Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in - Issac Asimov

Someone I respect immensely once told me that it takes five years for a company’s culture to solidify. They said that a company could change their ways of working, their frameworks of thinking, the rules of their business, what they value, etc., in the first five years. But after being around for five years, a company gets set in its ways of working. Bringing around significant cultural changes is quite difficult after that. We (Treebo) were three years old at that time. I breathed a sigh of relief, telling myself that we still have two more years to go, and then forgot about it.

Sometime back, I came across this story.

There once was a great saint who would lead his followers in meditation. Just as the followers were dropping into their zen moment, they would be disrupted by a cat that would walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone. The saint came up with a simple solution: He began to tie the cat to a pole during meditation sessions.

This solution quickly developed into a ritual: Tie the cat to the pole first, meditate second.

Years later, when the cat eventually died (of natural causes), a religious crisis ensued. What were the followers supposed to do? How could they possibly meditate without tying the cat to the pole?

From Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert

This story somehow reminded me of that conversation. It’s natural that as time passes, companies - and individuals too - develop standard ways of operating - SOPs. These are the written rules of doing things a certain way: open a JIRA ticket with DevOps if you want to start a new server, ping the #official-tech slack channel if you wish to report an urgent bug, update trackers, follow dashboards, and so on.

But along with the written rules, which can be resistant to change, we end up building invisible rules - habits and behaviors that are unnecessarily rigidified into rules - which are even more stubborn and hard to change. They are the silent killers that constraint our thinking without our being aware of it. For example, in a company where daily stand-ups happen at 11 am, most people start coming to the office only by 10.45. The unwritten rule becomes - can’t have an important work meeting with all stakeholders before 11.

Similarly, a company that might avoid releasing things over the weekend in general (due to reduced support or just wanting to play it safe) might lead to an invisible rule that nothing can be shipped on the weekend.

It’s things like these that compound over time and become part of a companies culture too. And people are usually smart to identify these invisible rules and make sure never to violate them. A study found that if a basic assumption comes to be strongly held in a group, members shall find behavior based on any other premise inconceivable. I call it the curse of culture.

As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful asset right until it isn’t. I can see how, over the years, any company could become used to doing things a certain way, which might lead to the rule that my friend cautioned me about.

As Asimov said, we need to scrub our windows every once in a while. And question assumptions more often, and replace old ways with something better. The best way of exposing invisible rules is by violating them every once in a while and see what happens. 

Remember. We are perfectly capable of meditating without the cat; we just don’t realize it.

Best,
Kaddy

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