Making Sense of the Invisible Rules That Shape Our Lives

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.

Kevin Cool: Just off a busy Berkeley street, up the red brick steps and through the back of a weathered California Craftsman is the kitchen at Chez Panisse. Two kitchens, in fact…

In one kitchen, you’ll find Ann Cromley.

Ann Cromley: I’m the sous chef in the cafe at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. So I am technically like the second in charge, underneath the main chef of the day. And I kind of run the kitchen with our prep team. I get kind of the final taste before I give a taste to the chef.

Kevin Cool: Ann is a savory cook. But at the back kitchen, Betty Franks leads the pastry cooks.

Betty Franks: So I do a lot of preparation of the different components that go into a dessert. It’s a lot of managing fruit and managing products, making sure that things are tasting their best.

Kevin Cool: Chef Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971. The restaurant has not only changed how Americans think about the food they eat, but it is widely credited with launching the farm-to-table movement, sourcing the freshest seasonal ingredients in its savory dishes, as well as the desserts.

And sweets have always been Betty’s specialty.

Betty Franks: Yeah, always desserts. I think I like the precision involved. There’s also so many different techniques that you have to be really good at. And also, I mean, I love sugar.

Ryan: Even though Ann and Betty work just a few feet away from each other, their approaches to cooking are pretty far apart.

Ann Cromley: I think the savory side, especially at Chez Panisse is very much intuition-based. We really go by what the vegetables or other ingredients are telling us in any given moment, even throughout the day it could change. We don’t really use a lot of recipes.

Kevin Cool: Ann says she couldn’t work the pastry kitchen even if she wanted to.

Ann Cromley: It’s just kind of not my forte. Uh, no recipes is my forte, I think. So I’m pretty flexible with, you know, kind of whatever is happening, whether it’s a change of plans or a change of ingredient in the kitchen.

Kevin Cool: For Betty, it’s the opposite.

Betty Franks: My friends like to make fun of me a little bit for just being really particular about everything. And my husband would say the same thing.

Kevin Cool: Why is precision important in one kitchen, but not in the other?

Betty Franks: The stakes are a lot higher when you make a mistake in pastry, like if you mess up a dough, like let’s say you forget to put the salt in it or whatever, you know it’s ruined. You have to throw it away. Whereas in savory, you can usually fix it.

Kevin Cool: These cultural differences show up outside of the kitchen, as well, according to Ann.

Ann Cromley: When we’re on break, you know, eating lunch or anything, they’ll bring a little timer with them so they don’t miss their cake. I mean, obviously they, they have to!

Kevin Cool: The kitchens have different approaches — but the sweet and savory cooks understand why each works the way they do.

Betty Franks: It’s really kind of like you guys do your thing, you know how to do it, you do it well, and we’re over here, you know, with our magnifying glasses.

Kevin Cool: Despite the different cultures, this recipe for collaboration works.

Ann Cromley: There’s someone doing something that is important, you know, from the lighting to the shining copper, to making the food, to making the pastry, the wine directors, you know, there are so many moving pieces and it’s quite amazing how perfectly it works.

Kevin Cool: Betty says she knows why.

Betty Franks: The culture of this place is so strong that that is kind of like the overarching culture. I mean, we’ve been open for 50 years and there’s a vision here. There’s an aesthetic. You know, we’ve had the same leader the whole time and we know what she likes and she’s not necessarily in the kitchen with us, but we are definitely all working towards this vision.

Kevin Cool: These kinds of cultural differences show up in all types of organizations, and pretty much everywhere in our lives. You can think of more flexible workplaces as “loose,” like the savory kitchen. And the ordered environments — like the pastry kitchen — as “tight,” according to Michele Gelfand.

Michele is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire our World.”

Michele Gelfand: We’re not just trying to describe cultural differences on some kind of continuum, like tight and loose. We’re trying to understand why these differences have evolved in the first place. What makes them make sense?

Kevin Cool: And that’s our focus today. This is If/Then, a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. I’m Kevin Cool, senior editor at the GSB.

I wanted to start today by just talking a little bit about culture itself. Where does it come from? And, to use your words, it’s one of the last uncharted frontiers of research. Why is it so uncharted?

