Catalyst Culture

Inclusive culture guarantees that we have people with different perspectives. This leads to higher levels of creativity and innovation.

This challenge should lead to

• Initiatives creating inclusive culture.
• Increased proposal quality.
• Safe and fun environment for innovation.

While something as intangible as culture can be difficult to quantify, member engagement surveys, open feedback mechanisms, focus groups and interviews can reveal "the pulse" of the organization.

Here are some pointers we can measure:

• Engagement, participation and opportunities to lead
• Incidents where miscommunication happens
• The meeting culture and ability for people to voice their opinions
• Support, help, and advice available
• Openness for creative dissent and constructive feedback
• Ability to spot and correct parts of the process that don't work
• Time spent from ideas to action
• Clarity of organizational identity and direction
• Perceived sense of equality, inclusion and belonging
• Learning and development opportunities
• Number of community-led initiatives put into action
• Broader participation in governance, decision making and project teams
• Virtual environment and tools that support the culture
• Members' satisfaction, happiness and "the fun factor"

It is not enough for Catalyst to attract and retain one type of people. Diverse talent with its multitude of viewpoints leads to better innovation. Creating a more inclusive community will lead to a diversity of ideas and thoughts as well as a better sense of belonging. An innovation platform cannot afford to be homogeneous. If we want inclusive culture and a richer perspective, we have to listen to those who are different from the majority.

To an outsider, Catalyst is a blur. To a newcomer, it can be confusing. To those who stay, it's still confusing. How might we make Catalyst a safe and welcoming place for all kinds of people?

In the world of business, there’s a saying ‘Great employee experience leads to great customer experience’. More than just financial rewards, people long for a sense of mastery, autonomy and purpose (see e.g. Daniel Pink: "Drive").

"People who see the world differently and have diverse ideas and perspectives often bring creativity and innovation to an organization. But because of their outsider status, they may struggle to have their ideas recognized by colleagues as legitimate." (Harvard Business Review: "The New Analytics of Culture")

Great culture is good for successful recruitment and retention of diverse talent. If people don’t feel included, trusted and heard, they will either leave or remain lurkers forever. Culture needs to be built into the core of the organization and it needs to be nurtured over time via initiatives that encourage constructive sharing of ideas.

There are many lenses, or paradigms, through which one can view diversity:

Resistance: Demand for diversity, coming from outside of the monocultural core group, is viewed as a threat to the perceived unity or a ‘non-issue’, something that is not important enough to even discuss. People feel safer working with similar colleagues so any attempts to increase diversity are stifled.

Non-discrimination: Also referred to as ‘Color-Blindness’ or meritocracy, this paradigm focuses on equal employment opportunities but without acknowledging potential differences due to different backgrounds. The thinking goes: “People should be treated equally no matter where they are from; cultural background does not count and does not need to be specifically dealt with.” Thinking ‘we are all the same’ aims to assimilate and hide diversity; important differences are not valued.

Fairness: In this paradigm, diversity is seen as a matter of equal opportunity and fair treatment. An organization addresses the need for specific support for minority groups, reducing social inequalities. While the concern for fairness is genuine, this is good for the organization’s image and helps recruitment, while guaranteeing compliance with legal and social requirements. People operating from this standpoint may have good intentions but fall short in truly utilizing diversity for the organization’s and its members' full benefit. Preserving harmony may stifle creative dissent.

Access and legitimacy: In this paradigm, differences are celebrated but only because they make business sense. The thinking goes that for the organization to be relevant, it needs to portray the same diversity as the global society it operates in. The danger of this approach is that monoculture remains the norm and ”the diverse” are kept on the sidelines. People may feel exploited if they find out that they are there just to make the organization look diverse.

Learning and growth: This final paradigm also promotes equal opportunity, acknowledges differences and values them but it doesn’t assimilate everyone into one mold or form silos and pockets of diversity. Instead, it connects people with diverse traits, backgrounds, knowledge and skills. Listening is encouraged and differences are internalized so that the organization can learn and grow because of them.

