- No what it’s written in procedures but what is not written in those pages
- Not how people behave in meetings, but in the cafeteria
- What people can get away with, and nothing would happen
- What happens in the long breaks, not in the mesmerizing looking at screens
- The noise in the corridor (yes, noise as in noise) or the deserted feeling
- The recognized elephants occupying all the room that nobody talks about
- What the employee manual does not tell you
- The percentage of people doing emails when pretending to listen to a conference call
- The things you never do here, what you are not supposed to do
- The phrases or expressions that surprisingly everybody uses in almost epidemic style
- The things we never talk about. The topics that are never on the table
- The number of people who work form home but don’t really work
- The terms, themes, phrases you don’t use because they trigger bad memories
- Not what is said in a meeting, but the unsaid
- Not what people say but what they do
Culture has been defined as ‘the way we do things around here’. It’s sometimes faster to focus on ‘the things we don’t do around here’.
(Ethnography! A management science that did not make it quite well to the Canonical Management. We shall repair this)