GRASS Explained
How culture shows up in everyday organisational life
The short answer: GRASS stands for Gatherings, Rituals, Actions, Symbols and Stories. It is a framework for identifying where culture is expressed and reinforced in the everyday patterns of organisational life. Rather than treating culture as abstract or organisation-wide, GRASS gives leaders five specific places to look and five specific places to act.
What is GRASS?
GRASS stands for Gatherings, Rituals, Actions, Symbols and Stories. It is a framework for identifying where culture is already at work inside an organisation, and where leaders can work with it. Culture can feel abstract until you know where to look. Every organisation already has gatherings, rituals, actions, symbols and stories. They are happening whether you design them or not. The question is whether they are reinforcing the culture you want or the culture you have inherited by default.
What are the five elements of GRASS?
Gatherings are the moments when people come together. Meetings, town halls, offsites, team lunches. How you gather shapes how people connect. The design of a gathering signals what matters. A town hall where only executives speak sends a different message to one where questions drive the agenda.
Rituals are the repeating practices that create rhythm and meaning. How you onboard new people. How you start the week. How you celebrate wins. How you end a project. Rituals create predictability and belonging. They tell people "this is how we do things here."
Actions are the everyday decisions and behaviours that accumulate. What leaders pay attention to. What gets funded. What gets rewarded. Who gets promoted. Actions are the most honest expression of culture because they reveal priorities in practice. What gets funded and who gets promoted says more about a culture than any stated value.
Symbols are breadcrumbs to help you see your culture at work. Office layout. The CEO's calendar. Who sits where in a meeting. What is on the walls. Symbols are powerful because people read them constantly, often unconsciously. A leader who leaves their door open is sending a symbol. A leader who is never on the floor is sending a different one.
Stories are the narratives that circulate inside an organisation. The founding myths. The cautionary tales. The story of the time the CEO admitted they were wrong. Stories carry culture because they compress values into something memorable and shareable. The stories people tell new joiners on their first day are more influential than any values statement on a wall.
Why does GRASS matter for leaders?
GRASS matters because it gives leaders five specific places to look and five specific places to act. Culture shifts in the gatherings you design, the rituals you protect, the actions you take, the symbols you create and the stories you tell. A new values statement signals intent. GRASS makes the shift practical.
Most organisations trying to shift culture start too big. They redesign the strategy. They announce a transformation. They roll out a program. GRASS invites a different starting point. Start with what is already there. Notice which of the five elements are reinforcing the culture you want. Notice which are working against it. Then make deliberate, small shifts in the places that matter most.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report (2024) finds that employees in high-engagement workplaces are 23% more profitable and significantly more productive. GRASS gives leaders a way to build that engagement through the patterns already running inside the organisation. The grass is greenest where you water it.
How do leaders use GRASS?
Consider an organisation where trust is low. The usual response is to run a trust- building program. A GRASS approach would ask different questions. What are the gatherings like? Are they performative or genuine? What rituals exist around feedback? Are they safe or punitive? What actions are being rewarded? Are they collaborative or competitive? What symbols of trust exist?
What stories circulate about what happens when someone takes a risk? The answers reveal where trust is being built and where it is being eroded. The shifts are specific: redesign one gathering, introduce one ritual, change one visible action. Culture shifts one element at a time.
How do People & Culture teams use GRASS?
GRASS was built to make culture simple and actionable. For People & Culture teams, that means having a framework that translates culture from something you talk about into something you can diagnose, design and shift.
Most P&C teams inherit the brief to “own culture.” It is one of the most loaded mandates in organisational life. Culture is everyone’s day job, yet P&C is expected to hold the architecture. GRASS provides that architecture. Five observable elements. Five places to look. Five places to act. Instead of trying to shift something that feels abstract, P&C teams can work with what is already there and make it deliberate.
In Shift, Meredith describes three levels of culture accountability: the board monitors it, the CEO and leadership team lead it, and People & Culture brings the expertise and systems that make it work. GRASS gives P&C teams a shared language for that systems role.
Designing onboarding through a GRASS lens
Consider onboarding. Most P&C teams design the induction process. GRASS turns onboarding into a culture question across all five elements. What gatherings does a new person experience in their first week? What rituals signal belonging before they have earned it? What actions from their manager demonstrate that this organisation values what it says it values? What symbols surround them: the quality of their desk, the readiness of their technology, the visibility of their name on arrival? And what stories do they hear before they have formed their own view?