Michele Gelfand: You know, I like to think about culture as a puzzle because it’s omnipresent, all around us all the time from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, affecting everything from our politics to our parenting.

But we take it for granted. We don’t even think about it. So it’s kind of invisible. And that’s pretty profound puzzle because how can something be all around you and influencing you all the time, but you not realizing it.

And it’s often only until you get outside of your cultural context, your cultural bubble, we might call it, that you start realizing, wow, like I’m actually been socialized by my parents, by my teachers, by the institutions that reward or punish certain behaviors. I’ve been socialized my whole life to adopt a certain set of values and norms, to construct a self, so to speak, that fits into that cultural context.

Kevin Cool: So, do you think leaders of organizations understand how much of a role they play in either developing a culture, or as the case may be, changing a culture?

Michele Gelfand: This is a very interesting topic that is being studied now is something called cultural intelligence or CQ. And this is really the ability to understand cultural variation, where it comes from, what its consequences are for human behavior in organizations and beyond.

And what’s interesting about CQ is that it’s independent of IQ. You could be super intelligent, general intelligence, but be low on CQ. You could be really high in emotional intelligence and still be low on CQ. And so that’s a real issue in organizations today. When we’re in a global context, we need to understand, how do we negotiate deals across cultural boundaries. How do we help create global teams that operate virtually? How do we help our expats transition to other cultures to be most effective?

So what we do in our research is we try to understand how do cultures vary around the world in organizations, even in our own households? And measure those aspects of culture and then try to use them to predict organizational functioning.

So one of the topics that I’ve been working on for many years is basically how tight or loose are social systems. This is one aspect of culture among others but we can quantify cultures that tend to veer tight, that have a lot of rules, that have very reliable punishments when you violate the rules. These are cultures we call “tight” cultures.

Other cultures at the opposite end of the continuum tend to be loose. They are less wedded to particular rules. They have more variance, more permissibility of what’s acceptable in terms of human behavior.

Places like Japan, Austria, like Singapore tend to veer tight and our data at the national level, cultures like New Zealand, like Greece, Brazil, tend to veer looser and it doesn’t mean they don’t have some domains that are tight. And likewise, we know some cultures, like even Japan, have some domains where there’s legislated looseness.

And then we can zoom into organizations and we can also start measuring how tight or loose organizations and units they’re in veer, because neither tight or loose are good or bad, they’re just about tradeoffs. And so one of the tradeoffs we see across levels is what we call the order-openness tradeoff. So tight cultures have a lot of order, at the societal level, tight cultures have less crime. They have more synchrony, meaning coordination. Even in very surprising places like the stock market, like there’s actually more synchrony in buying and selling stocks in tighter cultures.

Even clocks and city streets in tight cultures are more aligned. They say they’re more likely to have this similar time. You could see in the book, we have data on this. They also have more discipline. There’s more self control, more self regulation.

Kevin Cool: So they’re good at execution probably, right?

Michele Gelfand: That’s right. There’s a lot more kind of training on being attentive to rules, to managing your impulses, and that’s all in the service of not being punished for violating rules. Actually, tight cultures have less debt. They have less obesity, they have a host of self regulation successes, including alcohol, lower alcohol abuse.

Loose cultures struggle with order. They have more crime, less synchrony, those clocks are all over the place. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. And they tend to be more adaptable to change.

So it’s a trade off. And that order/openness trade off you see in organizations as well. We see that tight organizations tend to have more efficiency, more coordination, success at implementation, the people that are attracted to tight organizations tend to be more cautious, more careful.

Kevin Cool: What about someone who maybe is misaligned, in terms of, kind of, their own DNA or inclination? I actually can speak to this because I have been misaligned sometimes in the past in my jobs. And one example of this is I can remember being in meetings. and it was a tight culture, but they were all about sort of getting to the answer. And I’m somebody who sort of likes banter and to be a little bit playful. So a couple of times I would be kind of jokey in the beginning and it was like a comedian who completely bombed. It was like silence in the room.

