Themes in Culture

February 3, 2017

culturati-robertrichman

I was a facilitator and closer for the Culturati Summit in Austin, TX. It’s a gathering not only of culture authors, but people in companies, boots on the ground and implementing.  Here are the notes I thought would be helpful to share:

Themes in culture 2017

1. Getting Real
It used to be about hype and spin and staying positive. Now it’s all about the reality check. It’s about being authentic over looking good.

2. Embracing contradictions
We want to succeed, but we also want to make it safe to fail. We don’t want to get political at work, but we want people to be free to speak their minds. We want stability but there’s a need to disrupt ourselves before someone else does.

3. Values as clarity
There are so many distractions and interruptions that values are the only thing that really keeps us on track. It keeps us deliberate rather than being reactionary.

The Sweet spot

There was a talk on the new book An Everyone Culture that advocates for organizations that are constantly growing their people. I found this model interesting because it shows the balance of challenging people (edge) supporting people (home), and creating systems and processes (groove).

an-everyone-culture-ddo-diagram

How to increase performance, FAST.

Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, shared a fascinating way to improve performance across industries. The best way is not more and more practice. It’s this formula to generate the feedback loop of success:

  1. Do your thang.
  2. Have it video recorded
  3. Watch it and analyze
  4. Take the feedback and adjust

Rinse and repeat.

I’ve seen how incredibly this works for me as a speaker. I’m excited to see if others apply it to their industries.

Note, studies have shown that people are really on for peak performance for 4-5 hours a day. Makes me wonder – What if a company had people work from 9am to 3pm – with just highly focused work? I wonder if they’d be more productive and they’d have time to do the other things that make them happy (or do things like pick their kids up after school).