How you build a Culture in the end?

It was interesting to listen to SuperCell’s Ilkka Paananen on the Start-up Ministry podcast. He spoke at length about SuperCell’s culture and what he considers most important about it. While listening, I wondered whether Ilkka was really talking about culture, or rather about his company’s values and principles.

Ilkka shared a story of how their biggest games began to grow too large for the small teams that had once been the norm and cultural foundation at SuperCell. Small, autonomous teams managed their own operations and made their own decisions. However, as the games’ popularity increased, the teams could no longer keep up, and updates became too slow to maintain audience satisfaction. At this point, it became necessary to move towards larger teams, which was contrary to their existing cultural thinking.

Hearing this story, I started to wonder whether this was a change in culture or a change in the guiding principles of the company. The company’s principles included team autonomy and decision-making over management and hierarchy. This, in turn, led to cultural currents that are also visible to outsiders. At some stage, the small size of teams started to be seen as an absolute principle, even though it hadn’t originally been so.

However, the world changes, and for a company to keep up, some components must also change.

At such a point, it’s necessary to return to the drawing board and find a new direction. In this story, that meant increasing the size of teams while maintaining autonomy.

I believe that values and principles support a company’s culture. They create the path of possibilities along which culture flows through people’s actions. External context and human activity, in turn, create pressures to change those principles. Recognizing and responding to these pressures enables the company’s long-term survival.

How can we achieve managed improvement through this approach?

If we can identify the values and principles that guide our actions, we can create plans based on them. These plans are implemented, and the outcomes are examined. In that examination, we should always remember to also look at the principles behind the plans. For example, we may have small autonomous teams that bring speed. But do they always produce the right results in every situation? Is our theory valid in all environments?

We may come to the conclusion that the theory itself needs to change. This is the understanding that forms the foundation of all improvement.

How could you apply this to your own work?