The model
Culture is a living system
Invisible and visible forces, constantly interacting. What a group believes shapes what it does; what it does feeds back into what it believes. Healthy cultures run that loop as a virtuous cycle and unhealthy ones as a vicious one. Design works on both sides: it facilitates values and norms on the invisible side, and prototypes behaviors, practices, policies and stories on the visible one.
- Invisible
- What a culture believes. You cannot observe it directly — you infer it from what people do.
- Visible
- What a culture does and leaves behind. Observable, countable, and where most interventions actually get built.
The mechanism
Rituals carry culture across
A value nobody enacts is a poster. A behavior nobody believes in is compliance. Rituals are the repeatable moments that move a belief into practice, and practice back into belief. That is why they are the class's primary design material.
The vocabulary
Eight designable forces
Every partner project on the site is tagged with the forces it actually moved, so cohorts stay comparable across years.
Invisible
Values
The shared beliefs a group orients around, stated or not.
Norms
The unwritten expectations that govern everyday behavior.
Visible
Policy
Formal rules and decisions that shape what people are allowed and expected to do.
Practices
Repeated routines and rituals that make culture tangible.
Stories
The narratives people tell that carry meaning across a group.
Behaviors
What people actually do, moment to moment.
Artifacts
The physical and digital objects a culture produces and leaves behind.
Metrics
What a group chooses to measure — and so, implicitly, what it values.
8 forces · Culture Forces model, Kursat Ozenc, 2022