Make your culture a superpower

Culture is the result of enduring human interactions. But culture also boosts our interactions by making members of the culture smarter, more innovative, safer, and stronger. How is that possible? Because culture harbours our shared and accumulated repository of knowledge that none of us possess individually. It is greater than any of us and all of us. According to evolutionary scientists, culture turns us into one superorganism. But how might we leverage that insight in our organisations?

Culture as superpower

Human beings are not physically strong. We are far slower than most predators and vulnerable in many respects. If you or I were stranded on a desert island, our chances of survival amid poisonous plants, venomous reptiles, and potential predators would be slim. So, how is it that humans have become the most successful animals inhabiting this planet?

Many attribute our success to intelligence. However, when you test humans against monkeys and other higher animals, we do not perform much better on basic tasks. We do not have better working memory or faster problem-solving skills. Our spatial understanding is not particularly impressive. That is – unless the task is social in nature, or the human subject is an adult who has already learned a lot from others. Culturally, in other words.

We do have one superpower compared to other animals: we are much better at learning from one another. When tested on our ability to learn from an instructor demonstrating a solution to a task, we outperform any primate from the age of two onwards – no matter how old our test opponent is. This is clear evidence of the true source of our success: our ability to learn, share, and accumulate knowledge – across individuals and across time.

The culture in your organisation is much the same: an accumulated, shared knowledge of how to best handle your products, processes, and stakeholders — the foundation of ‘the way we do things around here.’ But is that just a fact, or can we actually leverage that insight? Let us find out.

Culture is evolution

Culture is a constantly evolving phenomenon. It is a system’s response to internal and external pressure and opportunities over time. Put in biological terms: it is adaptivity to maintain fitness to our niche. In organisational terms, it is a system to produce solutions. Randomness and members of the culture produce ideas, symbols, rituals, stories, and procedures that meet the demands. The most helpful experiments (or at least not obviously harmful) tend to ‘survive’ by being replicated.

This way a culture develops over time by trial-and-error through shared attempts to deal with challenges and opportunities. Cultures that are still around are, by definition, viable. Some are prosperous, others stable, and still others dying.

Unique to human culture is that it does not just adapt to the here and now, but also evolves by accumulating knowledge, skills, technology, and understanding of the world around us. Even if we do not get smarter as individuals – our IQ has probably decreased slightly over the past millennia – we grow smarter thanks to our cultural inheritance.

The renowned biologist Richard Dawkins famously coined the term ‘memes’ to describe how ideas, narratives, and perceptions function as the cultural equivalent of genes, spreading through the same principles as biological evolution. Ideas and stories survive through a kind of “survival of the fittest,” where “fittest” means not only solving practical problems but also being easy to understand and relate to. Unfortunately, that is also where conspiracy theories, urban legends, and widespread misunderstandings thrive. Just because many people believe something does not make it true. But all memes serve a purpose – whether it is knowing how to handle everyday challenges, living a good life, or simply trying to make sense of a complex world.

Your organisation also carries a lot of memes – some functional, others dysfunctional when it comes to serving the higher purpose of fitness and profitability. And if your organisation is large enough, it unfortunately has the capacity to sustain many dysfunctional ideas and practices, because other parts of the system adapt or compensate to keep the whole thing running.

The real agent of change

Basically, culture is trial and error, even if we tend to feel that most things in our organisation were carefully planned and designed. Most breakthroughs in science, medicine, art, and cuisine happen by mistake or chance, even if the official story celebrates individual geniuses who pursued an idea and succeeded. It is not unique to culture that we mix up cause and effect in this way – treating outcomes as if they were the reason something happened. The longer something has been around, the more ‘obvious’ it tends to seem, no matter how random its origins actually were. In any culture, you will find examples of things you must do (imperatives) or must not do (taboos) – practices that most people cannot really explain. It is just the way it is.

We have an overly individualistic focus in our part of the world, attributing a lot of human progress to specific people. However, more and more evidence from social science and organisational studies suggests that success comes from collaboration and learning from others. Individuals do not achieve much by themselves. The very idea of an individual in this sense is a thought experiment, because nobody lives in isolation: no man is an island, as the saying goes.

Think about it: How much of what you ‘know’ is something you realised completely on your own? How much of everyday necessities do you really understand the inner workings of? Would you be able to construct a toilet, your office chair, or a pair of glasses on your own? Let alone complex modern utilities such as medication for your diabetes or a smartphone. We may have deep knowledge and practical skills in a few areas, but we would never be able to reconstruct the modern world around us if we had to start from scratch. You would not even be capable of thinking if you had not learned a language. This gap between what we think we know and what we can actually explain when asked is so fundamental that behavioural science has given it a name: the knowledge illusion.

Even the very existence of your ‘I’ is probably cultural. ‘You’ exists because others approach you as such. Despite René Descartes and his famous I think therefore I am that makes the existence of a thinking mind the only indisputably truth when testing what we know for sure, the feeling of being you turns out to depend on the perception of others according to modern social psychology.

