Flocking

Do you know what a murmuration is? It’s the name given to a large flock of starling, which have a tendency to gather in whirling, synchronous clouds. They are an incredible natural phenomenon, able to move as a unit without scattering in different directions or crashing into one another.

A simplified explanation is that each bird is paying vigilant attention to the movement and behaviour of its neighbouring birds and adjusting its flight accordingly in real time. If you get enough of a change in direction in one part of the group, it can spread across the entire flock. This is a reasonably good analogy for the emergent nature of culture.

Culture is emergent yet surprisingly stable—while leaders can have a big influence on a culture, they don’t transmit it one-way like a radio signal, which they can control. Rather, culture is transmitted between each person in the culture: people learn how to be a member of the culture by interacting with and observing others in the workplace (not just what they say, but what they do).

Then, when they act in accordance with the observed culture, they become transmitters themselves, and further reinforce the legitimacy of the prevailing culture. Culture isn’t made once, it is constantly being made and remade like a giant feedback loop reinforcing the existing culture. And that makes it resistant to change.