The Museum You Carry How Curatology shapes organisational culture
Foreword
We talk about culture constantly.
We measure it. We diagnose it. We redesign it. We write value statements about it. We hire for it. We blame it when things go wrong.
And yet, most organisations struggle to explain how their culture was formed
What Jenny Theolin offers in The Museum You Carry is not another framework layered on top of this confusion. It is something far more grounded – and far more useful. She invites us to look at culture not as aspiration, but as evidence.
Culture is not hidden. It is sitting in plain sight.
It is in the onboarding deck that quietly defines what matters before a new hire meets a single colleague. It is in the drawer everyone knows about but no one clears out – the legacy processes and assumptions we tolerate long after they have outlived their usefulness. It is in the wall that still carries residue from the last restructure, the Slack joke that signals belonging, the meeting ritual no one ever named but everyone follows.
These are not trivial details. They are artefacts.
Jenny’s central insight is both simple and profound: organisations function like living museums. What we keep, repair, display, repeat, and quietly retire shapes who we become.
In a time defined by speed – hybrid work, restructuring, digital acceleration, AI integration – the instinct for organisations is to move faster. To refresh decks, rename values, announce change. But speed flattens meaning. It leaves residues. It accumulates cultural weight.
The discipline of Curatology that Jenny developed for this book offers a different approach. It asks us to pause long enough to notice what we are already carrying. Through the lens of the Collection Room, the Transformation Room, the Connection Room, the Becoming Room, the Echo Room, and the Imagination Room, Jenny provides leaders and organisations with a practical way to examine culture where it actually lives: in everyday work.
This book is distinctive in treating culture as something material, behavioural, and relational, rather than an abstraction. Culture is something we can observe, question, and shape deliberately.
Jenny Theolin brings a unique clarity to a field crowded with language but often lacking depth. Her work is grounded in research, but it is never academic for its own sake. It is thoughtful without being heavy, rigorous without being rigid, and, above all, humane.
The Museum You Carry challenges us to accept that culture is always being curated. The real question is whether we are doing it by accident – or by design.
This book moves beyond simply an interesting idea. It is essential reading for those who care about the future of their organisation.
Book Overview
Every organisation carries a museum.
Not behind glass, but in its everyday work: in the artefacts, rituals, inherited processes, digital norms, and stories that quietly define “how we do things here”.
Culture is not built through value statements. It is curated through what is kept, repeated, repaired, displayed, and tolerated.
The Museum You Carry introduces Curatology – a research-informed and practical lens for understanding organisational culture through its observable evidence. Rather than offering another abstract framework, the book makes culture tangible and actionable.
The Rooms
Organisations function like living museums composed of interconnected Rooms. Each Room reveals a dimension of culture, expressed through everyday work realities and grounded in research from anthropology, psychology, and organisational studies.
The Collection Room
What is being preserved – and why?
The drawer everyone knows about but no one clears out. The onboarding deck that quietly defines “how we do things here”.
The Collection Room draws on material culture theories and Thing Theory (Brown, 2021) to examine how objects and artefacts shape identity beyond their functional purpose. Research in material culture demonstrates that what organisations keep is never neutral; artefacts accumulate symbolic weight over time. In this Room, we explore how legacy processes and inherited tools become carriers of organisational memory – and how unexamined accumulation creates cultural drag.
The Transformation Room
How does the organisation metabolise change?
The wall that still holds residue from the last restructure. The project that ended without reflection.
This Room utilises research into organisational change, transition theory, and the psychology of endings. Studies on sense-making and change fatigue show that when transitions are rushed, their meaning is flattened and unresolved residue shapes future behaviour. Drawing on work around rituals, liminality, and organisational memory, this Room reframes transformation as a process that must be metabolised, not simply announced.
The Connection Room
How does belonging actually form?
The Slack joke that signals who belongs. The meeting ritual no one ever named.
