Tending a Living Culture

What Alasdair MacIntyre's moral philosophy has to say about organisational culture

Think about the abstract words that often get used in organisations about culture. We want to be High Performance, Collaborative, Innovative. Words that should really mean something. But it’s almost as if the meaning has worn away, left flat and dull from overuse. As if they have been photocopied too many times. Why is that?

I’ve been in the practice of culture work for twenty years. I’m called in as an expert practitioner to help review and work with culture, and I’ve developed a strong felt sense for good and bad work – because I’ve done both and seen both done by others. But conversations about culture have often felt as bland as talking about being innovative. I lacked concepts with enough gravity or precision to speak meaningfully about what I could sense. Then I came across the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and his landmark 1981 book After Virtue.

MacIntyre is talking about morality, but culture work is asking a moral question: what does good look like round here?

His central claim is this: you can only make moral choices from within what he calls a tradition. You can’t look at the world from nowhere and reason your way to what is good. That’s what the Enlightenment tried to do – ground morality in universal principles, stripped of history, community and place. MacIntyre argues it failed. And the failure left us with what he calls simulacra of morality. Photocopies. Fragments of a system we’ve forgotten. Words, without an anchor, have lost their meaning.

I think the same is true of organisational culture. We are too often universalising and abstracting – stand back, assess, apply principles, design a solution. It works in engineering and medicine, so we assume it works for culture too. MacIntyre shows why it can’t, and points toward something better. This isn’t a dunk on culture work – it’s an invitation to more deeply understand what a culture needs to stay alive. I’m hoping to give you a feel for his thought – but the application is rooted in my own experience. And when I say culture I don’t mean a narrow HR specialism, I mean the environment that cultivates the work we do.

1. Culture is inherited not chosen

MacIntyre writes: “I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation” – and we might add, my organisation – “a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations.”

When you join an organisation, you enter its story… the history, the unresolved arguments, even the moral debts. And that inheritance shapes the quest ahead of you.

I’ve not done culture work with Lloyd’s of London, but when I stood on the underwriting floor the history was palpable. There’s a bell salvaged from a shipwreck in 1858 that is still rung when a ship sinks, and each loss is still recorded in flowing ink in the Loss Books that lie open for all to see. These are physical carriers of a tradition. They show what this place is for: you take on risk, and when loss comes the cost is counted and rings out for all to hear.

A ringing history

Lloyd’s also grew to dominance insuring shipping during the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people were routinely included in cargo insurance policies. For MacIntyre you don’t get to pick which parts of an inheritance you accept – you don’t get to keep the bell and forget the people who were traded. They come from the same tradition. The inheritance is whole. In recent years the organisation has been facing this part of its history publicly – researching it, apologising for it, making it part of the story it tells about itself.

Not every company has such a heavy history to contend with, but every culture inherits a past, and characteristics rooted in what it does. A newsroom that deals with breaking news will have a culture of responding fast – and might struggle with longer-term questions. A vehicle company packed with engineers will have a culture of precision – and might tend to overcomplicate things. Each positive characteristic comes with a shadow side, and you can’t just choose a new culture. Our story isn’t finished. But the next chapter can’t be cut off from the chapters before – and acknowledging what you have inherited lets you see where it’s possible to go from here. Culture is an ongoing quest.

2. Culture must be practice based not institutional

MacIntyre makes an elegant distinction between a practice and an institution. A practice is an activity with its own internal standards of excellence – things you can only get by doing the work well. Underwriting risk. Making chocolate. Making movies. Practices have internal goods: forms of mastery and satisfaction that only exist inside the activity itself. An institution on the other hand is the social and financial structure that houses a practice. Institutions are necessary – someone has to pay the bills. But institutions are oriented toward external goods: money, status, market share, shareholder value.

In a healthy culture the institution serves the practice and the practice keeps the institution alive. But there is a tension. MacIntyre writes: “The ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution.” Institutions are always tempted to consume practices.

