When My Family Asks What I Do: Some Learn Culture in Childhood, Others at Work

When my family ask me what I do at work, and I tell them, their reaction is always: That's so stupid. Why do you even have to explain things like that? They simply cannot believe that I genuinely have to explain organizational structures and ways of working to adult people.

How is it possible that something they consider basic common sense is something that highly educated and experienced people with impressive careers, some of them holding PhDs, struggle to apply?

I have often wondered about this. It was only when I lived abroad for a few years that I truly began to understand it.

Clubs and associations in Franconia

I live in a region of southern Germany, in Bavaria, Franconia, where it is perfectly normal for people to belong to associations and clubs in their spare time and organize huge events. Unpaid.

Throughout the entire year, people spend their free time working together to put on massive events, and we are talking about events with hundreds of thousands of participants. They organize them professionally. Everyone does hands-on unpaid work.

All the teams are self-organized. There are no managers. There is only one level of hierarchy: the executive board. Everyone else operates on the same level.

There is no Jira ticket telling you what you are supposed to do. There are no roles, either.

You simply step in wherever the work needs to be done, and you do it.

The entire operation is 100% outcome-oriented. The event has to be a success.

After every event, the teams analyze what went wrong. A retrospective in the truest sense of the word. You discuss what needs to be done better next time. Conflicts get resolved.

You can even make a kind of "career" and move up within the organization. But there is no toxic culture.

The entire operation is self-financing. Membership fees are very low, and the costs are covered by selling event tickets, drinks, meals and cakes.

A learnable technology

I have analyzed this for a long time and identified characteristics that are present in my own culture, but also in other cultures around the world. These characteristics can be transferred to organizations and businesses.

If you grow up in an environment like this, you internalize what systematic ways of working look like and how to structure multiple teams.

If you grow up in an environment where these things do not exist, and you never encounter them, you have to learn all of this from scratch.

I have seen so many highly qualified people in leadership positions who have never learned these things.

How to structure complex organizations and the work is itself a kind of technology that can be learned.

And what I find truly remarkable is how few people have written about it.

AI can give you this information. But if the whole subject is unfamiliar to you, you do not even know which questions to ask in the first place.

How to build high-performing organizations with a positive culture is an expertise that can be made explicit, taught and transferred across cultural and organizational contexts.