What your culture is reading from you right now Culture shifts when leaders send a new signal consistently. That is the mechanism. Everything else is context. This is about something more specific than values posters or strategy cascades. It is the observable pattern of behaviour a leader emit...

The suitcase is unpacked. The map is still open. I started writing this email at an airport in Croatia, bags packed, boarding pass open, about to begin the long trek home. There is a particular feeling that arrives at the end of a trip. You stand in a departure lounge with a head full of things ...

  Most culture change efforts are designed to fail. What if the approach guarantees it? Leaders announce a culture shift, a program gets designed, workshops roll out, and posters go up. The posters have a longer half life than the commitment. Twelve months later the organisation is roughly where...

Every organisation has a strategy for growth. Most also have a strategy for talent, for technology, for market positioning. Very few have a strategy for the thing that determines whether any of those others will actually work. Culture is the operating environment in which your strategy either ga...

By October, leadership energy often drifts. Urgency rises. Important work risks being crowded out by the noise. Add to this mix, the frictions in our teams become frustrations and fractures as people's patience wears thin. Maybe you're feeling this yourself? It is tempting, especially now, to le...

Culture is always up to something. You may not have asked it to be, but it is. It shapes what people prioritise. It influences how decisions get made. It affects who speaks, who waits, and what happens next. Organisational culture is not a backdrop. It is a system. It moves through our language,...