culture Archives - Create an Adaptable Life

How Can We Avoid Confusing the Hard Parts (People) with the Easy Parts (Tools)?

question of the week / Johanna / June 19, 2024

We all live through various hype cycles, personally and professionally. (Hype cycles look a lot like the Satir Change model, the image in this post.) Right now, in 2024, “generative” AI is having its moment. But AI is not generating anything, certainly not new insights. Instead, the engines have ingested (without paying creators) lots of […]

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When and How Should We Build Community to Connect With Each Other?

newsletter / Johanna / April 10, 2024

When my younger daughter was in high school, her principal continually invited us to events. He thought we would “build community” with “meaningful connections” that way. But I already went to high school. And the last thing I wanted—maybe not the very last, but close to it—was to return to high school. My daughter could

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How Can We Make it Easy to do the Right Thing?

question of the week, Uncategorized / Johanna / September 28, 2023

Long ago, in a company that no longer exists, my managers asked me to “stretch the truth” to a customer. I refused. One of them threatened me with the loss of my job. They didn’t fire me that day, and I left soon thereafter. I didn’t have trouble doing the right thing because I’d already

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How Do You Know It’s Time for You to Confront a Bully?

question of the week / Johanna / October 27, 2022

The rapper formerly known as Kanye West conducted an anti-Semitic tirade a couple of weeks ago. (You can find it if you want to see it.) In his tirade, he bullied Jews. He thought he was untouchable. His licensing deals, his promoters, all of his business people—he thought his business collaborators would leave him alone

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What Opportunities Do You Have Now That You Did Not Back Then?

question of the week / Johanna / June 8, 2022

In the 1960s, the US passed a bunch of policies that created a time of much more opportunity for many kinds of people—including me. Because of the Civil Rights Act, and later, Title IX, I had more opportunities and freedom to take my place in the world. I could apply for a job that traditionally

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What Kind of a Culture Do You Want to Create and Reinforce?

question of the week / Johanna / March 31, 2022

Some people used to think that culture at work was the snacks or the foosball tables. That’s only a tiny part of a culture. We’ve seen over the pandemic that real culture is what we can discuss, how we treat each other, and what we reward. (That’s my interpretation of Edgar Schein’s work.) That means

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How Do We Create Culture?

question of the week / Johanna / September 2, 2020

We often talk about a few “bad apples” in teams, groups, or even society as a whole. We use the term “bad apples” because that metaphor helps us see that one bad apple can poison an entire container. Should we tolerate one bad apple? Are there other options to help us create a culture that

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What Do We Choose to Reward and Punish?

question of the week / Johanna / November 20, 2019

I’ve been following the issues and the punishments in the college admissions scandal. If you’re not based in the US, you might have missed this. The idea is that wealthy parents bribed and cheated their children’s way into elite schools. I’m not going to discuss the scandal itself. This post is about understanding the culture

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