Culturally lost

A cohesive whole

If you take an anthropological lens to seemingly unrelated incidents, protests and escalations in society (or in your organisation), you’ll see they are all part of a larger, interconnected whole. Cultures always have their own internal logic. When a big change is needed it affects not only one small area, but challenges the coherence and underlying logic of the cultural story. This makes the liminal stage of transformations particularly intense. All kinds of things that used to be normal no longer are, putting the familiar cultural narrative under pressure and sparking heated debates. This is what my book Tricky Times is about.

Culture: UNIQUE answers to universal questions

Cultures don’t just drop out of the sky. We make them together. People shape cultures and cultures shape people. Cultures are systems of meaning. They tell us about aesthetics: about what is beautiful and what is not. About morality: what is right and what is wrong. About what we should believe: what is true and what is false. Culture gives us unique answers to all sorts of universal questions so we won’t have to rethink everything all the time. Universal questions such as: what is good leadership, how do we conceive of time, how should we coexist fruitfully, deal with male/female differences, the lures of wealth, the natural environment and so on. Every group of people down the ages has formulated slightly different answers to these same human questions. Given that nothing has meaning in itself, people have to imbue life with meaning together, and every group does that a little differently. The most basic questions are how we can coexist peacefully and how we can cooperate fruitfully. A society’s unique answers shape its particular culture. If the environment changes or culture evolves in such a way that those answers no longer fit, people have to go in search of new answers. This is culture change.

Culture: the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ side

Culture creates order in the chaos around us, shaping our relationships, our systems and the physical and virtual worlds we live in. There is a persistent misconception that culture is only about ‘relationships, manners and symbols’. But, despite what many people believe, systems are not independent of culture. Culture reveals itself in the interplay between the ‘hard’, organisational side (also called the ‘blue’ side or system world) and the ‘soft’, relational side (lived experience). Culture is also sometimes described as a collective fantasy that we have all come to believe in. If we all believe in the same framework, it provides a scaffold for our thinking and actions.

Culture change happens when there is both a change in the collective narrative (values) and collective behaviour patterns (norms) and a reconfiguration of real physical and virtual online systems. It almost always involves a shift in power relations as well. Big changes affect how we think and act and how we organise our systems. Transformations of this kind are also described as ‘system changes’. But I call it a culture change, because it’s not only the system that changes, but also our lived experience and our collective story and behaviour.

If we can resist the temptations of the trickster, we can safely move through the turbulence of transitions.

A grand social project in which ‘the economy’ has become central

For the past four hundred years, Europe has been engaged in what you might call a grand social project of improving people’s lives through material progress. In time, economic growth was chosen to be the engine of the economy and so came to assume a central role in every person’s life. In terms of creating culture, economic growth became an important core value, laying the basis for a new narrative and giving rise to new collective patterns of behaviour, laws and systems. In this cultural story, anything that could propel economic growth was great and good. People with any kind of facility to create material growth gained leadership and the power to continue shaping the world to their ends. Our current culture has been shaped by always including the aspect of economic growth in our answers to all kinds of universal questions.

The economy is not a natural law, but a concept

In the realm of policy decision-making, economists have considerably more influence than sociologists, anthropologists, biologists and psychologists. If you consider the dominance of economics and our cultural core value of economic growth, this makes sense. We respect and esteem those who directly contribute to this economic holy grail. Our lives are saturated with economic ideas that are held up as sacred truths. And by working with equations and models, economics seems more like an exact science than the social science that it actually is. The real world is much more fickle than economic models, however, which are themselves deeply flawed and filled with archaic assumptions about human drives. Economics is part of our cultural story. It is not a law of nature, it didn’t fall from the sky; it is full of moral and political choices. It is a story, a concept, something we jointly give meaning to.

Culture and power

Power dynamics play an important role in forming culture, because culture, and so our lived experience, is shaped through interactions and decision-making. In every interaction, we are creating the stories we believe in. It matters what you say, where you say it, how you say it, but also who says it. Not everyone has the same power to take decisions or the status to even be part of the conversation. We listen to some people and not to others. There are always individuals who have power over others, because humans are hierarchical creatures and always establish a pecking order. The groups we form also always have boundaries. All this means we have to find ways of coping with the inevitable contradictions, duelling opinions and power dynamics within and between groups.

Power dynamics thus always play an important part in the creation of culture and in cultural change. With every decision we take, we change the world or consolidate the one we have.

Culturally lost in video (Dutch)

Culturally lost: ask the right questions to find the way

During the liminal stage of transformation we are lost in our own personal or cultural story, as it were, and it is up to us to find new paths and ways. It takes courage to acknowledge that we know a change is needed but don’t know yet what it should be, how we’ll achieve it or how long it will take. Big changes are not about making a plan to get from point A to point B. It is much more about leaving A behind and then trying to work out what B is and how to make it happen together with everyone else involved. We have to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, but it’s not clear how. How much will it cost? What are the benefits? Is it doable? Is it scalable? What are others doing…? These are the sorts of questions we tend to ask – and the reason we carry on doing what we’ve been doing. They suck the energy right out of our good intentions and condemn us to a status quo that we’re increasingly aware is untenable. We know it, it bothers us, but making a real change is easier said than done. It is awfully difficult to think outside these constructs. Difficult to imagine we could even be asking different questions. What would happen if we posed more questions like: will this make you and people around you happier, now and in the future? Is this good for the planet? Will this simplify things? Will this make things nicer?

Creation, courage and beware of tricksters

Navigating through periods of transition means accepting that there are things we don’t understand. It means consciously standing at the threshold between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange. Anthropologists call this liminality. You acknowledge that the truth is complex and open yourself up to new perspectives and possibilities, while also accepting that your answers and beliefs are not absolute truths. It takes creative and courageous personal leadership to devise new solutions. The creativity to allow new things to take shape and the courage to break with the old and integrate the new. Leadership is something that touches us all and for which we all have a responsibility. Taking leadership in liminality means pausing at the threshold and facilitating the space of chaos. Not by handing down solutions, but by guiding the process towards them. And by harnessing the creative energy of the trickster, without getting seduced by misleading or malicious trickster tactics.

If the heart of power wants it

The uncomfortable truth is that those who are benefiting from this system are also the ones with a lot to lose if things change. A peaceful transformation needs brave leaders who are not afraid to pursue a new story, even at the cost of their own and their peer group’s position. All of us will have to do some critical soul-searching about how we live. If we cannot do that, it’s only natural that the groups already experiencing the pain of the existing cultural system will only grow angrier. Transformations are always also about power. I often say: ‘If the heart of power really wants it, it will happen in 24 hours.’ The question is, where is your power centred? And what does your heart want?