We hail brilliant colleagues for their unique contributions. But these individuals never operate alone – their ideas are shaped by learning from and being inspired by others. Much of that input comes from outside your organisation – through school, conferences, online media, and more. But to come up with the idea, they also had to learn a great deal about your industry, your IP, operating model, market, and other specific factors. Most of that learning came from colleagues.

Our success as humans comes primarily from having had thousands of years to invent solutions and – most importantly – ways to build on the work of our predecessors through language, mathematics, and other forms of communication. We can transfer vast amounts of knowledge to fellow humans across both space and time. We even have specific brain functions (called mirror neurons) that allow us to directly incorporate what we see others do into our own skill set by activating the neural pathways involved in performing the very same actions. This fact has led researchers to claim that cultural evolution – not just biological evolution – is the root of our evolutionary success.

We do not just mimic the people we happen to meet; as infants, we learn to recognise who is worth learning from. While the hierarchy of other primates is based primarily on dominance, humans have an additional level called prestige, which signals success and accomplishment. Earning prestige means that you are very skilled at something and therefore worth learning from. Dominance refers to obvious strength and power, whereas prestige arises from accumulated proof of success over time. In today’s world, wealth and media exposure are typical signs of prestige. In our organisations, titles, corner offices, which meetings you are invited to, and many other factors signal prestige.

What does all this mean for your organisational culture and leadership?

Harness your cultural superpower

A healthy culture ensures that prestige is attributed to members who are truly valuable, thereby encouraging the copying of the right behaviour. An unhealthy culture lacks sufficient testing of the merits of contributions. It turns success criteria inward rather than focusing on customers, competitors, and stakeholders. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics are standard tools for creating transparency around value creation, but metrics can be easily manipulated and sometimes become purely symbolic.

We try to promote leaders who are ambassadors of the desired culture and performance, but even here we are too often led astray. Behavioural studies suggest that we too frequently promote people with dominant traits – the talkative and self-promoting – rather than those with merit and well-founded prestige as leaders.

If collaboration and social learning drove our evolutionary success, it is no wonder that so many companies are focused on fostering 'learning' and 'collaborative' cultures. Recently, this has been promoted under concepts such as psychological safety and inclusion, with the aim of reducing barriers to trust, experimentation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

These traits are crucial. For any organisation operating in changing environments or simply seeking to develop new and better ways of solving the same tasks, learning and collaboration are essential to experimenting with improved solutions. In fact, this applies to any organisation.

The ability to test, share, combine, and build on existing solutions represents a necessary set of ‘meta-cultural’ traits across all organisational cultures – traits that turn individuals into a kind of ‘super-organism’, regardless of the specific cultural values to which you subscribe.

You basically want to foster an evolutionary environment to systematically explore better ways to solve problems through good hearted competition and copying of the best solutions.

Lead your culture

If culture is this ‘Baron von Münchausen’ mechanism by which we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, then this is clearly where leadership can most effectively leverage its efforts. It is like compound interest – an investment that grows by its very nature through multiplication. So, when consultants and leaders urge companies to ‘invest in their culture’, it is less of a metaphor than one might think.

Still, organisational culture often loses out to more immediate and concrete tasks. There are many reasons for this. Culture is more abstract and long term than most daily concerns – unless it reaches a critical or destructive level, such as breaking the law or causing observable harm to employees or customers, where leaders are forced to intervene. Much like health – where nobody dies immediately from skipping exercise or smoking a single cigarette – culture is a delayed reward. You sow the seeds now and harvest the results later.

On a more general level, our ancestors were not selected for explicit cultural leadership in the same way as we implicitly benefited from the culture that emerged through our interactions. Our evolutionary success stems from our ability to create culture from the bottom up – not from having strong, top-down visions for leading culture. The best cultural leaders humbly recognise this behavioural limitation and understand that success requires dedication and a clear plan. They actively cultivate the organisation through the way they lead. This is an organic and patient metaphor, in contrast to military metaphors such as ‘strategy’ and ‘beating the competition’, or sports metaphors like ‘team’ and ‘winning’.

You have many tasks and roles as a leader. Leading culture is one of them. According to some organisational experts, including Edgar Schein, a renowned professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and a pioneer in organisational behaviour research, it is the most crucial role. Since your resources are finite, investing in culture seems a very smart way to spend your energy – especially if you believe that culture functions like compound interest. Leading culture means extending your leadership far beyond your direct presence or input: fostering norms and creating structures that guide behaviour even when you have left the office, and setting things in motion that resonate and disseminate virally throughout the organisation.

Sounds good? Well, let us get to work then.

Putting culture on the leadership agenda

First, you want to mobilise your leadership to be mindful of and prioritise culture. If the payoff is like compound interest rate – making you ‘richer’ year over year – why wait? The sooner you start, the greater the payoff.

But getting started is, unfortunately, not that simple. You may need to build a case for putting culture on the agenda. The goal is to create committed decisions and initiatives that prevent you from slipping back into everyday operational mode, neglecting long-term cultural benefits. Identify situations where your culture was critical to success, as well as others where dysfunctional aspects of your culture pose a risk or result in a concrete loss. Unfold how deep-rooted beliefs, ingrained behaviours, or core values led to these outcomes. This may help you establish a shared understanding of the importance of your culture beyond mere lip service.