I have worked closely over the last four years with the leaders of Ghirardelli, an iconic San Francisco chocolate company. They take great pride in their practice. They make and care about making great chocolate – they want to make more of it and sell it to you, because they know it can make life a bite better. The institution serves the practice. The place has a soul, and even under intense cost pressure (you may have seen cocoa prices over the last few years) they remain committed to what they have been doing for 175 years.

The old factory up in lights

Compare that to a consumer goods company where the practice has been hollowed out – where marketing isn’t about showcasing great products but about manipulating preference, and the only thing anyone feels pride in is what fits in a spreadsheet. Those places feel a little soulless, even when they’re successful and full of good people, because there’s no practice at the centre generating something to orient around. The culture is a solar system without a sun.

Ghirardelli’s new vision is “every chocolate moment deserves Ghirardelli.” Notice how that is a growth vision rooted in the practice. Compare it to “achieve x% market share in premium confectionery” – oriented entirely toward external goods with no roots. Something like that could be about chocolate or soap or anything.

To build a strong living culture you must orient around the practice, not the institution. And done right a good practice is good for the institution.

3. Culture must be argued not agreed

MacIntyre writes: “A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.”

A living culture argues – what matters here? what does our practice demand? what does good look like? – but it doesn’t settle the argument. It can’t, because what good looks like changes with every new situation. The argument is the life of the tradition, and good culture work creates a framework for it.

When I worked with Lindt before the pandemic, we found four values that together made their argument coherent. Two were “passion for the best” and “making it happen” – so the argument for any project included: do we go even further for excellence here? or do we pride ourselves in delivering now? The argument between them is the culture alive. People often assume values need to tell us what to do. No – values need to tell us what to argue about. If your culture doesn’t start debates – if everyone agrees or stops caring – the tradition is dying. And when a tradition faces fundamental challenges it enters what MacIntyre calls an epistemological crisis – where our ways of working things out stop working. The tradition has to reformulate itself or collapse.

A grand inheritance in a new world

I have been lucky to spend the last six years working in various parts of Warner Bros Discovery on questions of culture and leadership. The entertainment industry is in something like an epistemological crisis right now. Streaming changed distribution, audience behaviour fragmented, and the old model isn’t coming back. There is no hiding from institutional requirements to cut costs. But this is exactly the moment when the cultural argument matters most. How can we make great stories in this changed context? What new forms are possible? How might we radically rethink the way we work? What remains the same even when much is unrecognisable? Those are meaningful questions to argue about.

The danger for all organisations going through change is when arguments about practice collapse under the institutional weight. If leaders retreat into discussing only external goods – synergies, debt ratios, cost efficiencies – you will feel the meaningfulness drain away. People stop living inside a story about what they do and start dying inside a spreadsheet. And I want to be very clear: keeping a culture alive doesn’t mean avoiding difficult choices, discomfort, pain, even grief. Culture isn’t “nice”. There can and sometimes must be cuts, restructures, strategic shifts. But a living culture needs the argument about who we are to stay rooted in the practice.

4. Culture must be lived not declared

MacIntyre writes: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

Some people conclude that any expression of culture is the antithesis of culture – that naming it produces empty moralising and only enables bad actors to play political games with words. I understand the worry. But as a poet and a strategist, I often see this as a skill issue. People have been expressing complex things for the whole of human history. Expressing the culture in words sets the frame for the argument. It’s how a tradition becomes conscious of itself. And there isn’t one form that the expression should always take – you might need some of narrative, vision, purpose, strategic direction, principles, values, or something else that fits you better.

But whatever is expressed can’t be a floating abstraction – it needs roots all the way down to the practice. On one culture review project we collected stories from every employee about something a colleague did that made them proud to work there, and launched the findings with huge boards of real stories in the canteen. People could sense the texture of the culture through the stories.

You give any cultural principles roots by asking: when we get this right, what does it look like? When we get this wrong, what are the ways it goes wrong? Naming what we don’t want is the sharpest part and is often missed – Dave Snowden points to fairy tales as a model for how people learn from failure: the big bad wolf teaches you not to go into the woods at night in a way a moral lecture never will. And you test your principles’ roots with real scenarios: can you use them to fire someone? To make a big strategic decision? To persuade someone excellent to join? If not, you have empty declarations. You want something that can be wielded in an argument.

