The Cultivated Org

New organisations must act like the kind of company they want to be, rather than just talk about the kind of company they want to be.

I’m a contractor, bouncing between studio work and startup work.

The studio work pays the bills, the startup work doesn’t. Not yet.

The startup work is going much better than expected. A small amount of people are using Scrummy on a daily basis. That itself blows my mind. Having worked in various agencies doing strategy type things in recent years, it’s a novelty. 80% of what I’ve done in the last 8 years has been talking about making products and services, rather than actually making products and services, which is what I did for the previous 8 years.

You could say I’m easily pleased, but the fact that people are actually getting value out of something we’ve made is what it’s all about.

Myself and my 3 co-founders are gradually sneaking up on product/market fit. We’re learning about our traders and their customers and we’re being careful about how our product reacts to what we learn.

This is also what it’s all about.

So, we’re ready to shift gear, move fast and break things, as they say.

The last time I tried to make a business, I was 25 and failed spectacularly, painfully and depressingly. I now feel less stupid than I was then. Though now, at 37, I’m stupid enough to try again.

In the fever dream of a new venture, what I don’t want to forget to do is to cultivate constructive culture. I suspect for a lot of people, culture is about the way people dress, the habits people pick up when they work together, the way people talk about things, in-jokes, music tastes, facial hair etc. But a lot of those are just external cultural tells. The bits of culture that I’m more interested in cultivating are the kinds of things that cause other cultural tells. Making interactive products involves lots of thinking, talking, trying things out, making things, seeing if they work and generally learning. To do good, constructive learning work, we need to be vibing on dopamine, not cortisol and for that to happen, we need to be rested not stressed, trusted not taken to task, we need to be honest not deceptive, generous not scheming, seeking truth and rooting out assumptions, excited to learn and try new things, reductive, critical, open and willing to have faith in others, we need to have control of our means and ways of achieving what we want and we need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing. That last bit is the main bit, the reason to do any of it, which for Scrummy is to help good, independent traders to thrive.

I wondered for a long time if we might be able to explicitly design such a culture by creating meaningful and memorable phrases that people become inspired by. No doubt that would help a fair bit. Take ustwo™ with ‘JFDI’, W+K with ‘Walk in stupid’. But these kinds of phrases aren’t usually conceived in brainstorms when planning out a company, they are usually phrases that people use to articulate and explain behaviour that they want to encourage more of in others, while working together — generally these kinds of gambits and maxims are emergent, not prescriptive.

So, there are some fundamental things I’d like to create a culture around. But to sit as a group and try to create principles feels a bit prescriptive. Prescriptive principles scare the shit out of me. Look no further than the Quran, the Holy Bible, Das Kapital, the U.S. Constitution or even the Agile Manifesto for a set of inspiring, well-intentioned principles that are used to invoke varying degrees of violence every day.

Violence, in its many forms, isn’t just perpetrated by violent people, it’s usually carried out by people who believe, for whatever reason, they have a mandate to Do the Right Thing. Even if it can sometimes mean doing worse things.

In the long term, these dogmatic kinds of behavioural frameworks can end up replacing our own ability to rationalise about the world and our work and can abdicate us of our responsibility to reflect on and improve our working practices. If we can develop cultures that are iterative, constantly reflective, co-created in a dialectical way, we’ll have culture that is more resilient, longer lasting and will result in more appropriate behaviours, ideally, a happy, motivated group of people working towards a common and consistant purpose.

What this might mean for a new venture like Scrummy, is that in these early days, we need to be the kind of company we want to be, rather than just talk about the kind of company we want to be. We need to exhibit the kinds of behaviour that’s desirable and constructive, not destructive behaviours that only benefit us in the short term, such as signing up chains of shops because they’ll pay us more for less work, hiring people that are cheaper but aren’t engaged with Scrummy’s purpose, skimping on the experience of our products or putting profit before purpose.

If you look at the ingredients of yoghurt, one of the main ingredients is often yoghurt. Organisational culture should be like that — culture begets more culture. So, while a group working together is small and new, it’s likely that as that group grows in size, culture will simply evolve as the organisation evolves and grows.