Pro-fit for fight

Culture is a difficult concept. The word refers to everything from lactic bacteria, farming, and marital traditions to the way we celebrate success in our companies. But is culture just a poorly defined concept, or is there something to be learned about your own company from its broad usage? Some researchers have started to describe culture as an immune system, guarding and governing social interactions to ensure viability. Is that a promising route to take to make culture more operational in your organisation? Let us have a look.

Elusive yet important

Few concepts in management literature are as poorly defined as ‘organisational culture’. The reason is probably that the word ‘culture’ denotes many different and only vaguely related phenomena. Just as most of your family look a little alike but none of you completely the same, culture means slightly overlapping but different things in different contexts. And the fact that culture is at the same time guiding human interaction and resulting from human interaction – both cause and effect – does not add clarity. Moreover, it is both physical and immaterial; tangible and elusive. Culture is in everything, but never on its own.

If culture did not play such a significant role in the success of companies, the concept would have long since disappeared from managerial lingo. Yet, many have experienced how collaboration, innovation, productivity, and wellbeing sometimes materialise gracefully and effortlessly, like a swinging band. At other times, you throw all sorts of analysis, value processes, and change communication at your organisation to correct course, with very little result. This had led many to conclude that the difference between high-performing and dysfunctional organisations is an elusive phenomenon called culture, something powerful that guides our behaviour but evades even the most fiery CEO addresses, convincing payoffs, and omnipresent value posters.

So, culture is important. We have learned that Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Still budgets rarely follow the threat of becoming breakfast. Strategy almost always receives far more funding than its cultural prerequisite – the very thing that is supposed to make all the strategic efforts ‘take root’ and ‘grow’. Perhaps this is because culture is organic – coming from agriculture – whereas strategy comes from military terminology. This entails that strategy is active and acute (you are at war!), whereas culture is passive and slow. Strategy is something you do, while culture is something you get.

All this has not helped our understanding of culture. Recently, researchers have started to describe culture as an evolutionary mechanism that governs collaboration among organisms at all levels of complexity. Including your company. An immune system that organises a lot of processes to ensure viability of the organism. Let us take a look at this approach to see whether it brings clarity to the concept of culture. Perhaps we can gain a better understanding of what culture is beneath all its different manifestations – and why it matters so much.

Culture as a biological phenomenon

Culture is normally understood as the outcome of human interaction. When people interact, we create rituals, artefacts, and assumptions; sometimes passively, like local customs that evolve over time, sometimes more actively, as in bureaucracy, architecture, or the Ten Commandments. Sometimes these are random and purely conventional, like driving on the left or right side of the street. Other times they are more functional, such as taboos linked to behaviour that could be detrimental to survival, including incest or hygiene.

The similarity between nature and culture has been discussed for a long time. The term ‘meme’ was introduced to propose that cultural units like ideas, fashion etc., proliferate like genes. Popular memes spread ‘virally’, and many have compared organisations to organisms. However, evolutionary thinkers like Joseph Heinrich have convincingly argued that for Homo Sapiens, culture has played a bigger role in our evolution than genes. Nature and culture are not two separate worlds. Culture is way that some organisms organise to improve their evolutionary success. Humans’ ability to transfer knowledge, learn from each other, and accumulate knowledge over generations catapulted us out of the evolutionary race with other primates, to become something quite different.

Culture is not a ‘waste’ product, but a self-organising principle that helps people coordinate their efforts. We create it, and it helps us become more efficient and cohesive. As the Danish researcher Jesper Sørensen has pointed out, this is also the key to understanding why cultures persist. Culture boosts organisation, communication, and coordination in groups because we can better predict one another, trust one another, and carry out more tasks with less explicit coordination when we share the same culture. This explains why culture is always present wherever people interact.

But culture is not an exclusive human phenomenon according to Sørensen; it is a biological principle that governs living systems more broadly. Culture is a complex self-organising phenomenon that prevents biological systems from collapsing. Ants and even bacteria form cultures: emergent structures, behaviours, and exchanges of information and energy that make the system more efficient than its constituent organisms would be on their own.

