When I first launched this newsletter, my goal was to provide some practical tools for moving personal and organizational priorities forward.

Most of my guidance has focused on task and process: how do you move from idea to reality?

But task and process are only part of the story.

In this newsletter, I’ll focus on a piece that is often treated as a frivolous extra or dismissed as a waste of time.

What is this piece?

It’s culture.

Read on to learn why attending to culture must be integral to anything you take on.

The productivity obsession

We live in an era that prizes productivity—ideally that of the measurable sort.

Advice about efficiency abounds. You can earn certificates in project management, take workshops on optimizing workflows, and read blogs promising to hack your way to a more productive workday.

This trend has only intensified since the pandemic. With personal ties weakened through remote work and school, many of us (myself included) became laser-focused on what we had left: the task at hand.

We modified our processes to get the work done apart and often asynchronously, thanks to the magic of Zoom, Slack, Teams, and other tech tools.

Along the way, we lost sight of the people. Even with the return of onsite work and in-person school, the focus remains on task completion and process optimization.

Reframing what counts as “the work”

A few years after the pandemic, I participated in a workshop on facilitation that transformed how I approach nearly any new initiative, regardless of whether it requires any actual facilitation in the strict sense (e.g., running meetings, focus groups, or strategic planning sessions).

The model of integral facilitation, developed by Steve Davis and Darin Harris, views facilitation as an interplay between four different forces, represented as four quadrants in this diagram (Credit: Living Giving Enterprises):

  • Self awareness: How do I show up? How do I feel about the task at hand? What challenges, biases, and strengths do I bring to this undertaking?
  • Task management: What needs to be accomplished?
  • Group management (Process): How do we go about doing the work?
  • Group awareness (Culture): How do our relationships with each other, our shared values and vision, shape our ability to achieve our goals?

In this framework, culture is fundamental to the work, not incidental.

The real-world costs of ignoring culture

Most organizations—especially those strapped for resources—spend the bulk of their time and energy on the two right-hand quadrants, which focus on managing the task and managing the group (process).

“We have to get the real work done,” so the story goes.

Activities aimed at strengthening culture are seen at best as something extra, at worst dismissed as a waste of time.

Through both my professional and volunteer work, I’ve seen this attitude take a variety of forms:

  • University budget policies that prohibit spending any money on refreshments for post-meeting receptions
  • The manager who skips the organization’s community-building outing “to get work done”
  • Companies that cannibalize community spaces and break rooms to install more cubicles
  • The ubiquitous culture of the working desk lunch
  • The decline of school recess, PE, field trips, and free play in order to cover more academic content
  • A data-driven political canvassing operation that instructs volunteers to knock on as many doors as possible and avoid lengthy conversations—rather than spend time truly listening to the complex array of views in their community.

The invisible infrastructure

The next time you’re tempted to cut down on culture and connection in the name of productivity, remember that relationships are the invisible infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

For your next big project, see what happens if you first seek to understand not just what needs to be accomplished, but how the people involved relate to each other and the work itself.

As always, I’m here to help.