And then the rooted words of course have to be lived – embedded into systems, processes and rituals. This is fairly common knowledge in cultural work and a recent HBR article put it well.

On the bus with ?What If! in the 2000s

Ultimately you don’t learn a culture, you are apprenticed into it. When I joined the innovation consultancy ?What If! in 2006 they had just won best place to work in Europe two years in a row. New joiners went on a bus tour with the founders to get a handle on the inheritance. And working alongside senior consultants I heard the values – bravery, action, passion, love, freshness – used in the work: in feedback, in pitching, in planning. And they lived in all sorts of ways in structures, rituals and policies. We value freshness, so you get an optional sabbatical after four years.

The expression and the living feed each other. And when culture is coherent, the practice forms the people.

Leading culture

None of this is just for a culture project. It’s for anyone who runs anything. Because just like a vine is for the wine, so a culture is for what is cultivated – performance, productivity, efficiency and resilience all grow from a living tradition. Paying attention to culture is some of the most commercially serious work a leader can do.

And whatever they think about culture, a leader is read as culture. People are apprenticed into culture, and apprentices look to leaders. MacIntyre would hold leaders to account for the aliveness of the place they lead. It is tempting to settle for being an institutional manager – without moral responsibility for anything other than external goods like shareholder value. This would make you a forgettable and interchangeable leader. Real leadership power comes from being a practice leader – who, even with institutional responsibilities, stays deeply connected to the particular work of this particular place. It means fighting for things that matter even when they can’t easily be counted, and leaving the place stronger than you found it – refusing to hollow it out. A practice leader, through dedication to the craft of this place, earns the right to lead the argument about who we are and what we are doing. A practice leader makes sure there are spaces where people in the practice are reasoning together about what the work demands – and listens for what their power could shift.

Travelling back in time, my innovation consulting practice was design thinking – a particular approach to creating new products, brands, strategies. But as I moved into working with organisations I had to learn that culture is not an object to design. You don’t design a vine. If you want more fruit, you tend it. You see what is already growing and encourage a bit more of this, a bit less of that. Offering guide rails, encouragement, nourishment, and a bit of pruning.

And what the tending looks like depends on where you are in the story. Sometimes a culture needs its argument rearticulated (eg as purpose or values). Sometimes tending is clear strategic direction. It’s worth mentioning here that strategy cannot be separated from culture; it is one of the key things that shapes culture. Sometimes tending is facing up to a world that has changed, or making a drastic intervention. In all of these the question is the same: given what we have inherited and where we are, where do we go from here?

MacIntyre writes: “We live out our lives, both individually and in our relationships with each other, in the light of certain conceptions of a possible shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us, some seem already foreclosed and others perhaps inevitable.”

We inherit a set of possible futures – the tradition tells you what directions are available and desirable. The tending must be held by leaders who care about the practice. But these leaders must also recruit people inside the practice who can see and sense things the exec can’t. I have never not been impressed by the impact of a cross-functional group of cultural custodians when they are encouraged to speak plainly to people in power about what they can see.

Sometimes it’s helpful to bring in consultants – like me. But MacIntyre would warn us that consulting is a practice housed in an institution too – and this creates a real risk. The institutional incentives for consultants are to claim space and importance (for a case study), to lean on generalised best practices (for efficiency), to create dependence (for sales). Staying with MacIntyre, our culture consulting practice insists on the opposite: culture must be led by leaders, deeply rooted in the particularities of this tradition, and tended by those inside it. If we want to be good consultants we need to contend with this tension honestly, not pretend it doesn’t exist.

In practice

The next time you’re in a room that cares about culture – slow down.

What practice does this institution exist to serve?

What has it inherited – not only the highlights?

What arguments are being avoided or need to be had?

Do the words spoken have real roots in the work people actually do?

What ideas or principles live in the rituals and policies and practices?

If your culture work is chosen, institutional, agreed and declared, then you have designed it – and MacIntyre spent an entire book explaining why that won’t keep a place alive.

A living culture is inherited, practice based, argued and lived.

And you don’t design something that is alive. You tend it.