Michele Gelfand: I mean, it’d be nice to get the memo before you enter the organizational door. Hey, guess what? we’re going to let you know that the people, the practices, and the leadership in this organization all veer tighter versus looser. And for sure, we have some interesting data that show that fit matters. People who are, have looser mindsets. And you can take the quiz on my website

Kevin Cool: I did. I’m very loose.

Michele Gelfand: Are you very loose? There you go.

Again, we can all shift it up depending on the context, but people who have looser mindsets tend to be attracted to looser organizations. And we know from a lot of work in organizational behavior that people that tend to be different tend to leave. Not everyone, but that kind of attrition happens.

By the way, this is also something that is related to relationships. So I’ve been talking about nations, organizations. But we all have our own mindsets in the kind of partners we choose. I’ve always wanted to give the tight-loose quiz out at the altar or in the Synagogue like —

Kevin Cool: Or maybe on a second date.

Michele Gelfand: Exactly. Like, truth be told, I veer moderately loose on my own quiz. My husband is quite tight. He’s a lawyer.

Kevin Cool: Mm.

Michele Gelfand: And he has a lot of accountability. Whenever you have a lot of accountability, a lot of monitoring, whether it’s public accountability or actually issues related to safety in an organization, you’re going to start seeing rules. Because rules are really helpful in those contexts. And the fact is we’ve been married 30 years, but we have a lot of tight/loose conflict. and we try to negotiate it. He really gets very deeply disturbed how I load the dishwasher.

Kevin Cool: How you load the dishwasher?

Michele Gelfand: Yes. I mean, I would say he really gets disturbed by it.

Kevin Cool: Is it chaos?

Michele Gelfand: Pretty much. And he’ll now reload it. He just reloads it. But these conflicts, they can really, in some couples, tight/loose manifests itself in other very problematic conflicts, like dishwasher, we can survive the dishwasher problem, but tight/loose conflicts that we’ve studied relate to financial management. Where do you sort of veer in terms of risk taking in terms of your finances? Uh, parenting is another prime source of conflict. How do we think about rules for the kids and what domains? Even vacations, like how do you organize a vacation? My siblings and I have vacationed every year together and finally we’re using the language around tight/loose —

Kevin Cool: You’ve taught them this?

Michele Gelfand: Yeah. And they, they want to have a framework, to try to organize like why we vary on certain things. But the important point here is that negotiation, which I also teach at the GSB is about your priorities. You can’t have everything you want in your life. So when I talk to my husband about his tightness in our household, it’s like, what are your priorities? What’s the thing that irritates you the most about what I do and vice versa? So that we can then each get our priority domain.

Kevin Cool: So you invite that dialogue and that helps?

Michele Gelfand: Yes. And including with vacation – some people love spontaneity, unpredictability on vacation. Other people like structure. Like, that’s fine. Both of those codes are perfectly reasonable. And so why don’t we actually talk about it and negotiate it for a healthier and more enjoyable vacation?

And I think what’s so exciting to me about cross cultural psychology more generally is that we’re not just trying to describe cultural differences on some kind of continuum, like tight and loose. We’re trying to understand why these differences have evolved in the first place. What makes them make sense? And when we originally started looking at tight/loose around the world, I had just a simple idea, a theory to test with this 30 plus nation study, which was that countries or any context, whether it’s organizations or households that have a lot of threat, that they have experienced chronically in their lives. Think about Mother Nature’s fury, like natural disasters, famine. Think about how many times your nation’s been invaded. We can actually quantify that. We can get data from political science. We can get data on natural types of threats from lots of different sources. And the idea is really simple. When you have a lot of threat, you need rules to coordinate to survive.

Michele Gelfand: So you can see that tightness, it’s dynamic, it can increase, it can decrease. And so in general, countries that have had a lot of threat or organizations that have a lot of threat, whether it’s safety issues like in manufacturing or hospitals or airlines, they tend to have more rules because they need those rules.

Countries that or contexts that have less threat can afford to be more permissive. And so, this is something I think is really important to recognize, that culture evolves for some reasons. That’s not the only reason why it evolves.

But it’s important to realize that not only can we try to understand cultural variation, but then try to think about what makes it functional? Because that can make us less judgmental about it.