The Connection Room draws on social identity theory and research into micro-rituals and belonging. These small, repeated signals create cohesion more effectively than formal declarations. Organisational anthropology shows how informal norms and shared practices shape inclusion, hierarchy, and trust – often more powerfully than policy.
The Echo Room
What lingers underneath formal structures?
The email tone that reinforces hierarchy. The story retold to every new hire about “how things really work”.
This Room draws on narrative theory, organisational storytelling research, and cue-dependent memory, demonstrating how environmental and linguistic cues trigger behavioural patterns. Even as strategy evolves, echoes of past leadership, crisis, or success persist through language and digital norms. Culture is sustained not only by structure, but by repetition.
The Imagination Room
What future is being curated?
The strategy deck that defines ambition.
The initiatives that receive visible investment and airtime.
The Imagination Room employs research on organisational identity, future-making, and symbolic leadership. Studies into strategic narrative and expectancy theory show that what leaders spotlight and support shapes perceived possibility. Culture is shaped not only by memory, but by the signals organisations send about what is imaginable.
The Becoming Room
How does an organisation make space for who it is becoming?
The initiative that quietly no longer serves its purpose.
The identity statement built for an earlier chapter.
No organisation can keep everything. Over time, projects, structures, and ways of working that once created momentum begin to muddy the future. This Room draws on research into organisational identity, adaptive systems, and behavioural psychology to examine how release enables renewal. Studies on cognitive load and strategic focus show that without deliberate subtraction, attention fragments and growth stalls. Becoming is about more than simply innovation but also about conscious letting go.
The Method: C.U.R.I.O.
Curatology begins with curiosity.
Most organisations attempt to change culture by declaring new values.
The starting point for Curatology is somewhere more uncomfortable: evidence.
Before rewriting strategy, launching initiatives, or refreshing language, organisations must confront what they are already carrying. C.U.R.I.O. is a disciplined practice for doing exactly that through examination rather than aspiration.
Choose – Select one artefact, ritual, behaviour, or pattern that shapes organisational culture. Stop hiding behind abstraction. Choose something tangible.
Uncover – Examine what it once meant – and what it signals now. Many cultural artefacts outlive their purpose, but few are re-examined.
Reflect – Identify what this reveals about power, belonging, fear, hierarchy, or identity. Culture is rarely neutral.
Interpret – Decide what to preserve, evolve, or consciously retire. Interpretation is where leadership courage becomes visible.
Offer – Make the shift explicit. Retire the ritual. Redesign the practice. Rename the norm. Culture changes only when interpretation shifts into action.
C.U.R.I.O. reframes culture work from symbolic performance to intentional curation. It replaces reactive change with disciplined attention, challenging organisations to move beyond speed and toward coherence.
Culture is already being curated. The only question is whether your organisation is prepared to look at what you’re keeping.
Audience
Senior leaders, CHROs, People & Culture directors, founders, and transformation leads who know culture matters but want a deeper, more grounded way to work with it.
Comparable to The Culture Code and The Art of Gathering, but differentiated by its material-culture lens and room-based architecture.
About the author
Jenny Theolin is a curator of culture, a learning leader, and an experience designer at Studio Theolin. She works with organisations including AFRY, Volvo Cars, ICA, the European Parliament, Electrolux, Toca Boca, adidas, and Hyper Island, designing learning experiences and guiding culture and transformation work. She is the founder of Toolbox Toolbox, a collection of facilitation tools across the world and around the web, and the creator of Make Friends Not Contacts, a network for creatives want to explore the world beyond work.She is also the author of Dare to Facilitate, a book that explores the intersection of courage and experimentation in facilitation and organisational life.
Alongside this work, she is an exhibition curator and producer for organisations including H&M Foundation, WaterAid, and Cancer Research. Her practice in the arts – shaping physical exhibitions, selecting artefacts, designing narrative flow, and producing public experiences – directly informs the philosophy behind The Museum You Carry. Through her extensive experience in both organisational culture and curatorial practice, Jenny brings a rare, applied perspective: she understands how meaning is constructed, displayed, and sustained; whether in a gallery or in the everyday life of an organisation.
