Reflections: The Culture Code

This week’s Cyb3rSyn Newsletter is a guest post by Mahmoud Rasmi.

Mahmoud shares his reflections from our May Tech Leaders Salon discussion on Daniel's Coyle's book, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐝𝐞.

I wanted to start this reflection by mentioning one of Plato’s dialogues, but then I thought it might take me a few paragraphs before I could make my point. I’ve also used that dialogue so much that it’s time to just let go, or not. So I thought maybe it would be better to share the underlying idea I have, letting you in on the process.

There are certain concepts that seem to be fuzzy. By that I mean they’re often difficult to either articulate or define clearly. Take for example the concept of justice. What you find in the dictionary is something like “the process or result of using laws to fairly judge cases, redress wrongs, and punish crimes.”

This definition does not really tell us much, though. If we look more closely, we could easily end up in a philosophical rabbit hole were we to put on our Socratic hats. What does ‘fairly judge’ mean? What is fairness? If this were a Wikipedia article, after a few link clicks we’d end up on the Philosophy entry. This is also known as the Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon.

Culture is one such fuzzy concept. One definition of culture is “the beliefs, customs, arts, etc. of a particular social group, place, or time.” Similar to justice, this definition requires the exploration of more concepts like beliefs, customs, and social groups.

Despite the fuzziness of these concepts, we do still have an intuitive sense of what they are. This is one of the goals of Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, where Socrates attempts to get a definition of piety from Euthyphro, who claimed he was an expert in the subject matter.

By the end of the dialogue it becomes clear that 1) Euthyphro doesn’t really know much about the concept. 2) The fuzziness of the concept means that it requires being examined from different angles. The more thought we put into it, and the more conversations we have about it, the better we grasp it, along with the complexity underlying it.

Well, there you go, I couldn’t help but include the dialogue after all, albeit more succinctly than I had originally intended.

This longwinded introduction leads me to Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code. Coyle thinks of culture more as “a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.”