What interests me this week

Say you have a great idea for something your team to put into regular practice, like a habit. If your team goes on to do it on their own, it becomes a culture.

If that doesn't happen, someone may be compelled to make it a rule for it to get done. This is a process. On a nation-state level this is law.

You don't need to turn something into a process if it's embedded into the culture, same way there's no need for a law to tell people to celebrate Christmas.

A process/law can be undone or reversed (even if it's rare). Culture is decentralized and unstoppable.

Culture done wrongly inflicts permanent damage.

Managers turn ideas into processes when they fail to make it cultural.

Hard incentives/punishments are in place to drive processes. Cultures are motivated by soft incentives, often status-based in nature.

A lot of proposals in my team dissappeared into idea blackholes over the years because it's not done as part of the culture and not enforced as a process.

I suspect Asians respond more to processes. When there's a clear carrot and stick the game becomes way more unambigious.

But I'm interested in injecting new behaviors into the team culture. This is quite possibly above my pay grade and outside my core competency. But I suspect I have some mental models that might be helpful.

Cultures are created by collective beliefs. Beliefs are installed via stories.

Stories are told through rituals. Celebrations exist to highlight intended behaviors in order to spur more of it. You only need enough people to adopt a new behavior before it becomes mimetic and pressure the whole collective to get in line.

Mainstream religions have gotten this whole storytelling rituals down to perfection.

But applied on a development team, how would it look like?