Building a Team Culture with Heuristics

For thousands of years, people relied on oral tradition and stories as a mechanism for maintaining culture. People would pass down the stories from generation to generation. The good stories kept getting told, and eventually, these stories became the foundation for the formation of a unique identity and culture among the people who shared them.

In business, on the other hand, it’s important to focus on procedures and reducing tribal knowledge. Oral tradition is not a great way to scale your team reliably. It makes business sense to be able to grow the team rapidly or to swap people out of the system and have the system keep going. If your entire company relies on certain people being there or passing on knowledge, it creates a lot of risk for the business as things scale up and down.

Some might argue that it's possible to pass down culture in the same way we pass on knowledge. Write down the culture and have people read it. However, culture is embodied by the practitioners, it's observed, not read. If the words on the page don't match the actions of the individuals, they are meaningless.

It would appear then that these two things are at odds with one another. On one hand, we should reduce dependencies on oral tradition and individual stories to reduce the risk, but on the other hand, the shared identity and actions of the people create the culture that is vital for a company to thrive.

What then? Does creating systems go against thousands of years of human tradition when it comes to culture? Are the two mutually exclusive?

The answer, like most right answers, is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It's important to build systems that keep the engine going, but that should not be at the exclusion of stories and cultural narratives that hold the team together.

That begs another question. Is culture only organic, or is it something that can be built?

Once again, the answer is both. Culture is built both from the bottom up and from the top down. It's both set and discovered.

This all sets the stage for a topic I think is vital to leadership. I have seen the best leaders do this on instinct, but I have only seen a few consciously set this up. The topic is obviously about building a culture, but the "how" is via heuristics.

What are Heuristics?

Heuristics are short phrases that encapsulate a large idea and, more importantly, evoke many shared memories. My mind immediately went to Arrested Development and their phrase, "That's why you always leave a note". On a more serious note, some business ones are "Run to the fire" or "Inspect what you expect," or one of my favorites: "fix it twice".

The reason they are so powerful is that they encompass all the stories and lessons behind them. The more you use them, the more meaningful they become as more and more stories contribute to the phrase. Once the phrase is established, you simply use it instead of giving the long, rambling instructions that you used to have to do.

These phrases are passed on to new team members, and when they inquire about them, the best stories are retold. Even though they weren't present for those stories, they begin to share in the team's cultural heritage.

Heuristics From the Top Down

Culture can be driven via heuristics from the top down. It takes a lot of repetition, but it can be done. For example, I have seen a leader in support use the phrase "run to the fire" to talk about the need for people to drop what they are doing to make sure a customer is being taken care of.

This was a planned heuristic. He saw a need for people in his organization to rally around the customer and help them when things were going wrong. He implemented this and would bring it up often. Sometimes as a reminder, but often as praise.

I use "fix it twice" in software development. I learned this from my first mentor when I was a junior developer. This means to quickly resolve the customer's issue, sometimes through a workaround or a quick code change. Once the customer is stable, the job is only halfway done. You need to fix it again to prevent it from happening in the future. This often involves a larger code change and some form of regression testing.

So it is possible to assess the team, identify their needs, and develop a plan to implement a heuristic that fills a specific gap. Alternatively, you can adopt heuristics from previous teams you have managed. However, they may not initially have the same cultural impact. You will need to share stories from your previous team or explain the lessons behind the phrase to get it started.

I have observed that heuristics initiated in this way take a lot of time to gain momentum and need to be reinforced more frequently by the leader. Nevertheless, they are still a valuable tool and are probably more common than heuristics that originate from the bottom up.

Heuristics From the Bottom Up

Bottom up heuristics naturally emerge from interactions within the team. However, it still takes a conscious effort by the leader to recognize and adopt them as team heuristics.

I believe it is important to be observant of stories that exemplify the positive attitudes and behaviors within the team, especially the stories that are frequently retold.

Once the stories have been shared, they can be condensed into heuristics. Heuristics serve as shorthand, allowing you to convey the essence of the story without having to retell it.

For instance, there was a time when we were working on a graph API that would serve as the main integration point for our entire product. I was concerned that other teams might not fully grasp the significance of this project.

We had made progress and had critical data in the graph. When people asked, "How can we access this data?" I would respond, "It's in the graph." I repeated this phrase so often in one meeting that people started teasing me. They would say "It's in the graph" for everything, and the phrase stuck. It also solidified the graph as the integration point for the entire product. To this day, it is still jokingly repeated.

Another example occurred when we were rapidly building a product, simultaneously working on the backend and frontend. I wanted to emphasize the importance of communication to ensure alignment, so that when both sides were completed, the integration would be seamless.

I used the analogy of building a bridge from both ends and expecting it to meet in the middle. I used hand gestures to indicate alignment or misalignment between the two sides of the bridge. People caught on to this and soon started using it as well. We reached a point where we didn't even need to mention bridges; the hand motion alone conveyed the importance of communication for alignment.

Bottom up heuristics are more likely to stick because they come from the people who are meant to use them. However, you need to be vigilant in identifying them and amplifying the ones that you ultimately want to succeed.

Conclusion

Having a good, shared culture is vital for a team. Knowing this, be on the lookout for phrases that embody the culture and amplify them. If you need to address an issue, don't forget the importance of having a plan for how to communicate all the lessons in a simple way. This way, you won't have to spend 30 minutes at each staff meeting reinforcing the message. Instead, a simple hand motion could convey the thousands of words you would have said and be clear to your audience.