Jim Johnson argues organizations must intentionally design their culture rather than let it be shaped for them. If culture is left undesigned it results in chaos—people talking behind others’ backs, drama, pedestal behavior, rapid turnover, and lack of alignment—whereas a designed culture produces order and alignment that helps people stay and move together.
We have a choice on what our culture is going to look like. We can either design it or it can be designed for us. And what that creates is chaos. And how you'll know that if you have a culture like that is you're going to find people talking behind other people's backs. There'll be drama, there'll be people putting themselves on a pedestal because they think they're better than everybody else. You're going to have people coming in and not staying very long. They're washing out really quickly. But it creates this chaotic type thing that's going on where everybody's going in different directions and they're all over the place. A lot of times we're wearing all the hats and we're trying to run a business that's very chaotic because there is no alignment. So we want to make sure that we avoid this type of thing. And what happens and where this comes from is allowing everybody else to design our culture for us. We have this ability to design our culture, and that designed culture that we have hopefully leads to something that we love, and there's order and there's alignment.