The key to understanding the emergence of culture is energy. Everything in the universe is governed by energy, and one of the most fundamental rules is that energy changes form from more organised to less organised – from chemically well-organised oil to less organised heat when burned. This is called entropy. Biology is the science of self-organising systems that have found a way to temporarily beat entropy. Every living organism is a local reversal of entropy. Organisms extract energy from their surroundings and convert it into ordered forms. Without mechanisms to harness energy to sustain themselves, living systems collapse into mere molecules and atoms: put plainly, death. Being alive means temporarily overcoming entropy and not leaking total energy.

Culture is a response to entropy. Organising through cultural symbiosis means managing energy even better as a collective than any organism could do alone.

Organisational culture

Companies are culturally similar to organisms. The company that creates more value with less energy – i.e., has a healthier immune system – wins. This means extracting energy from the surroundings to maintain internal coherence, renewal, and growth. In a commercial reality, money is our primary currency for this energy. But other forms, like brand image, employee engagement, and licence to operate, are also indicators of organisational viability.

Another key to understanding culture as a governing principle is that cultures are symbiotic. Your organisational culture does not start at your headquarters’ entrance. You have partners, value chains, and other resources that are not on the payroll but are crucial for your energy management and systemic sustainability. Just as organisms in modern biology are seen as ‘holobionts’, consisting of a host plus multiple symbiotic species, ‘you’ are not an individual but a plural. You carry more foreign cells in your body than cells with your own DNA; tiny organisms that help you extract nutrients in your gut and fight off harmful bacteria on your skin. You would not survive long without the many intestinal bacteria that digest your food and create energy. That is why a varied diet has become standard advice to maintain a well-functioning immune system by nurturing a wide spectrum of biota in the gut to stay healthy. This is symbiotic division of labour. And it is a clear picture of the immunological view on what culture is and what it does for the system.

The organisational culture organises the energy management in the company according to this view, as a kind of operating system running behind all the processes going on to ensure that the organisation does not leak energy. For instance, the culture enables employees to create value without costly control mechanisms by lowering transaction costs in collaboration and coordination through high predictability and trust. The culture allows for symbiotic partnerships and the ‘digestion’ of ideas and tools to innovate and adapt. At the same time, the culture rejects other external influences or internal ‘mutations’ to remain coherent, focused, and productive.

An organisational culture consists of subcultures, just like an organism consists of organs. The subculture of the legal department is obviously different from the subculture of R&D. Legal deals with risk minimisation through prediction in a defensive mode, whereas R&D deals with what is less predictable in an explorative mode. The more uncertain your surroundings, the more need for ‘creative’ subcultures. The energy trade-off is between perfect fit with the current situation and adaptability to changing circumstances. Very predictable and uniform operations are efficient when things are stable, but less so when things change quickly and frequently – especially as the risk of failing to correct course when faced with diverging paths increases.

Subcultures become destructive if they disrupt the energy efficiency of the system, for example, by being unpredictable, by acting parasitically against other subcultures in a battle for shared resources, or by operating uncoordinated and in parallel.

The organisational immune system

Organisational culture works by guiding behaviour, directing attention to, and fostering belief in specific ideas that are functional to the system, enabling collaboration, coordination, and communication. When your culture is healthy, the overall behaviour realises your value potential – from keeping some actions off limits (taboo) to making other behaviours attractive through praise and formal rewards, and by attributing prestige to individuals with skills deemed valuable.

Some parts of culture are ostentatious – like the stated values, rituals for celebrating victories, and well-designed onboarding processes. Other elements are invisible and only implicit – like hidden assumptions that guide decision-making and promotion beyond the formal criteria.

The organisational culture shows its strength in turmoil, making the immune system perspective easier to understand. During COVID-19 and other shocks to the organisation, such as rapid digitalisation, we could more clearly tell the healthy and resilient cultures from the rest: they respond to threats by mobilising and reorganising as unified a system.

Dysfunctional cultures remain confused, demotivated, and apathetic; sticking rigidly to normal or running uncoordinated in all directions. They spend too long passively trying to predict rather than acting and experimenting with ways ahead. Culture guides and organises this work by shared views on, for example, autonomy, respect, experimentation as a practice, appreciation for risk-taking, tolerance for imperfection, and leaders focusing on the system, not on themselves.