Recently, we published a paper in Harvard Business Review. that was on the impact of tight/loose differences across about 4,000 cross border acquisitions like on financial performance on the price tag for cultural differences and tight/loose.

But the question we had was, can we actually quantify this across many different CBAs, cross border acquisitions, and in fact, what we can see in this paper and the Associated Journal article is that even small differences in tight/loose relate to pretty serious decrements in financial performance. So this sort of makes us think like, wait, why don’t we try to negotiate these differences before we merge?

Think about this, not just in terms of strategic compatibility, but think about the cultural iceberg like beneath the surface in terms of the different people and practices and leadership that we know we can measure in organizations so that we can help people, just like we would help couples, to really be very mindful about how are we going to handle these cultural differences.

Kevin Cool: One that comes to mind, in fact, that you’ve studied is Amazon purchasing Whole Foods. What was the early early on short term result of that? How did that express itself, and then how did it develop from there?

Michele Gelfand: You know, I think this is a great example of that. These mergers don’t have to be like across oceans. They could be within our own backyard. And in this case, again, culture tends to be ignored in these kind of mergers in favor of strategic compatibility. There’s a lot of compatibility strategically between Amazon and Whole Foods merging. But what we could see is that the culture of Whole Foods was quite loose, including the founder. The founding leaders are imprinting their own mindsets on the organization. There was a lot of discretion. There was a lot of voice in this organization, that there was source of a lot of pride. Amazon, not surprisingly, veers tight. It had some pockets of looseness, but it has a lot of rules,

Kevin Cool: It’s very systematic.

Michele Gelfand: Very systematic. And, there was the sense that these differences really caused a lot of discontent, particularly in Whole Foods.

There’s times in an organizational life when we’re going to need to negotiate tight and loose also, like not just in mergers, but also when, for example, startups. Startups tend to be quite loose, not surprisingly, but as they’re going to be scaling up, they’re going to need to tighten.

And one of the things we found in interviews of people who start up firms here in Silicon Valley and elsewhere is that they’re not necessarily aware of how difficult that’s going to be, because if you have a loose mindset, you like that freedom to just creative and rules feel very, very constraining and, actually a lot of people leave once they’re bought out, because that tight/loose conflict again is happening.

And so one of the things I think it’s important, more of a general principle is as leaders, to be effective, we want to be ambidextrous. Even if we might lean tight or loose, we want to be able to create context where we can have both tight and loose elements. I call it the Goldilocks principle for organizations is it’s not whether you’re tight or loose, it’s how you actually create balance in your organization.

We don’t want to take a tight organization like I work with the U. S. Navy, for example. Clearly, this place needs to lean tight. Hospitals like also I work with hospitals. They need to lean tight. But they’re also worried about this trade off. Like as you get super tight, you have more coordination, more efficiency, that kind of order we’ve been talking about. But you lose out on that creativity,

Kevin Cool: Maybe less innovation.

Michele Gelfand: Exactly. So we want to try to think about for tight organizations. We call this flexible tightness. How do you insert some flexibility into non-safety domains?

On the flip side, organizations that are getting too loose. They’re getting really super chaotic. We want to insert some structure, some accountability into those contexts. We call this structured looseness.

Kevin Cool: Is that leadership’s job?

Michele Gelfand: It is leadership’s job. I think that it’s the leader’s job to use the framework. And, you know, that’s what we’re trying to do is give a new language to be thinking about these problems.

The broader point is for leaders to recognize that there’s these two kinds of factors that we’re trying to really maximize. One is empowerment that comes from looseness. But the other is accountability, that comes from tightness.

And imagine a world where you’re in a context where there’s both, that there’s a sense of accountability that, you know, you have some kind of pressures to deliver and to be held to account and everyone around you feels that way, where there’s clarity and what’s expected in your role and in the team. But at the same time, you feel this sense of, uh, latitude to be free, to be expressive. And organizations might need to weigh those differently.

I like to use what’s called the tight/loose/tight model, like very clear expectations, tight bookends. Everyone’s kind of aligned on what’s expected here, and has support for that, but then loose in the sense of kind of implementation. Like you get this done however you see fit, but then tight on the back end, which is that we check to see that everything has been, how do we do vis a vis our expectations?

