shaping your culture with “always” and “never” rules

Fun exercise alert. Coming up with core values or operating principles or other cultural guides can spin you off into some pretty esoteric philosophical places. You can find yourself writing a lot of bs that will rightly be seen as such by your people - especially the second and subsequent waves of people who weren’t cooking up This Organization with you in a founder’s test kitchen. 

One way to avoid lyrical but useless culture stuff: write a list of observable “always” and “never” rules. These are the things we always (or never) do and say around here. The observability criterion is an important part of this particular exercise. You’re looking here for propulsive actions not pure souls. (Mindsets and philosophy matter, of course, they’re just not what this exercise targets).

Give yourself permission to get really specific with some of these rules. “We never use sans serif typefaces” or “we never waste time thinking about typefaces” or “we always pick the typeface that best matches the needs of the audience” are all legitimate, depending on what kind of place you’re trying to be. 

You may find that some of your rules have a similar spirit and point at a common desideratum. If there’s a word or phrase that captures the shared spirit and goal of that set of rules, that word or phrase is probably one of your starting core values.

-eric