Growth Culture Principles for an Organization

A company that is growing is a company that is learning. The intrinsic value of an organization is based on the accumulated knowledge carried by its people and its culture. Behaviors that increase this knowledge increase organizational muscle which in turn increases customer value delivery faster than competitors.

Most people want to be in a learning culture, but can benefit from some help with the how. Culture is a set of beliefs and behaviors that can be expressed in terms of Principles. While you can’t impose a culture, you can start acting a set of behaviors and if these prove successful, the beliefs and culture will follow.

This post is inspired by Ray Dalio’s book of the same name. In this he argues that people and organizations should reflect on their core principles and write them down. This is the basis for continuous organizational improvement. The principles outlined below are a set that I have seen to work well. There is a lot of overlap with the ones in Ray’s book but in keeping with his encouragement, these have been prepared independently.

The principles are in no particular order. Ideally we would have a system for up and down-voting them so people can contribute their own ideas and the ones we collectively believe in most will rise to the top. This will be our culture, established emergently, and it will be dynamic.

Principles

We should have strong opinions, weakly held:

• Strong opinions means that we think carefully about the issues in front of us and determine our position — for instance are we for or against pursuing a given course of action.
• If you are unsure, either remove yourself from the debate because the impact on your team is limited or be clear on what you need to develop an opinion — perhaps more time or information on the subject.
• Weakly held means that you are always open to critique of your position. You embrace feedback that makes you change your ideas for the better.

Proposals and decisions should be written down:

• The act of writing down your argument drives clearer thinking
• Some issues take time and thought to understand — people should be given the time to provide a reflected critique
• A record of decisions and the reasons for them is critical for later review when the results turned out not to meet expectations
• An easily findable repository of documents on past learnings is a great asset for training and to inform future experiments

Everyone who has meaningful insight on an issue should be heard:

• When debating an issue there should be no hierarchy of who gets to speak. Anyone who has a perspective that is grounded in experience should be heard.

All issues should be open to public debate and decisions and their criteria should be public:

• The need to present your ideas and subject them to public scrutiny makes them better

Complex questions should be debated by the smallest qualified group:

• While public debate is good, a meeting of 20 people is a poor forum for vigorous debate. Typically around 4 or 5 people coming from different perspectives is the right balance where you can expect to get a good range of feedback while not falling back on ‘just doing a readout’.
• To reconcile this with the question of public scrutiny, the meeting notes and conclusions should be publicly available for all to comment on.

Ask the customer first:

• They are the ones that write the cheques
• The form this takes will not normally be literal, but any change agenda should include how you will learn from customers at its center.
• A team that is creating new experiences for customers should have an explicit practice in place to ensure there is customer validation happening every week.

Experiment, a lot:

• A lot about customer and market behavior is unknowable in advance. This can also be true of a technology approach. The best way to understand if something will work is to try it.
• Develop techniques for building quick prototypes of ideas and test them out before investing expensive development dollars.
• Question any investment that goes on more than three months without any form of validation.

Pair Program

• In developing anything, two heads are generally better than one. It forces more discipline in your thinking and improves the product through the debate of multiple perspectives.

Critique up the hierarchy should be encouraged:

• Senior members of the company make decisions that have more impact than junior members. Their decisions should therefore be subject to greater scrutiny, and a culture should be put in place that encourages thoughtful up-critique.

We should make predictions and test them:

• This is the scientific method, the only proven way of increasing knowledge
• Most proposals are predictions on the expected results of an action (‘if we launch this product we will make $Xm in additional sales’)
• We should always document our predictions and then reflect back on what actually happened objectively. This is the basis of the OKR process and where learning comes from.

The reasons for doing something are not always monetary but should still be documented:

• When ‘It just makes sense’ to do something but we can’t quantify the results, that’s ok, but we still need to supply a written supporting narrative. For actions that are not quantifiable, we should supply a description of how the customer will be experiencing the future benefit. When we get to that future, we can then assess how accurate the narrative turned out to be.

In a disagreement, make sure you can express the point of view of the other:

• Disagreements are healthy and productive — they usually improve the idea. To manage through a disagreement, start by making sure you understand the point of view of the other person by reading back to them how you understand their perspective.
• Once you have established that you both understand each other well and you are still not converging, try to identify the root cause. You might be optimizing for different goals, or just place different emphasis on different pieces of information. By identifying this root cause, you will likely be able to find a route to resolving it.

