Editing Organizational Culture
The growth and formation of organizational culture are ultimately about the stories we tell ourselves and the people around us. We create organizational reality through truth-telling, positive projection, and tall-tales.
- Truth-telling: what is the reality we currently experience?
- Positive projection: what is our ideal?
- Tall-tales: what are the realities we assume can never change, but actually can?
Tell the truth. Speak to the ideal. Dispell the myths.
I’ve been in organizations with cultures that have healthy aspects and unhealthy aspects, as we all have. We’re currently trying to figure it the organizational culture of a new organization.
We’re now listening to the stories people tell themselves and their coworkers.
Because culture is formed by story-tellers.
I’ve bought into some incredibly unhealthy cultures in the past. Tall tales. A culture I was forever condemned to be a part of. It wasn’t hard to formulate. I simply repeated the stories I was told. I assumed that the reality designed by others was our reality. There’s no option. No alternative.
There was no other story to tell. I didn’t know how to move from storyteller to editor.
The difference between then and now is that my editing skills are a lot better than they were.
