If the people in an organisation are the hardware, organisational culture is the software. It determines if the organisation is more than the sum of its parts; whether it can quickly adapt to new obstacles and opportunities; and how much its members are willing to fight for its cause.

Organisational culture has two parts, routines and rituals. Routines are procedures that directly help the organisation achieve its goals—“the way we do things around here”. Examples of routines at the London Institute are how we score our discoveries, how we interview candidates, and how we set research grant budgets. Simple, modular routines that are stable over long periods are key to a superadditive and agile organisation. Modular routines tend to preserve interoperability, in the sense that changing one routine has minimal knock-on effects on the effectiveness of the others. Because of this, we can envisage and test out the adjacent possible, which is key to innovation in any system.

But developing the right routines is only half the battle. They have to be learned and practised by members of the organisation. With new employees coming and going, and new routines being added to the mix, this can be a challenge. At the London Institute, our members learn routines in two ways. The first is by showing up and seeing how other people operate. The second is by creating and sharing evolvable scripts. These are concisely described and easily accessible units of procedure. They are precise enough for a newcomer to do the job consistently, but open-ended enough to allow for individual judgement. Scripts can change, but only slowly relative to the number of times they get used. They need to remain steady over many variations in circumstance so that their effectiveness can be assessed before adjusting them accordingly.

The other part of organisational culture is rituals. These are procedures that indirectly help the organisation achieve its goals—by guiding behaviour and cultivating allegiance. Examples of rituals are our prominent use of blackboards, our Friday evening drinks, and showcasing our best research papers on the wall. Showcasing our discoveries doesn’t help us make them. But it does reinforce what constitutes success and recognises those who achieve it—key elements in steering and motivating people. As with our routines, we encapsulate our rituals using evolvable scripts, too.

Showing up for work is essential to rituals. In fact, one way to define rituals is the things that we couldn’t do if we didn’t show up. By this definition, they involve togetherness and shared space. Rituals resonate with our tribal instinct: our desire to belong, the satisfaction of shared adventure, and ultimately our search for meaning and purpose beyond ourselves.