An organization’s vision, mission, and values are the roots of its culture, and creating them is a completely different topic. This post assumes you have these things already and did a good job creating them. A good way for you to know if you did a good job with them is to ask a bunch of random team members what they are and what they mean. In the vast majority of organizations, a mission statement is largely window dressing. A marketing exercise completed and forgotten except on some walls and marketing materials. If this is you, then your culture is already in trouble. And lastly, before we move on from this related topic, a vision creates an asymptote, something you can approach and get close to by never meets. A mission points the organization in a direction and the values tell you how to get there.

This is important for culture because if your vision, mission, and values are a great fit for your organization, then a core part of your culture will be to follow them.

Before we go any deeper, let’s define what sustainable culture is. It’s durable, long-lasting, adaptable, inclusive and it’s the guiding force for creating trust and transparency in our organizations. It’s something we live in our work lives, not a marketing exercise. A sustainable culture serves its organization, customers, and partners. It helps to define the organization and should be easily propagated. Zappos culture book is an excellent example of an artifact that supports a sustainable culture.

Branham and Hirshfield’s book, Re-Engage is basically a set of case studies for how to define your culture, it’s essential reading to help you define your culture. In fact, there are a few areas of research that will be key to creating a sustainable culture. Positive Psychology teaches us to have optimal lives, how to be resilient, and how to be grateful and feel like we are enough. It teaches us how to motivate ourselves and how not to have a negative impact on other people’s motivation. This field also tells us how to attain Flow States which increase our well-being and the quality of our work. Behavioral Economics is the science behind marketing, it’s the study of why people do what they do and shows that while we are predictable, we are also very irrational. Most of why we do what we do needs to be researched to be understood because it’s so counterintuitive. For instance, in studies done around the world, when you offer someone a reward to do a creative task and measure things like time to completion of a creative task, the person being rewarded is always slower to complete the task. Cognitive Neuroscience is the study of how our physical brains work in conjunction with our cognition. We learn how memory and recall work, that our brains are essentially serial processors. We can only hold a small number of things in our minds at a time, which means we are bad at multitasking. Systems Thinking is also a key topic. It shows us how to create feedback loops to see how things are obscured by time. If you have long-term goals that span 20, 30...100 years, this will be very important. Human beings are very complex, and our problems generally require complex solutions. Browse my reading list for related books. It would be a great idea to get a grounding in these areas before trying to create a sustainable company culture. Like with most things, the more work you do upfront, the more it will pay off. Go slow now to go fast later.

If you are a bit overwhelmed by fulfilling these prerequisites, that’s normal. This is a huge undertaking that requires massive work and dedication. If the idea of this excites you, as it does me, it’s a good indicator that this sort of work is a good fit for you. Getting a grounding in these areas can take a year (if you work on nothing else and learn very quickly), to 3 or 4 years. 2 years is a good timeline to shoot for if you can be dedicated. To speed things up, work with your team, commit to being a SME in an area, and share your knowledge. If you don’t do the prework, you’ll make a lot more mistakes, take wrong turns, and find dead ends. You’ll also much more likely to fail or get crappy results.

I’ve been studying these topics since 2010 when I launched my blog. I’m obsessed with creating generational companies. Companies that last at least 50-100+ years because big hairy problems take generations to solve.

What next? Use your learning in intrinsic motivation to help your team inspire itself to take on the task of defining your culture. The more the team is involved, the more they will buy into the results, the better the results will be. Keep in mind the things you’ve learned while you are defining your culture to keep the team engaged and put in feedback loops to help you know when things are going off track so they can be addressed.

The vast majority of company cultures are random and not well thought out, many that are thought out are not based on good science, either way, the results aren’t great and usually not very sustainable. That’s because doing this well is hard work and most companies want a quick fix. Even the ones with great intentions can easily go off track if they don’t understand the science.

If you thought you were going to get a quick answer, sorry about that. That would be like looking up how to do a laparoscopic appendectomy, having not been to med school and expecting you could hit the medical supply store, read up and do a quick operation over the weekend. Humans are very complex, the more of us that interact, the more complex things get.

Now get out there and change the world!