All I am is just a curious mind with loads of questions crawling here and there. I am here to converge those questions to see a ray of hope. No matter how utopian does it sound, hope is all we have and not the expectations.
We stumble upon certain thoughts and incidents that make us to take a hard look inside ourselves. From our own eyes, from our own heart and from our own mind. We strive to live independent but our actions are shackled in chains of our so-called Culture. Does the culture snatch our independence or it is there to liberate us from all the chains? Then, what is culture?
Values, beliefs, morals, principles acquired by us; started by a human, spreading its wing to communities, with a most “inflammable by-product” – Religion. I agree that culture is not limited to a religion. But God was forgotten since aspects like religion and culture became omnipresent. ‘Our culture in a whole is considered to be highly diversified’; thinking about it I am drawn to a few lines of one most acclaimed poem by Rabindranath Tagore :
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where the knowledge is free,
Where the world is not broken into fragments
By narrow domestic walls.”
Today, the mind is always under a threat of being singled out. It is always under the threat of whys and hows. The knowledge has become an important ingredient of Supremacy. And that has become enough to draw the danger lines. Then where are we heading to? This is of course a far fetched question but is it the right time to think about it?
Now treading to hard practicality, since we are living in the VUCA world, culture and cultural diversity has become buzzword in the corporate. Organization has their own culture in terms of their style of working, employee relations, perceptions and of course, expectations. A synergy among all the factors results in sustainability of the culture. Cultural diversity may be included in the golden words of organizations; it will lose its shine if it is not perceived by the individual in a way it should be perceived. Then how should it be perceived? Had it been a rocket science, the question would have been answerable. Every individual has different perceptions about culture in connection with relative terms like ethics and values. Yes, somewhere, someplace or most of the places, change is needed. We grew up with a motivational thought, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” To change a culture, be it on a societal level or organizational level, the first step is to understand the culture, to understand the roots and ideology of the culture. Moreover, it is equally important to have an absolute clarity on the change(s) to be made. Jumping on the Change Wagon without knowing the destination may take you to an entirely different place. Out of the blue, disrupting an existing culture may give rise to another unthinkable culture creating a vicious web of unjustified thoughts and processes.
We know that an organization is the miniature form of the society we live in. Then for everything discussed above, the matter of importance is the relations maintained at the individual level. Thus, an individual create relations, relations create culture, culture affects an individual and thus the cycle is created. Any changes or customization at any level should not prove as an erosion of integrity in an organization. The harmony in the cycle thus will create a new VUCA world where the change will take place from Volatility to Versatility, Uncertainty to Universality, Complexity to Compatibility and Ambiguity to Adaptability!
By,
Shireen Namjoshi