This is actually used in the military. It’s called commander intent. It can be used in organizations also. It’s a nice way to think about ambidexterity. Including in remote contexts where a lot of the bookends got a little bit messed with in terms of clarity of expectation and clarity of like, have you actually reached your goals?

Kevin Cool: Do you think there’s more of a recognition now, just in terms of the importance of culture, as a sort of a baseline understanding? There’s an old adage, culture eats strategy for breakfast, right?

Michele Gelfand: You know, yes and no. I mean, Samuel Huntington, the late political scientist, published this book, “Clash of Civilizations,” many years ago. And whether you accept or debate his major premises around the role of culture, what he was trying to debunk is that more and more people don’t think it matters, and mostly that’s because this kind of myth of globalization, like somehow globalization is going to kind of homogenize cultures.

And now we have the internet, which was not the case back then, and we have social media. And, you know, I think that that’s a real myth, even if we’re globalizing and we are in each other’s faces more, as Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist would say, that doesn’t mean that we don’t hold on to our values. In fact, from Huntington’s point of view, you can accept certain aspects of culture, other people’s cultures, but you can also reject them and you can really even be almost against other, you know, values ‘case they seem to be, imperialistically, affecting your own cultural values.

So I really think that that’s a new problem that people at first may not have thought about it matters, but now might think it doesn’t matter because the world’s getting more similar — and there’s just not a lot of evidence for that.

But what happens sometimes when we have this extreme conflict is people, they’re not actually realizing that the perceptions they have of others is really exaggerated.

And I’ll give you an example, that we did this study in the U.S. and Pakistan — but this also applies even within the U. S. — where we interviewed people in Pakistan and also in Saudi and we ask them about their perceptions of Americans and their perceptions were like Americans are, they’re not just loose, they’re like half naked all the time and they’re like drinking beer for breakfast and they’re calling the police on, when their parents are too strict and like all these, like, very extreme

Kevin Cool: Is that because that’s what they see on TV?

Michele Gelfand: That’s what they see on TV.

Kevin Cool: Yeah, yeah.

Michele Gelfand: And Americans, if they knew where Pakistan was, this was kind of an if, they only associated Pakistanis as being in mosques. And so they thought, they’re super tight. They weren’t imagining Pakistanis, you know, playing sports, listening to music, reading poetry. So they were sampling very narrow range of situations and generalizing that. And same thing with, in Pakistan.

So what we did was, we randomly assigned people in the U.S. and Pakistan to read each other’s diaries. In Pakistan, some people read American diaries. The others read Pakistani diaries. Same thing in the U.S.

Kevin Cool: Mm-hmm.

Michele Gelfand: Half randomly assigned to read American diaries versus Pakistanis, and we didn’t edit these diaries and turns out people love reading people’s diaries. You know, that’s also a good thing about this study.

Kevin Cool: Regardless of where they’re from.

Michele Gelfand: You’re like, give me these diaries!. And, you know, so Americans, you know they were in a wider range of situations than people would expect, you know, being like informal, weak and strong situations, tight and loose situations, but they were also still drinking more and waking up their girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever.

Pakistanis were certainly in tighter situations. It was really remarkable to see that, not only did people who were assigned diaries from other cultures relative to the other group start seeing that we’re more, way more similar than we realized, but they also changed their stereotypes about them.

People looking at American culture started seeing us as more moral, we’re not this loose mess. And vice versa. People who were looking at Pakistani culture didn’t see it as constraining or as, there were a lot of other negative stereotypes that went along with that.

Kevin Cool: So we’ve talked a lot about how culture expresses at the organizational level. If I’m in an organization, but I don’t necessarily have the levers of power, even if I know tight/lose and I know what the implications of that, what am I supposed to do about it?

