Designing Culture: Collaboration, Commitment and Consequence
By: Nathan Kinch
Tags: Startup Lessons, Culture, Behaviour Change, Leadership, Design

What is culture? Can it be designed or does it develop organically? Perhaps it’s both.

I’ve been thinking about organisational culture for a while. In fact, Bianca and I founded >X because we believed (and still do) the way products and services are designed today is broken. In so many cases organisations are optimising for different outcomes to their customers.

This is a massive challenge to tackle. It’s also a 10+ year thing. So the immediate set of questions we asked were;

Where do we place our focus? How do we start making progress? How do we verify whether or not we have a right to exist? And What is our unique point of view?

That’s where information asymmetry and the inherent power imbalance in the digital economy comes into play. We figured more ethical, transparent and person-centric data practices could help better align organisations to their customers. We also believed the organisations closest to their customers would deliver the most value, meaning and engagement. Those organisations would eventually become the most trusted and valued. They’d gain access to the most data, direct from the source; their customer. This access would be their competitive edge.

Because of our expertise and experience, we were uniquely positioned to help organisations do just that.

As we’ve pushed forward we’ve realised we’re onto something. We’ve gone from second guessing to grappling with growth challenges. To support this growth we need infrastructure. The most important piece of infrastructure, within any organisation, is its people.

Which brings us back to the question above; What is culture? And can it be designed?

Regardless of the answer, the environment we design at >X is important to us. In fact, we believe work can be valuable, meaningful and engaging. We’re intent on making >X one of the most valuable, meaningful and engaging places for people to spend part of their life.

By working together (effectively) with the right group of people, we have an opportunity to create a lasting positive impact.

This is why we’ve created the 3Cs. We like to think of them as principles. They help us work towards our purpose. They help us bring our values to life.

By living them on a daily basis we believe we can build an organisational culture that lasts.

1. Collaboration

The only way for us to achieve our ambitious vision — to positively contribute to society by changing the way products and services are designed — is to work closely and effectively with great people all round the world.

Collaboration is how we optimise idea flow to ensure diverse, inclusive and societally positive outcomes.

2. Commitment

We say what we do and we do what we say. We commit to our point of view and the decisions we’ve made. We follow through, review and learn from the outcomes.

3. Consequence

Everything we do has an impact. Every action we choose to take results in consequence. Consequences can be positive. They can also be negative.

Key to our very existence is optimising for positive consequence. Every time we have a decision to make, we rely either formally or heuristically on our ethics framework. We direct our choices and actions towards positive individual, organisational and societal outcomes. We’re also considerate of downside. We actively protect against it by ensuring we maximise good and minimise bad. This is not a zero sum game.

Above all, we own the consequence of our actions.

Although we’re early in our journey, we trust in the importance and usefulness of these principles and their intent. We’re amidst figuring out exactly what that means in practice. We’re actively experimenting as we grow our team and our company.

The purpose of this short, introductory post is to communicate our thinking. We’ll continue to share our learnings on a regular basis. We’re open to feedback. We’re motivated to learn more about what you value, what you believe is and isn’t working, and what you’d like to see in a workplace. We’re even open to having existential discussions about the purpose of organisations, the purpose of work, and how we can work together to make life fundamentally better. Seriously, coffee?

Most importantly, we’d like to dive deeper with you. We’d like to connect with people who believe some of the things we believe. We’d like to be challenged and become better from our diverse interactions.

To learn more about us, watch this short video.

To chat to us directly, send us a message.