Traditions and Culture
We find the glue operating in such seemingly minor events as the celebration of birthdays or preparing a special dinner every Sunday in a family system. Within organizations and tribal systems, the glue can be found in the celebrations of success (joining the Fortune 500 or returning from a successful hunt). It also can be found in the initiation rites that bring young people into maturity within a specific community, or in the retirement parties that enable someone to leave an organization with recognition and honor.
This glue might be embedded in the traditions that are embraced and engaged by members of a community. As represented in Fiddler on the Roof (a musical about life in an early 20th Century Russian shtetl), the community is sustained and protected through the patterned engagement of rituals such as the Friday evening Shabbat meals. Glue is also found in the central role played by the rabbi and in the marriage ritual.
Even more broadly, the culture of a specific organization or society can play a major role in holding it together—especially during times of collective angst (such as exists in many VUCA-saturated societies today). It is through the culture of an organization that anxiety can be either accentuated or contained. It is also through the culture of an organization, that the bonding of its members can be engaged in the constructive reframing and redirecting of anxiety (Bergquist, 2020)
There is another benefit. A strong culture enables members of an organization to better understand, overcome or adapt to the real (or imagined) threats inherent in the anxiety. In other words, uncertainty and attendant anxiety are reduced and patterns are maintained when members of an organization collectively (culturally) create a narrative about the source of the uncertainty and anxiety—as well as the current impact of this uncertainty and anxiety on the organization. Cultural narratives can also point out ways in which VUCA-Plus conditions (especially uncertainty) and attendant anxiety can be reduced. These ways are represented in the sustained patterns of operation in the organization or society. Pattern maintenance often is based in the creation of, providing support for, and occasionally modifying these organizational narratives.
Proponents of appreciative inquiry (AI) (Cooperider and Whitney, 2005) push the role of organizational narrative one step further. They suggest that the shift in an organization’s narrative might be the most powerful way in which to bring about change and improvement in the functioning of an organization—for the narrative provides both continuity and guidance regarding the pathway to change. Edgar Schein (1999) suggests that an organizational culture should be built on the narratives of past successes. The AI practitioners would agree. They would also suggest that this narrative should focus on an organization’s real (not imagined) strengths and successes.
The fundamental interplay between the containment of anxiety and the formation of organizational cultures was carefully and persuasively documented several decades ago by Isabel Menzies Lyth (1988). She describes ways in which nurses in an English hospital cope with the anxiety that is inevitably associated with issues of health, life and death. Menzies Lyth notes how the hospital in which nurses work help to ameliorate or at least protect the nurses from anxiety. She suggests that a health care organization is primarily in the business of reducing this anxiety. On a daily basis, all other functions of the organization are secondary to this anxiety-reduction function.
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