Drive Innovation, Light Change
Culture doesn't usually announce itself as the problem. Instead, leaders notice behaviours that keep recurring: people avoid difficult conversations, collaboration works well within teams but poorly between them, decisions are revisited after meetings, initiative is encouraged but people continue to wait for permission, or a new strategy calls for experimentation while familiar ways of working quickly reassert themselves.
Individually, these can look like communication, leadership, accountability or performance problems, and sometimes that is exactly what they are. But when behaviours become persistent and patterned — particularly when they survive repeated attempts to change them — it may be worth asking what people have learned about how things really work here.
That is where culture becomes consequential.
Values matter. So do mission statements, leadership messages and formal expectations. But people also learn about their organization from experience, noticing what happens when someone disagrees with a leader, whether mistakes invite learning or blame, which deadlines really matter, whose opinions carry weight, whether collaboration survives when pressure rises, and what happens to someone who challenges an established way of working.
Over time, those experiences create expectations about what is normal, useful, safe and likely to succeed. Some of those expectations support what the organization is trying to accomplish; others can quietly work against it.
So when culture appears to be getting in the way, the useful question isn't simply "Do we have the right values?" We also need to ask: What have people learned about how to succeed, belong and get things done here — and what keeps teaching them that?
Culture often makes itself known through symptoms that are easy to interpret too quickly. A leadership team might describe employees as resistant to change when experience has taught people that new initiatives rarely survive. Managers may complain that people aren't taking enough initiative while employees have learned that acting without permission creates risk.
An organization may value candour while people have discovered that difficult information is better received when softened, delayed or kept private. Teams may be urged to collaborate while performance systems, resource competition or everyday consequences continue to reward local success.
None of those examples proves that culture is the explanation. They illustrate why persistent organizational problems can deserve investigation before prescription.
Every workplace develops informal knowledge about how things get done. Some of that knowledge is enormously useful because it allows people to coordinate, exercise judgment and navigate situations that no policy could anticipate.
But informal expectations can also begin working against organizational intentions. People may learn which conversations to avoid, when not to take a risk, whose approval really matters, which stated priorities can safely be ignored or which behaviours are necessary to fit in. When those expectations become widely learned and repeatedly reinforced, changing a policy or issuing another communication may have surprisingly little effect.
Organizations communicate constantly through what happens after people act. If someone raises a difficult concern and becomes excluded from subsequent conversations, other people notice. If taking initiative produces additional work but little recognition, people learn from that too. If problematic behaviour delivers strong results and carries few consequences, the organization is teaching something regardless of what its values statement says.
This is an important premise behind our Consequences@Work™ thinking. Rather than asking only which behaviours an organization wants, we can examine behaviours people actually observe and the consequences that appear to follow them. This creates a different question: what might the organization be teaching people to repeat?
Most organizations can describe the culture they want. The more difficult question is whether everyday experience consistently supports it.
An organization can sincerely value innovation while making experimentation costly. It can champion collaboration while rewarding individual competition, or promote accountability while allowing difficult decisions to migrate endlessly between committees. These contradictions do not necessarily indicate hypocrisy; organizations are complicated systems, and misalignments can accumulate gradually without anyone deliberately creating them.
They still matter. When what people are told and what they repeatedly experience point in different directions, experience can become the more powerful teacher.
There may not be one perfectly uniform organizational culture. Teams, locations, professions, functions and leadership groups can develop somewhat different expectations about how work happens, and a behaviour considered normal in one part of an organization may seem surprising in another.
Those differences aren't automatically unhealthy. Subcultures can help groups adapt to the particular work they perform. They become more consequential when differing expectations create friction, undermine coordination or make the organization's larger intentions difficult to carry out.
We don't begin by assuming that every persistent organizational difficulty is a culture problem. We begin by gathering evidence, which can include employee perspectives, leadership conversations, stories about consequential workplace experiences, values and norms, observed behaviours, recurring barriers and the narratives people use to explain how their organization works.