Hook
Culture is already being curated – in drawers, decks, rituals, and digital habits in every organisation. The question is whether this happens by accident or by design.
Organisational culture is one of the most discussed – and least effectively addressed – challenges in modern business.
In an era defined by hybrid work, AI integration, rapid scaling, restructuring, and generational shifts, organisations are experiencing cultural fragmentation at unprecedented speed. Leaders are under pressure to move faster, pivot more often, and communicate more clearly. Yet most culture interventions rely on surveys, value statements, and engagement frameworks that rarely address how culture actually forms.
The Museum You Carry offers a distinct and timely alternative.
While existing culture books focus on behaviours, values, or performance psychology, The Museum You Carry introduces a materially grounded lens: culture is shaped through artefacts, rituals, inherited processes, language, and repeated behaviours. It is curated – whether consciously or not.
This framing is differentiated in three critical ways:
It makes culture tangible. By focusing on everyday work artefacts – onboarding decks, legacy processes, Slack norms, meeting rituals – the book translates abstract culture theory into observable evidence.
It reframes change as cultural digestion. In high-velocity environments, organisations accumulate cultural residue from rushed transitions. The book introduces a disciplined approach to metabolising change rather than layering new initiatives onto unresolved foundations.
It introduces a scalable methodology. C.U.R.I.O. provides a structured, memorable framework that can be applied in executive settings, offsites, onboarding, and transformation work. It is simple enough to travel, but intellectually grounded enough to command authority.
The market appetite for culture books remains strong, as evidenced by the continued success of titles such as The Culture Code and The Art of Gathering. However, few books examine culture through the lens of material evidence and organisational curation, leaving a clear gap in the category.
Additionally, The Museum You Carry aligns with several current macro-trends:
In short, The Museum You Carry positions culture as more than simply a branding exercise, but as a disciplined act of curation that brings results. It offers a new language for an urgent problem and a practical framework for addressing it.
Culture is already being curated. This book meets leaders at the moment they are ready to do it deliberately.
Table of Contents Draft
Introduction
Part I – Seeing the Museum (the who)
Collectors and Curators
Organisations accumulate artefacts by default, but culture shifts only when someone chooses what to preserve, interpret, or retire.
The Visitor
Culture is experienced through objects, and one artefact can signal something different depending on who encounters it.
Part II – The Exhibition Rooms (the what)
The Collection Room
The templates, decks, policies, and layouts we preserve become the material expression of organisational identity.
The Transformation Room
Walls repainted, org charts redrawn, systems half-retired – objects hold the residue of how change was handled.
The Connection Room
Shared rituals, language, and repeated gestures bind people together more powerfully than formal declarations.
The Echo Room
Email tone, origin stories, and inherited slide formats leave traces of past leadership and earlier crises, muddying the present.
The Imagination Room
Strategy decks, spotlighted initiatives, and visible investments curate the future long before it arrives.
The Becoming Room
Becoming requires deliberate release — organisations do not evolve by adding more; they must consciously let go of identities, projects, and practices that have drawn to a close.
Part III – The Discipline of Curating Culture (the how)
Curiosity Before redesigning culture, we must learn to notice the artefacts that already shape behaviour.
C.U.R.I.O. Method C.U.R.I.O. reframes culture work from symbolic performance to intentional curation. It replaces reactive change with disciplined attention and challenges organisations to move beyond speed toward coherence.
Part IV – EXIT (the what’s next?)
The Museum at Night
When performance stops and leadership leaves the room, artefacts expose the organisation’s unspoken norms.
The Gift Shop
The real culture of an organisation lives in what people carry from it: the stories they repeat, the tone they adopt, the beliefs they internalise and pass on.
Every meeting, decision, and artefact produces something portable.
The Museum You Choose to Carry Culture is already curated; the only question is whether you shape it intentionally.
