Shifting From Culture Theater to Culture Embodiment
Culture: it is the glue that holds organizations together, making it possible for impact to exist. Without a strong culture, at best, the organization struggles to trudge forward, and becomes a tragic tale of never fully realizing its true potential. At worst, the organization completely falls apart and leaves a trail of pain and damage in its wake.
Many organizations understand the importance of investing in organizational culture. Go on any company website right now, and you’ll likely see a glossy company culture page, filled with beautifully articulated organizational values, a list of “generous benefits”, and photos of happy employees at company offsites.
And yet, these company pages can often be hiding a darker reality: employees that feel burnt out, disregarded, disrespected, and disillusioned. This is a symptom of a reality where organizational culture is seen as more of a branding initiative than a lived, embodied, ongoing practice.
In this article, we’ll explore the difference between what we call Culture Theater, or the performance of strong organizational culture to please external audiences and provide a surface level facade of care, and Culture Embodiment, where culture is treated as a living, evolving entity rooted in the actual of experiences of the people that make up the organization and stewarded over time to grow and sustain the maximum impact.
Understanding The Difference Between Culture Theater and Culture Embodiment
Culture Theater is rigid. Culture becomes like a ceramic cup, which demands that what goes inside the cup morphs to match its shape. It leaves little room for adaptation, despite the fact that tension may be mounting. Tension goes unaddressed, and the cup stays the same. Over time, cracks begin to form in the cup, and the liquid inside starts to seep out.
Culture Embodiment is emergent. It is more like a living root system, where seeds are planted and roots begin to work their way deeper and deeper into the ground, but are not rooted in concrete. The root system is interconnected, flexible, resilient, and responsive to changes in soil, season, and weather. It responds to needs as they emerge, and adapt to make room for and intermingle with new seeds as they are planted.
Culture Theater is created in silos and prescribed. It is created by a group of “elites”, often behind closed doors, with little to no engagement or feedback from the folks who will make up said culture. There is minimal visibility into the process or thinking behind these culture decisions. Rather, decisions are made, presented as finalized, and prescribed down to the rest of the organization.
Culture Embodiment is collectively uncovered and co-created. It resembles a group of people tilling the land to understand better what they are working with and what lies under that first layer of dirt, and then working together to decide what seeds to plant and how best to water them. It grows through conversation, experimentation, and shared tending, and everyone has a hand in shaping it.
Culture Theater smooths over conflict and critique. It attaches itself to the assumption that the image of harmony and positivity are what make for a good working environment. In the efforts to maintain that polished appearance, it works to quickly bury dissent or conflict beneath the surface, ensuring it does not threaten the status quo. Of course, this doesn’t make the conflict go away, but rather allows it to fester in a way that may not be seen, but will absolutely be felt.
Culture Embodiment encourages evaluation from within and sees conflict as opportunity for growth. It recognizes that tension is a natural part of any living system, and that conflict is what drives evolution. It does not see dissent as a distraction or deterrent, but rather as a precious clue to where patterns are becoming damaging and where extra care is needed. Tending to conflict with curiosity builds resilience and adaptability, ensuring that the culture can evolve and become even stronger over time, not just in optics, but in experience.
Culture Theater lives to serve optics, and is detached from meaningful structural change. It will always default towards the decisions that it believes will make the organization look progressive, harmonious, or innovative. The activities performed in the name of “culture building” are rarely, if ever, connected to actual change and improvement of the working environment.
Culture Embodiment is loyal to felt experience first, and informs and converses with change. It is devoted to witnessing the real, messy, human truths of how people actually relate and work with one another. It views culture and organizational processes and structures as intertwined, and sees “culture building” activities as a way to surface what is working and what is not, and to make the invisible visible so that it can be integrated.
The Risks of Culture Theater
Culture Theater can look really good on a piece of paper or a company website - but it comes with risks that must be considered.
Trust is continuously eroded.
When culture is performed rather than practiced and embodied, there is an ever-widening gap between what is said and what is done. No matter how well-crafted your employee values page is, the words will ring hollow, and may even cause anger and bitterness, when the daily realities of folks in your organization are in stark contrast to what is portrayed. This gap leads to a steady erosion of trust, making team members increasingly less likely to participate in these performative culture building activities, only making it harder to meaningfully enrich the culture and push the desired organizational impact forward.
Conflict festers and leads to cracks, instead of alchemizing into growth.
When conflict goes underground rather than being dealt with properly, it doesn’t just break down and disappear right away. Rather, it takes on the energy of yet another plastic bottle tossed into the landfill, with no prospects of decomposing, leading to a growing mountain of waste all while the company leadership applauds itself for being “biodegradable”. Over time, this conflict will re-emerge in more perilous forms, putting cracks in the perfect porcelain of the image of positivity and harmony. By this point, leadership may try to patch up the cracks, but it’s often too late. The water (aka, your team members) will spill out, flowing elsewhere.
This is not just troublesome from an employee retention perspective, but also a tragic loss of opportunity. That conflict was an arrow pointing to areas where something needs to change. Often times, those moments that force a reckoning and a shift are the moments that invite the most innovation and resilience into an organization. That conflict could have been composted — broken down to nourish new growth that can sustain the culture for years to come.
Employees feel like passive recipients, rather than active stewards, of culture
When company culture initiatives and imperatives are created in the silo of an executive leadership team and then passed onto employees, the employees feel little to no sense of efficacy in the shaping of their own organizational culture, yet feel forced to comply. These employees may even be trying to bring up constructive criticism or to illuminate areas where the daily reality of their work isn’t lining up to the way it is being defined, but they’re meeting dead ends and nothing changes. This leads them to feel undervalued, powerless, and increasingly disconnected from the mission. On the contrary, if team members felt like they had a genuine role in building and stewarding company culture, they’d have a greater sense that the work they are doing, and the way they are doing it matters.
Organizations prioritize the fear of reputational damage over the opportunity to model a more regenerative company culture.
When companies engage in performative culture building, oftentimes it is a reaction to a perceived threat of reputational damage, or out of a desire to create something they can point to and say “Look, we care!” But this focusing too heavily on what the external world has to say about an organization’s culture and reputation comes at the cost of the lived experiences of the actual people within that organization. Organizations should focus first on creating a truly co-created, emergent culture with team members first, and trust that it will ripple out into reputational goodwill.
In fact, organizations have an opportunity to trailblaze in this way by breaking the fourth wall and authentically sharing about their efforts to shift to a more embodied company culture. It may be messy, and there is the risk of some reputational damage along the way, but there is also the beautiful potential that openly sharing about this journey can invite support and insights from others, and inspire folks at other organizations to follow in your footsteps.
It’s time to stop the performance.
Culture should no longer be a branding exercise. Of course, being able to clearly articulate the organizational values and culture is important, but it cannot start or stop there. In order for organizations to truly have an impact, both internally and then externally, they need to start viewing culture as a living ecosystem that requires collective care and stewardship.
Here at Lucid Studio, we’re all about exploring the messy middle that lives in between imagination and reality. That includes the potholes along the way where organizations that once had a beautiful vision and were primed for big impact get thwarted off course. And the path to a truly regenerative organizational culture, and ultimately, a more regenerative world, is not paved with the optics of strong culture, but rather the continuous practice of it. That means a continuous willingness to be comfortable with discomfort, to sit in the unfolding and hold space for it, and to listen deeply to what is surfacing and what it needs to thrive.
Are you ready to invest in a culture that doesn’t just look good, but feels good? Let’s talk.
