The Culture Words Exercise in Organizational Awareness

There is a theory in the study of languages that the words you can use to describe something determine how you see the thing you describe, an idea that culture shapes your language, and your language shapes your culture.

In other words, if you don’t have a word for it, you don’t see it, and vice versa. Family, work and national cultures are full of culture specific words that help you understand how the culture works.

For example, when I learned Japanese at High School I learned about wabi, a flaw that makes something beautiful, or “the perfection of imperfection”. It sounds like nothing we have a word for in English but we completely understand the concept. We buy handmade suits or shoes because it’s the very imperfection of the handmade process that makes them perfect…perfectly machine stitched mass-produced clothes just aren’t as good. If you lived in a culture or worked in a place where wabi was a frequently used word you would know something about what the people value…you would be more "culturally aware" or “organizationally aware”.

An organization I once worked with frequently used the phrase “weed, seed and feed”. It represented an HR philosophy that first you had to weed out the bad performers, then seed the organization with good performers, and only if you were doing that could you afford to feed the ones who were left over. You can see that knowing about “weed, seed and feed” tells you a lot about the HR team.

Exercise:

Find three words, phrases or pieces of jargon that are specific to your organization. What do they mean, who uses them, and when are they most often used?

Review:

What does this tell you about what your organization thinks is important?

For Advanced Discussion:

Find someone who is not in your organization but who can relate to it in some way, (maybe a customer, a competitor or even a family member who shares your values but works somewhere else). Ask them what culture specific words they use in their organization. Are they describing something you understand but don’t have a word for, in which case, does this mean it’s something more important to their organization than yours? Are they describing something you have in your organization but use different words for, in which case how do you think the different words came about and what does that say about your organization?

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