the “soil” of a company changes my work.
I don’t know what will come from this, but I’m looking forward to it.