A very short episode, today, but the topic is not unimportant.
Summary:
- When it comes to culture, it’s always possible to make excuses.
- Like dieting, you can always find reasons to do or not to do something, research going both ways.
- Much of it is driven by beliefs, but even the data can go both ways (see Douglas McGregor Theory X and Theory Y1).
- So the most important factor in driving your culture is who you are and how much you grow personally.
- Examples of excuses: transparency. There are many companies operating with total salary transparency. And yet despite that you will find very well meaning, experienced, connected, respectable people to tell you that it can’t possibly work, you’ll have trouble with it, etc.
- The only way to get past all these people telling you what you’re doing is wrong, is to actually believe in the things you want to do, and give them a try anyway.
- If you don’t believe in open culture, transparency, etc, you will find an endless series of excuses for why it can’t be implemented.
- It takes a fairly large amount of self-belief to ignore these excuses and power on. For that to work, you have to actually believe in what you’re preaching.
The key insight of which is not a comparison of Theory X and Theory Y, but the striking realisation that whatever set of assumptions you start with, will drive the kind of data you find – i.e. you will find data to support your assumptions when it comes to how people work, so choosing your assumptions is more important than gathering data to confirm/deny those assumptions!↩