The Emergent Nature of Culture

From Hannah, I learned there’s no such thing as “no culture”.

There’s only unconscious** culture.**

As I reflect, every team I’ve worked in—no matter how structured or chaotic—had one.

The question was never “Do we have a culture?” but rather…

Is it intentional or accidental?

At startups, culture is raw and hyper-reactive—beautiful in its energy, volatile in its inconsistency. You have less people, it’s easier to keep less people aligned.

Mid-sized tech sits in between: culture in flux, often pulled between the inertia of scale and the intimacy of small teams. You have more people now, it’s harder to keep 100s of people aligned.

At big tech companies, the culture is usually well-documented but perhaps ossified. It’s professionalized—but not always lived. You have even more people, and it’s hard to keep thousands of humans aligned.

Hannah’s framing takes out any sort of moralistic judgments…

Culture isn’t good or bad—it’s emergent.

It’s a thing that exists, that we feed—intentionally, or unintentionally.

It’s the collective expression of how people actually behave. Which means, if you want to change culture, you have to change behavior at scale.

And that starts with the people who set the tone: leaders.

Leadership as Cultural Infrastructure

This sounds obvious—but it’s not.

Most leaders think of culture as a thing they can design.

Hannah reminded everybody in the room that it’s a force they must embody.

In big tech, I’ve seen beautifully written culture documents that exist in total disconnect from lived reality.

Values are celebrated on stage and forgotten in sprint planning.

You might hear someone say “we value collaboration”—then watch how promotions reward individual heroics.

That misalignment—between stated values and rewarded behaviors—is where culture fractures.

As Hannah put it:

The same principle applies inwardly:

If what I say I value doesn’t match how I act under stress, I’m out of self-alignment.

It’s how a group’s stated principles meet their practiced patterns.

The more consistent the two are, the stronger and clearer everything is.

The more they diverge, the more confusion and distrust creep in.

That’s what I’ve found in my experience.

The Four Levers of Culture

Hannah shared a framework on how she thinks about culture.

She called it the four points of leverage—a system for steering culture intentionally.

“You have a culture at your company whether you like it or not… because it is manifest in the ways that humans show up and behave and interact with each other.”**“It is best and easiest if [culture] also comes from the top… because you need people to be role modeling it.”

“You want what you’re saying and what you’re doing to be consistent.”## 1. Naming It.

It’s diagnostic, and directional.

Actually naming your culture and values empowers the conditions to continuously reveal the delta between the named idealistic culture and the performed behaviors in reality.

2. Hiring For It.

And people either flow with it or against it. Pick the ones that want to flow in the direction of that culture.

Find the people whose natural behaviors reinforce the flywheel you’re trying to spin.

3. Ritualizing It.

It’s intentional, she said.

Because rituals are where beliefs become embodied.

Every company has rituals—standups, demos, reviews.

The question is whether those rituals reinforce the culture you claim to have.

If you say “transparency” but all critical decisions happen behind closed doors, your rituals are lying for you.

It’s kind of like a cultural nervous system.

Being intentional about the rituals your teams exercise daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly, shapes the team they become.

*“Actually articulating: what do we want our values to be? What do we want our culture to be?”*Naming brings awareness to the invisible. *“You should be deliberate about hiring people who are excited about that culture, who are going to flow in the direction of that culture.”*It’s where “how we do things” becomes “why we do them.”

*“What are the things that we all come together and do as a company? Do those things reinforce our culture or run against it?”*But Hannah also warned that naming exposes hypocrisy—when the words don’t match the behavior.

I love her use of the word flow here.

Culture is not static—it’s a current.