Michele Gelfand: Yeah, I mean we can think about this at the sort of organization wide level, but people’s lives are kind of local, right? They’re in teams. They’re in, you know, they’re surrounded by some people that they’re co-located or at least co-organizing around some kind of task. Um, and that’s where I think people do have more power to say, hey, here’s a framework. Let’s talk about this. Let’s use the language to try to label some issues you might be having. Let’s diagnose as a team. Where we are in this continuum. How do we sort of think about the profile of what domains we’re tight and loose in, and is this the right balance? One of the things that I think helps is having a framework and a language to try to label the things that we experience in our local teams, and then say, hey, are we at the right balance?

For example, do we really need to have a certain dress code? Is that domain very tight? Because maybe that’s not really that necessary. Like in the work that I do with execs here, I have this model called the EASE model, which is when we’re trying to loosen a tight system.

Again, we’re not trying to, like, make it, loosey goosey, but EASE stands for Examine the rules. In any context, it could be in a team, it could be in a whole unit. Are these rules really necessary? Ultra tight contexts tend to have a lot of rules, and some are kind of not necessary anymore. They’re what we call silly rules. This applies even in the U.S. Navy, like, do we really need to have rules for haircuts and the socks we wear? So we can sort of start saying, okay, let’s do a rule audit.

The second thing is Allowing Exploration. And a team, if you feel like you’re in a team that’s really super tight, one of the things that we can help ease or add some flexibility, that flexible tightness I was talking about, is to kind of give a time or a place where we’re all allowed to just brainstorm on crazy ideas.

Anyone could sort of start talking to their teams about these, using the language. Another has to do with Shifting to a more decentralized structure. That’s part of the EASE model, which is like the tight systems can be pretty hierarchical.

Let’s delegate some responsibility. Let’s give power to people who are at lower ranks. Um, Toyota did this, successfully trying to insert some looseness into their system.

It means people that are in power have to give up some power. People who don’t have power have to be willing to exert it.

And then the final thing is Empowering People, is making people feel like if they dissent, if they disagree in a tight culture, that they’re not going to be reprimanded. So there’s ways that even in lower level employees can actually talk to their teammates about, do we have the right balance of tight/loose?

Take the quiz. How are we all falling on the quiz? You know, it’s a free tool on website. Let’s analyze our structure and our culture for the domains that we’re tight and loose in. Let’s be mindful on, do we need all of these to be tight or loose? Even households, like as I mentioned, I mean, my kids probably will need some therapy. Let’s toss it out there, right? They’ve been learning about tight/loose, you know, for many, many years.

Kevin Cool: Do they know how to fill the dishwasher?

Michele Gelfand: Probably, one of them does. But you know, even in households, parents can label what domains do we need to be tight in? And what domain should we be loosen in? And that changes, of course, as the kids age, or as they’re in different contexts. And in our household, we were pretty clear about the domains we’re tight in.

And, I think it’s really specific to a family, specific to social class, to lots of contexts, but it is eminently negotiable. And we kind of laugh about it, nerding out, like, talking about what domain should be tight or loose in our household and beyond.

I have mentioned a couple of times my website. It’s just michelegelfand.com. Michele with one L.

Kevin Cool: Well, this was delightful, Michele with one L. Thank you very much for being here.

Michele Gelfand: Thanks so much. It was wonderful hanging out with you guys.

Betty Franks: Just to say that sometimes I get home at the end of the day and I’m like, I can’t believe I was so stressed out about ice cream. But it happens.

Kevin Cool: If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. I’m your host, Kevin Cool. Our show is written and produced by Making Room and the Content and Design team at the GSB. Our managing producers are Michael McDowell and Elizabeth Wyleczuk-Stern. Executive producers are Sorel Husbands Denholtz and Jim Colgan. Sound design and additional production support from Mumble Media and Aech Ashe.

A special thanks to Betty Franks and Ann Cromley from Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

For more on our faculty and their research, find Stanford GSB online at gsb.stanford.edu or on social media @stanfordgsb.

If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider sharing it with a friend or colleague. And remember to subscribe to If/Then wherever you get your podcasts or leave us a review. It really helps other listeners find the show.

We’d also love to hear from you. Is there a subject you’d like us to cover? Something that sparked your curiosity? Or a story or perspective that you’d like to share? Email us at if then pod at stanford dot edu. That’s i f, t h e n, p o d at stanford dot edu.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back with another episode soon.