The benefits of adopting the learning and growth paradigm are clear:

• It brings new ideas and different knowledge for everyone’s use.
• It helps us to develop new skills and approaches to the work we do.
• It helps us become more innovative as individuals, as teams and as a whole organization.

When culture of inclusion becomes a collective strength, it helps align strategies with people’s diverse capabilities. However, it takes time and needs to be enabled through a consciously built culture that encourages trust and belonging.

In this kind of culture, everyone feels at ease, no matter how heated the daily discussions get. In a truly effective innovation platform, it is not only okay to voice out differing opinions; it is expected.

An ideal Catalyst Culture:

• Is fun, relaxed and welcoming.
• Communicates that diversity of background, opinion and insight are essential.
• Creates an expectation of high standards of performance from everyone.
• Stimulates personal development and emotional intelligence.
• Promotes peer mentoring and learning from one another.
• Encourages openness, trust, asking, listening and a sense of belonging.
• Makes people feel heard, respected and valued.
• Breathes life into a well-articulated and widely understood mission.
• Supports and maintains an egalitarian and non-bureaucratic structure.
• Allows a degree of creative friction for innovation to flourish.

Examples of proposals you could submit to this challenge:

• Educational events to explore the related concepts and research
• Discussion fora to help us understand each other and to work better together
• Use of software to make meeting culture more inclusive (e.g. Otter & Equalicert)
• Analysis tools to understand how culture influences Catalyst members' thoughts and behaviour.
• Social media content creation to help raise awareness
• Tools that help in recruitment and onboarding of top talent
• Incentives for bringing different types of people together in teams
• Surveys, interviews and documentation of "the Catalyst pulse"
• Systems and processes that strengthen inclusiveness in Catalyst
• Partnerships with external expert organizations
• Initiatives to clarify our shared mission, vision, values and goals
• Competence development tools and frameworks
• Mentoring, coaching and peer support structures and solutions
• Wellbeing and community listening related initiatives
• Celebrations, rites, rituals and other cultural artefacts to strengthen the culture
• Leadership development initiatives
• Equal participation and engagement initiatives

It is up to all of us to propose initiatives that help strengthen the most important asset Cardano has: the community. Let us know what piece of the puzzle you suggest solving.

• How could we take steps towards a stronger Catalyst Culture?
• What initiatives can be implemented to help us become more effective working together?
• How might we facilitate the integration of our differences for the benefit of organizational learning, improved capacity for innovation and for the general wellbeing of everyone involved?

Co-proposers

Jo Allum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joallum/

Özgür Yaşar Akyar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ozguryasarakyar/

Nori Nishigaya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishigaya/

Tomi Astikainen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomiastikainen/

Dzhuliana Nikolova: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dzhuliana-nikolova-b6805714a/

Alignment with the Fund9 strategic goals

Fund9 Challenge Setting proposals are supposed to meet one or more of these attributes. Here's our commentary for CA consideration:

• Prepare a group of people willing and able to make contributions to the ecosystem.
• This challenge setting proposal aims to make it easier for anyone to join and find their place in Catalyst, becoming active participants faster than today.
• Turn Cardano into an open source project.
• Commonly agreed on culture helps pull in the same direction and this shared team spirit lessens the need for centralized control.
• Accelerate the growth and evolution of developer & app ecosystem.
• One of the issues that can be addressed with common culture initiatives is the perceived gap between "the developers" and "the governors".

We, the challenge team members, feel that this challenge setting is geared to address all three aspects of the Fund9 goals.

Sources:

Making Differences Matter:

https://hbr.org/1996/09/making-differences-matter-a-new-paradigm-for-managing-diversity

Managing a Culturally Diverse Workforce

https://copdei.extension.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Managing-a-culturally-diverse-workforce.pdf

Diversity and Team Leadership in a Nonprofit Organization:

https://lutpub.lut.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/30829/TMP.objres.268.pdf

The New Analytics of Culture

https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-new-analytics-of-culture