Ground plans in reality:

• Don’t build plans that defy either internal or external reality
• Avoid judging other teams unless you fully engage in problem solving with them. ‘We would have succeeded if only team X wasn’t so ineffective’. If team X is truly an obstacle to your plan this means either your plan assumed things about the team that just weren’t true, or perhaps they do need to improve, but if so, how?
• Similarly in the market, don’t assume you will gain market share just because the accessible market is big. Address the realities of customer intent, brand strength and competition directly and make sure you have a credible hypothesis on why your product will grow.
• Ambitious well thought through plans are motivational. Plans based on poorly researched aspiration breed cynicism.

Avoid time wasted on generalities or idle complaints:

• Comments such as ‘we should be more efficient, innovative, inspirational, …’ that are not backed up with a specific idea of how this will be achieved are counter productive in that they just serve to highlight a perceived weakness without bringing up any insight on the causes or raising a credible plan to change it.
• In a similar way bringing up small issues in a meeting that takes away time from the large ones is an opportunity cost.

Prioritize based on opportunity cost as well as value:

• This idea may be good, but that one is better. Time spent working on small problems is time not spent working on big ones.

Don’t overlook performance problems:

• Your team will not be successful and grow if you ignore performance issues.
• If an initiative did not succeed, take the time to review what happened and take learnings from it.
• If an individual made a mistake or a bad judgment call, do not avoid calling it out to avoid hurting their feelings. They and you will not grow if these events are glossed over.
• Do not inappropriately punish someone for a mistake. Mistakes are an opportunity for learning, and punishment will lead to risk avoidance or hiding information.
• Team members need to have good character and good capabilities. If either one of these are lacking, you need to confront it. Ignoring it will cost you and them more in the long term.

Social and Interpersonal principles

While these principles are not about learning per-se, they speak to how you can better manage yourself and your relationships at work and thereby be more successful in creating value.

Understand that different people think differently:

• We all come with different intellectual and emotional makeups, and different cultural and life backgrounds. This means the approach people take to both tasks and people will vary considerably. Don’t expect to change people, seek to understand them instead and find the right collaboration model for the two of you.
• This starts with understanding yourself. Look for books that can help you in self understanding, and reflect on your strengths and weaknesses. Think about what you enjoy and what you find difficult and where your skills lie. Test yourself objectively with technique such as Myers Briggs.
• Then do this with others and think about the intersection of your personalities — do you complement each other, or conflict? This should inform how you understand each other and work together. A good reference for exploring this is the Social Styles model.

Be self aware about the difference between your animal brain and your logical brain:

• Your rational brain understands that seeking critical feedback is essential to growth. Your animal brain reacts negatively to attacks on your ego, and is very sensitive to how others perceive you. When you feel your pulse rising be aware your animal brain is kicking in. Give it time because the good news is that those animal emotions tend to be short lived — let them pass (might take a day or two) then revisit the subject.

Be mindful of your physical and emotional state:

• If you are tired, angry, hungry or depressed going into a meeting you will not be your best self and won’t get the best results. How you show up is important — people intuit very quickly your psychological state so you need to enter any interaction with positive energy. This means paying attention to your physical and psychological health, taking breaks when you need to and taking 5 minutes before a meeting to just calm your mind and relax. If you can’t show up in the right mind state, you might want to postpone. A good methodology is Intentional Energetic Presence.

Don’t say something about someone behind their back that you would not say to them directly:

• Any critique of an individual should be well grounded enough and should go to that individual first before you bring it up with others. The only exception to this is if you are trying to gather evidence first as to whether the behavior is singular or general.

Work should be fun:

• We spend half our lives at work. We should make it something we enjoy.
• If people enjoy their work they will be more creative and productive.
• Ask your team-mates if they’re enjoying themselves. Try to fix it if they’re not.

Be positive and optimistic:

• Visualizing positive outcomes is a great way to get there
• Think one step bigger than you initially imagined. Maybe it’s possible.

Be nice:

• Because it makes a better world