One nurse told me they developed a system of color codes to warn one another. “We put doctors’ names in different colors on the whiteboards,” she said. “Blue meant ‘nice,’ red meant ‘jerk,’ and black meant, ‘whatever you do, don’t contradict them or they’ll take your head off.’
One way to identify the organizational routines inside your own company is to look for the ‘work arounds’ or codes that people use to communicate with each other, such as writing doctor’s names in different colors in order to signal which ones are pleasant to work with, and which are troublesome. Every company - and, in fact, every unit or team - has little codes like this. Sometimes they are formal, like using different colors to signal information. Sometimes they are almost completely undefined, like the gossip that people whisper to each other which serve a similar function: to warn, or to pass information. Those small communication systems are signals for what people feel like they can’t openly say - and the behaviors that emerge to accommodate the need to communicate, even when that communication is hard, are the organizational habits that define the culture.
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