A P&C team using GRASS would audit the onboarding experience across all five elements and design deliberately for each one. The gap between a technically complete induction and a culturally powerful one is almost always a GRASS gap.
Diagnosing engagement data
The same lens changes how P&C teams read engagement data. A GRASS-informed team does not just report engagement scores. They diagnose which elements are strong and which are absent. Low psychological safety might be a rituals problem: the organisation has no safe, repeatable practices for honest conversation. Poor cross-functional collaboration might be a gatherings problem: people from different teams never come together in ways that build connection. A persistent gap between stated values and lived experience is almost always an actions problem: what leaders tolerate is louder than what they espouse.
GRASS turns an engagement survey from a reporting exercise into a culture assessment.
Partnering with leaders
GRASS also changes how P&C partners with leaders. Instead of delivering culture programs and hoping something shifts, a P&C team using GRASS can walk into a leadership team meeting and ask: which of the five elements is working for you right now? Which one needs attention?
The conversation moves from abstract culture talk to specific, observable patterns. A leader who says “our culture feels off” is stuck. A leader who says “our gatherings have become performative and our rituals have disappeared” knows where to start. P&C’s role is to help leaders see the pattern and then design the shift.
Building a culture strategy
For P&C teams building a culture strategy, GRASS provides the diagnostic structure. Audit each element across the organisation. Identify where the strongest signals are reinforcing the desired culture. Identify where default patterns are undermining it. Build the strategy from what is already there, because the future culture is already present; it is just not evenly distributed yet.
This is a fundamentally different starting point from designing a culture program, running a survey, and hoping the results shift next year. GRASS grounds culture strategy in what is observable and what is actionable, every day.
GRASS at a glance
| Element | What to observe | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Gatherings | How people are brought together: meetings, offsites, town halls | Who has voice, how decisions are framed, what is valued |
| Rituals | Repeating practices: onboarding, weekly rhythms, celebrations | What the organisation reinforces and what it neglects |
| Actions | What gets funded, rewarded, promoted, ignored | Priorities in practice rather than principle |
| Symbols | Office layout, calendar signals, visible leadership behaviours | What people read as true regardless of stated values |
| Stories | Narratives that circulate: founding myths, cautionary tales | What the organisation remembers, celebrates and warns against |
Try this shift
In your next meeting, pay attention to one thing: what does the way people gather tell you about what the organisation values? What is signalled tells you more than what is said.
Meredith Wilson is a culture expert, speaker, author and mentor. She works with leaders to shape, shift and lead culture.
Author of Shift: Everyday actions leaders can take to shift culture (2023)
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I use GRASS to assess my organisation's culture?
Start by observing each element in turn. What do your gatherings signal about what matters? What rituals persist, and what do they reinforce? What actions are rewarded, and which are ignored? What symbols are visible to anyone walking through the door? What stories do people tell new starters? The patterns across all five reveal where culture is being built and where it is drifting.
What is the difference between rituals and gatherings in GRASS?
Gatherings are the moments people come together: meetings, offsites, town halls, team lunches. Rituals are the repeating practices that create rhythm and meaning, whether or not people are in the same room. An onboarding process is a ritual. A Monday standup is both a gathering and a ritual. The distinction matters because rituals often run without scrutiny. They accumulate meaning precisely because nobody is designing them.
Can GRASS be used to change an organisation's culture?
GRASS identifies where to act. It gives leaders five specific entry points into a system that can otherwise feel overwhelming. Culture shifts happen one element at a time: redesign one gathering, introduce one ritual, change one visible action. The shift is in the pattern.
What's your next step?
CultureShift MasterclassHow leaders multiply culture. 90 minutes online or two hours in person. A practical experience in reading your culture through GRASS and making deliberate shifts where they matter most. Explore Masterclass |
Leading CultureShape, shift and scale culture. A 12-month program for leaders responsible for making culture work across their organisation. Explore Program |
Get the book: ShiftEveryday actions leaders can take to shift culture. Practical, grounded and written for leaders who are responsible for making culture work. Buy Shift |
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Programs
CultureShift Masterclass — Learn to read and shift your culture with Meredith
Leading Culture — A 12-month program for leaders shaping culture in real time
