How do you explain a culture people have never lived?

One challenging thing in business is explaining something your stakeholders have never actually experienced — like self-organization or culture in action.

How do you explain something that doesn't exist in someone's world? 🤔

How do you explain trees to someone from the Greenland tundra, where trees don’t grow for thousands of miles around?

Missionaries explaining the Bible to Innuits must have struggled with this — the text mentions dozens of different trees: cedars, oaks, figs, palms…

At the beginning of my leadership career, I read about team dynamics — the classic stages: storming, norming, performing.

On paper, it all made perfect sense. And we were in the performing phase.

Until one day I realized: wait — we’re actually in the storming phase.

What I thought had been well explained to me turned out to be theoretical — until I lived through the full cycle in an actual team.✅

So this is what the “storming stage” really looks like 🙂 Wooooow!

The explanation gave me a glimpse of understanding.

Only real experience validated it and made it real.

Same thing with company culture.

At Speed and Function we state that we strive for a blameless culture.

During interviews, some employees say they already work in a blameless environment and know exactly what that means.

Six months later, after working at S&F:

“Oh… what I had before was actually quite blameful.”

We had a client who started with:

“Why do we need a self-organized culture? It doesn’t work for us.”

And ended with:

“I’ve really appreciated the feedback culture. I feel like I’m being listened to — and it’s coming from a place of growth, not judgment. We now want our internal team to behave like that.”

We’re actively looking for ways to help clients understand that culture — for example, the ability to treat feedback as data — can become a key driver of success for the entire organization.

This isn’t obvious until you experience it in real life.

So how do we explain this to clients who’ve never experienced it?

How do we help clients feel this culture before they go through it?

It’s a bit like trying to explain a palm tree to an Inuit who has never seen anything taller than moss.

Still figuring this out.

If you’ve cracked the code on explaining the intangible — I’m all ears.👇