When leaders want to change outcomes, they often reach for culture. They talk about mindsets. They launch values initiatives. They ask people to behave differently. These efforts are well intentioned. They are also frequently mistimed. Culture does not change first. It changes last.1 Treating culture as a lever misunderstands what culture actually reflects.2
Why culture is such an attractive target
Culture feels powerful. It explains patterns that formal structures do not.3 It accounts for behaviours that persist despite new processes or systems. It offers a language for what feels intangible. For leaders under pressure, culture also offers distance.
If culture is the problem, the solution can be framed as long-term, gradual, and diffuse. Responsibility is shared. Urgency is softened. Unfortunately, this framing often delays the interventions that would actually change outcomes.
What culture really reflects
Culture is not an independent force. It is the accumulated result of decisions about:
- what gets rewarded
- what gets tolerated
- what gets escalated
- who gets protected
- how risk is distributed
These decisions are made every day, often implicitly. Culture reflects the history of those decisions, not the intentions behind them.
Why culture changes slowly
Culture lags because people learn through experience. They watch what happens when things go wrong. They notice which behaviours are defended and which are penalised. They adjust accordingly. No memo or campaign overrides that learning. This is why organisations can change strategy, structure, or systems quickly while culture appears stubborn. Culture is waiting to see whether the new rules actually hold.
The danger of acting on culture too early
When organisations target culture before changing underlying design, they create frustration.
People are asked to behave differently while consequences remain the same. They are encouraged to “lean in” while risk exposure increases. They are told to trust while evidence is mixed. This disconnect breeds cynicism. Culture initiatives fail not because people are unwilling, but because the environment has not yet changed enough to make new behaviour viable.
Translating culture into enterprise signals
When culture is treated as a lagging indicator, it becomes diagnostic rather than aspirational.
Instead of asking, “How do we change the culture?” leaders ask:
- What behaviours are currently being selected?
- What does that tell us about our design choices?
- Where are incentives, governance, or decision rights misaligned?
- What risks are people protecting themselves from?
These questions point directly to levers leaders can actually pull.
Where leaders should intervene instead
Leaders influence culture most effectively by intervening upstream. Specifically, by adjusting:
- incentives and performance measures
- decision rights and escalation paths
- governance speed and authority
- protection for surfacing issues early
- consequences for old versus new behaviours
When these elements change, culture follows. When they do not, culture remains exactly where it was, regardless of messaging.
Why this reframing protects value
Misdiagnosing culture leads organisations to invest heavily in activities that do not change outcomes. Meanwhile, value continues to erode through misaligned behaviour, informal workarounds, and partial adoption. Treating culture as a lagging indicator keeps attention where it belongs: on the design decisions that determine how the organisation actually operates under pressure.
A more practical way to work with culture
Culture is best understood as feedback. It tells leaders whether the system they have designed is producing the behaviour they need. When culture is “wrong,” the question is not how to fix people. It is what the organisation is currently rewarding, protecting, or avoiding. Answering that question leads to action that actually changes results. This is one way of thinking about why change succeeds or fails. Other pieces go deeper into how informal systems, incentives, and leadership behaviour shape what ultimately survives.
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Kotter, J. P., & Heskett, J. L. (1992). Corporate Culture and Performance. Free Press. Kotter and Heskett’s empirical research on culture and organisational performance establishes that culture shifts as a consequence of changed performance realities, not as a precondition for them. Cultures that appeared resistant to change shifted substantially when external pressure made the old way non-viable. Culture changes last because it reflects accumulated learning about what has worked — it does not change until that learning is superseded by new experience of what works now. ↩︎
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Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. Schein’s distinction between artefacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions explains why reaching for culture as a lever is frequently mistimed. Leaders have easiest access to artefacts (stated values, messaging, visible symbols) and least access to the underlying assumptions that actually govern behaviour. Targeting culture means targeting assumptions — which only shift through direct experience of new consequences, not through communication about new values. ↩︎
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Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications. Weick’s framework explains why culture provides a sense of explanatory power that can substitute for structural diagnosis. Culture-as-explanation satisfies the sensemaking need for a coherent account of persistent behavioural patterns — it accounts for what formal structures do not. But it does so by pointing to an emergent property rather than to the specific design decisions that produced it. This makes culture available as a distance mechanism: it explains patterns in ways that defer rather than enable structural intervention. ↩︎