Just like in human physiology, a healthy immune system is not a strong immune system, as suggested by the misunderstood ‘defence’ metaphor sometimes used. ‘More’ is not better in immunology. Healthy, balanced, resilient, and adaptive are more appropriate words. Even ‘optimal’ is a word seldom used in biology, because it connotes a discrete spot in the fitness landscape to strive for. But there are no such optimal states in nature. Everything about adaptivity and evolution comes with a ‘it depends’. It is all about fitness to circumstances. It is better to be ‘good enough’ and viable across of range of potential scenarios than perfect for one that may disappear tomorrow.

You do not want autoimmune responses – when the immune system attacks its own host. Too tough policing of values, like when legal creates ‘rheumatism’ in all flexible joints, leaves the organisation immobile. Too narrow an interpretation of what is ‘within the system’ and ‘foreign to the system’ lowers diversity and opportunity for adaptivity to new demands. Too many taboos create fear and low psychological safety. Or departments fighting each other over the correct interpretation of the culture or for resources, similar to inflammation.

Any culture must prepare for the unforeseen and be able to adapt to what may come. Evolution is one big algorithm for ‘what may come,’ and increasingly, companies are operating in very uncertain circumstances that highlight the importance of a healthy culture. Otherwise, you miss opportunities and may be hurt by changed circumstances. A healthy immune system ensures adaptivity by nurturing and balancing different traits and subcultures that may become the dominant culture in new circumstances.

A healthy organisational culture is not one of myopic insistence on a single trait or value. Honesty at all costs. Safety over innovation. The business of business is only business. Just hire talent and everything else will follow. Part of its strength is culture’s complexity: because it is distributed like a network, no single dysfunctional node or connection will bring it down. That systemic complexity is also the reason why organisational culture is hard to transform.

But are we better off viewing organisational culture as an immune system? Is this perspective not just as confusing as other frameworks and approaches that has left culture underprioritised?

Well, the immunology view is surely new to most despite some occasional organic metaphors in managerial lingo. And complex frameworks are not popular outside science, because they often crash with lay perceptions of simple and linear causalities in a world made up of discrete and independent agents and things. But because something is harder to understand does not mean it is wrong.

What the approach offers, however, is a well-established scientific understanding of the underpinning laws and principles that organisational culture share with other kinds of cultures. Even if modern biology is very complex and the immunology view on culture is still developing, the hope is to draw inspiration to understand how to nurture healthy cultures in our organisations. Let us end by looking at some preliminary and high-level ideas to create healthy organisational cultures.

Creating a healthy organisational immune system

The road to a healthy organisational cultural immune system is nurturing the balancing dynamics that allow your organisation to thrive over time. It means ensuring adaptivity and resilience on the systemic level by making functionally specialised units collaborate through global but preferably local rules.

In more managerial words this entails a culture of competing for the best ideas, but not for position. It means mostly smooth and trustful collaboration, but enough healthy friction from diverse perspectives to exploit opportunities and innovation. It is daring to be symbiotic with other ‘organisms’ – customers, partners, communities, authorities – when productive, but never overdependent on a single agent. It means a strong sense of belonging, but the willingness to let go of people, products, or partners that are no longer contributing. Taking risks but never going overboard. Make people feel important for contributing, but never indispensable. A healthy culture is always bigger than any one person – including your founder, CEO, or whoever may suffer from that illusion.

Culture as an immune system is an inherently systemic and collective perspective. It is not about ‘what is in it for me?’ but ‘how do we thrive?’ Nobody can make it on their own anyway. You are always dependent on a range of cultural systems: your national culture, government, local community, family, organisation, soccer club, etc. You are more dependent on the system than the system is on you, simply because the culture is ‘super-individual’ and built over a long time. Humbling, right?

In short, the immune perspective means balancing opposing benevolent forces that sustain the system. It is tempting to wish for short-term stability, clear plans, and a stable organisation, but staying alive in the long term is inherently a balancing act – always ‘both-and’. An existential insight that most humans mature to realise, but a principle that nature has honoured since the dawn of life.