“That’s just how things are around here” is something only someone who is either complacent or has given up would say!

The expression is old and pretty worn out, but it still persists.

That’s just how things are around here…

Sometimes, the person saying it thinks it’s a positive thing. “Like, no matter who joins the group, they start acting like the rest of us without us having to do anything. Great! We’re already perfect and don’t want any new ways of thinking coming in.”

Sometimes, the person saying it sighs and has given up. “It doesn’t matter what we do, the attitude is what it has always been, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Both are wrong.

Because it’s not simply “how things are around here.” If it were, we wouldn’t have female doctors, answering your mobile phone during working hours would be completely unacceptable, and “working from home” would still mean “I’ve already done so much work that I’m taking this day off.”

Culture is something else. Culture lives in the interplay between people, the organization, its history and its incentives. Change happens in all of these areas. (Yes, even history changes. Every day you come to work, it is one day longer…)

But it is in the relationships between people that culture becomes real.

That sentence actually has greater implications than you might think at first. It completely disproves the idea that “that’s just how things are around here.”

• Think you’re perfect today? Watch out! Every person who joins the group WILL change the whole.
• Have you given up on your slow-moving culture? There is hope. Change is absolutely possible, as long as you start. Bit by bit, relationship by relationship.