61 Exploring Culture
As you make your way through the unit keep in mind the importance and impact of the culture of the Army and the micro-culture within your immediate surroundings such as your barracks and locality. You also want to be acutely aware of the changes that are taking place outside your immediate area. We will help you to explore these changes in the form of micro and macro trends using a Trend insight activity we call TrendWatcher.
The way the Army overall and you in your context understand and respond to change and trends is crucial. We want to you explore the links between your culture, trends and change.
Cultural Brailling is a term coined by Global futurist Faith Popcorn. The term emerged from her organisation’s work on understanding customer trends and societal shifts. Popcorn has been using this technique since the 1980s to detect and track changes in the way consumers live. The term comes from the tactile language system that was developed for blind and visually impaired people who cannot access print materials. The language, Braille, is constructed with a code in the form of a series of dots that represent letters, punctuation and other written symbols. Faith Popcorn and her co-researcher Susan Choi explain that just as Braille has a set of dots or ‘bumps’ as symbols to communicate language, culture too has ‘bumps’ that we can also identify using our senses. They say that the ‘bumps’ of culture are everywhere and everything.
With Braille we use our fingers. It is touch reading and writing.
With culture we use all our senses and the dots are things that you see, things that you touch, things that you hear, the emotional ‘feel’ of things you notice around you.
An easy way to understand this is to imagine walking into a coffee shop and you notice the aroma of roasted beans, experience the lighting, hear the music and the sounds around you as you feel the ambience and take in the whole atmosphere. You start to get a sense of what the overall place is like even before you sample the coffee.
The same thinking can be applied to investigating culture. Cultural Brailling can help us make sense of culture within teams and groups and more broadly in the context of Army. The process itself is about being hypervigilant in terms of the environment you are in and the dynamics within it.
To understand anything about a culture you must ask questions and observe! Here are a few suggestions of what to ask.
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What appears to be important to this group?
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What are the ways members engage with each other in informal circumstances?
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Who are the key influencers?
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What are the rituals and ground rules?
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What are the shared stories?
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What are the myths and legends?
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What can you tell from the body language of people in the environment?
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What evidence is there of how social networks are configured in the group?
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What can you see / hear / read / touch that gives evidence of the ‘idioculture’ at play? (Idioculture just means the culture of a small group, such as a sports team, within a larger subculture such as the Army.)
When navigating change, or applying critical thinking to a situation, Cultural Brailling can help in the process of exploring what is important to the team or group you are working with. This practice can help uncover the nuances of team and group life.
Activity
Now it’s your turn! You are going to apply Cultural Brailling in a real-world context. To do this you will need to first download the Cultural Brailling Register which you can do below. Once you have this printed or saved, you are ready to proceed.
Ready?
Step 1
Identify a team or group in the Army context that you know well.
Using the Cultural Brailling Register you have downloaded, work through the questions. There is no need to rush: take your time.
Answer the questions in relation to your own team or group at work. Be sure to give the team or group a name in case you come back to reflect on this context again later.
Step 2
Now that you have completed your Cultural Brailling exercise read over your responses.
- What stands out to you?
- What was a surprise?
- What did you learn about this group?
- What might you take from this exercise as you think about culture?
- Finally, how might you use this technique in your daily work?
| The Cultural Brailling Register |
| What appears to be important to this group? |
| What are the ways members engage with each other in informal circumstances? |
| Who are the key influencers? |
| What are the rituals and ground rules? |
| What are the shared stories? |
| What are the myths and legends? |
| What can you tell from the body language of people in the environment? |
| What evidence is there of how social networks are configured in the group? |
| What can you see / hear / read / touch that gives evidence of the ‘idioculture’ at play?
(By the way, we define ‘idioculture’ as the culture of a small group, such as a sports team, within a larger subculture such as the Army.) |
Now that we have explored culture using the Cultural Brailling technique, we want you to better understand the implications of culture in the context of change.
In his book ‘Leading outside the Lines’ the researcher and ex-Navy Commander Jon Katzenbach has written extensively about the power of culture and the ‘informal’ organisation within military and corporate environments.1 His idea is that seeking to ‘change a culture’ as embedded as those within military environments is fraught with frustration as cultural pull is generally too strong.
Instead, focus on working with not against the cultural grain of an organisation or group.
In the short video clip that follows, Jon Katzenbach explains these key elements of flow and focus.
FLOW
Three key activities enable you to work with:
- Highlight a few key behaviours that you want people to demonstrate.
- Leverage sources of emotional energy.
- Find a handful of informal leaders who already influence the culture to work with.
Katzenbach believes you are much more likely to move people from rational compliance to emotional commitment when you consider the relationships and information flow at play within a culture.
As you watch the video listen for the example of the ‘pride builder’. You will reflect on this after you watch the video.
Reflection
Think back to the example of the ‘pride builder‘. What is your reaction to this example? How might this concept work in your context? Have you seen or experienced such a situation in the Army? Remember this concept as a way of linking the formal and informal approaches to understanding culture and change in your context.
References
- Katzenbach, J. R., & Khan, Z. (2010). Leading outside the lines: How to mobilize the informal organization, energize your team, and get better results. John Wiley & Sons.