Culture Digs™ provides one structured way of gathering this evidence. It allows people to describe the culture they experience, including values, norms, barriers and organizational stories, rather than reducing culture to a single score.
Increasingly, our analysis also looks beyond individual responses toward candidate cultural propositions: statements about what the accumulated evidence suggests people may have learned about working in the organization. Those propositions can then be examined for recurring themes, differences between groups and broader organizational patterns.
The progression is from evidence to propositions, propositions to themes, and themes to patterns. The objective isn't to declare what an organization's culture "is" from a survey, but to develop a sufficiently grounded interpretation of how culture may be operating and where it matters.
Making culture visible is useful only if it improves the choices an organization can make. Sometimes an organization discovers strengths that deserve protection. Sometimes a familiar explanation turns out to be too simple. Sometimes a problematic behaviour makes considerably more sense once the consequences surrounding it become visible, and sometimes the organization discovers a genuine gap between the culture it intends and the culture people have learned through experience.
That creates a more practical starting point for change. Instead of asking only "How do we change our culture?", we can ask "What would people need to experience differently in order to learn something different about working here?"
The answer might point toward leadership behaviour, expectations, processes, recognition, consequences, decision practices or other aspects of organizational life. The appropriate response depends upon the pattern the evidence reveals, which is why understanding the culture should precede choosing the intervention.
We keep seeing behaviours that contradict our values.
Restating the values may not change very much if everyday experience continues to teach something different. It may be useful to investigate what happens when those behaviours occur, what surrounds them and what may be reinforcing their repetition.
People seem reluctant to speak candidly.
The issue may not be a lack of communication skill or confidence. People may have learned something from previous experiences about the consequences of raising difficult information, disagreeing, challenging assumptions or admitting uncertainty.
We say we want more initiative, but people keep waiting for permission.
Employees may be responding quite rationally to what previous experience has taught them about autonomy, risk and decision authority. Understanding those learned expectations can be more productive than simply asking people to become more proactive.
Different parts of the organization seem to play by different rules.
Meaningful subcultural differences may exist. Understanding where expectations diverge can help determine whether those differences are useful adaptations to different kinds of work or sources of organizational friction.
We've tried to change the culture before, but it hasn't really moved.
Previous efforts may have concentrated on articulating aspirations without sufficiently changing the experiences through which people learn how the organization actually works. A new set of values will struggle to overcome old lessons if everyday experience continues to reinforce them.
Something feels off, but we can't put our finger on it.
You don't need to know in advance that culture is the problem. A thoughtful culture inquiry can help determine whether meaningful patterns exist and whether they are consequential, without requiring the conclusion before the investigation begins.
"Culture change" can sound like a program to be launched, complete with new language, workshops, communications and expectations. Those things can sometimes be useful, but beginning with the intervention creates a risk that an organization will attempt to change a culture it has not yet understood particularly well.
We prefer to begin by looking carefully at what people experience, listening to the stories they tell, examining which behaviours recur and noticing what gets rewarded, tolerated or discouraged. From there, we can look for the expectations people appear to have learned, consider where those expectations support or collide with organizational intentions, and decide what the evidence makes reasonable to change.
Sometimes culture really is getting in the way. The first task is to understand how, because that creates a much better chance of changing something that matters.
Talk with Guiding Star about what's happening in your culture →
Organizational Culture
Explore how values, norms, expectations and experience shape what people learn about how work really happens.
Culture Digs™
Surface cultural evidence and turn employee perspectives into clearer propositions, themes and patterns.
Consequences@Work™
Examine what happens after people act to reveal which behaviours the organization may be teaching people to repeat or avoid.
Culture Integrity
Identify where articulated values and everyday experience reinforce one another — and where they pull apart.
When you work with Guiding Star, you ignite real transformation — in your people, your teams, and your impact. Let's spark light, warmth, and lasting excellence for your customers, donors, and stakeholders.
Reach out today. Let's build something brilliant together.
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