Stop Trying to Fix Your Culture. Start Changing What Creates It.
“We need a culture change.”
It’s a sentence I hear in nearly every strategy session, leadership offsite, or organizational transformation kick-off.
The intention is always right.
But the approach? Often deeply flawed.
Instead of tackling the real levers of culture, organizations reach for superficial tools:
Vision statements
Value posters
Leadership slogans
Workshops with fancy acronyms
Six months later?
The culture hasn’t moved an inch. The same tensions persist. The same behaviors repeat. Why?
Because culture doesn’t change because you want it to.
It changes because the system makes it possible.
What Culture Really Is (and Why It’s So Hard to Change)
From a systems theory perspective, culture is not something you manage.
It’s not a project. Not a program. And certainly not a mood board of aspirational values.
Culture is what Niklas Luhmann called an “unentscheidbare Entscheidungsprämisse” – an undecidable decision premise.
In plain terms: It’s the learned, often invisible rules that guide how people make decisions without consciously thinking about it.
These aren’t rules you can declare. They emerge.
They’re the organizational version of “we’ve always done it this way” – and they exist for a reason. They stabilized because they once worked.
The Problem with Top-Down Culture Change
Leaders often try to “fix” culture by deciding what it should be.
They roll out values like “trust,” “innovation,” and “collaboration” – and expect behaviors to follow.
But here’s the catch:
People aren’t resisting values. They’re reacting to contradictions between what’s said and what’s systemically possible.
If your organizational structure, incentive systems, and decision-making processes stay the same, no slogan will shift the culture.
In fact, those values might start to feel like corporate gaslighting.
What Actually Changes Culture: The System
If culture is emergent, then change happens indirectly – by influencing the system that produces it.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Change the decidable elements:
Shift meeting formats. Rethink decision rights. Review who speaks first and who stays silent.Name the paradoxes:
Explore tensions like control vs. trust, speed vs. diligence, or consistency vs. innovation. Real culture lives in that messy middle ground.Use resistance as data:
Don’t fight it. Resistance often reveals what’s at stake – and what’s still working for someone. That’s valuable information.Invite reflection, not compliance:
Ask, What happens if nothing changes? Invite people into shared sense-making instead of compliance with a new set of rules.Surface what’s already true:
Don’t start with aspirational values. Start with observed behaviors – and ask what those behaviors are solving for.
Culture Follows What You Actually Do
In my work as an HR consultant and systemic coach, I’ve seen this approach bear real, sustainable results.
When leaders shift how they lead – and not just what they say – culture starts to move.
Because culture always follows:
What gets attention
What gets rewarded
What gets repeated
And what gets ignored
So if you’re serious about culture change, skip the poster campaign.
Start asking better questions.
And start changing what creates the culture in the first place.
Want to explore how systems thinking can help your team shift its culture?
Let’s talk – I support organizations in navigating real change with clarity, curiosity, and just the right amount of friction.