Culture: The Operating System You're Actually Running

Additional documents that add value: employee survey data, exit interview themes, org charts (especially the informal one), strategy documents, any previous "culture deck" or values statement.

Determine the Mode

Ask: "Are we doing a full culture diagnostic, a review of an existing assessment, or setting up alert triggers?"

• If no previous culture session exists in company-context.md, default to Diagnostic.
• If a previous session exists and the user wants a check-in, default to Review.
• If the user mentions specific risks, transitions, or monitoring needs, suggest Alert Triggers (can be combined with either of the other modes).

Then follow the appropriate track below.

Mode 1: Diagnostic (Full Session)

Time guidance: 30 minutes minimum. Probably longer. Culture is the thing people think they understand and almost never do. The uncomfortable moments are the valuable ones — don't rush past them. Sleep on Part 3 if you need to. The best culture insights surface at 2am when you stop performing and start being honest.

This is the deep session. Run it the first time, or when something fundamental has shifted — new leadership, a merger, a crisis, or the creeping suspicion that the organisation you're running isn't the one you think you're running.

Part 1: The Culture You Think You Have

This is the dating profile. The version of yourself you'd put on a slide.

Ask:

• "What are your stated values? The ones on the wall, the website, the onboarding deck."
• "If a journalist asked 'what's your culture like?' — what would the CEO say?"
• "What behaviors do you reward? What do you celebrate? What stories get told about 'how we do things here'?"
• "When you're hiring, what's the cultural pitch? What do you tell candidates about working here?"

Write it down. Get specific. Vague words like "innovative" or "collaborative" or "people-first" don't count until there's a concrete behavior attached. "We're innovative" means nothing. "Engineers can spend 20% of their time on self-directed projects and three of those became products last year" means something.

The dating profile matters — not because it's accurate, but because the gap between this and reality tells you everything about cultural self-awareness. A small gap means leadership sees clearly. A large gap means there's a fantasy culture and an actual culture, and they've stopped talking to each other.

Part 2: The Culture You Actually Have

Now kill the dating profile. Put it aside. We're going to look at behavioral evidence — what people actually do when nobody's writing a values statement.

Culture isn't what you say. It's the pattern of behaviors that persist because they get rewarded — or at least tolerated. You find the real culture by watching what happens, not by reading what's framed.

Probe each of these dimensions. Push for specific examples, not generalisations.

How Ideas Move

• Where do new ideas actually come from? Top-down? Bottom-up? A specific person or team?
• What happens to an idea from a junior person? Does it get heard? Does it get credit? Does it get killed with "that's interesting, but..."?
• How many layers does an idea pass through before someone can act on it?
• "Tell me about the last genuinely new idea that came from someone unexpected. What happened to it?"

How Failure Gets Handled

This one reveals more than anything else. Forget what the values deck says about "learning from failure."

• "Tell me about the last real failure. Not a minor miss — a genuine cock-up. What happened to the people involved?"
• Did it get discussed openly or buried?
• Was there a post-mortem, and if so, was it honest or performative?
• Who got blamed? (If the answer is "nobody," push harder. Someone always gets blamed — the question is whether it's explicit or ambient.)
• "What would happen to someone's career here if they tried something bold and it failed visibly?"

How Decisions Actually Get Made

The org chart says one thing. Reality says another.

• "Who really makes decisions here? Not who's supposed to — who actually does?"
• How long does a meaningful decision take from 'we should do this' to action?
• What gets decided by data, what gets decided by the loudest voice, and what gets decided by inertia?
• Is dissent safe? Can someone push back on the CEO in a meeting and still have a job the next day?
• "Tell me about a decision everyone knew was wrong but nobody stopped. What does that tell you?"

How People Treat Each Other

• Is conflict addressed or avoided? (Both are cultural signals.)
• What happens between departments? Collaboration or territory?
• Who gets listened to — and who gets talked over?
• How do people talk about each other when they're not in the room?
• "If I were invisible in your office for a week, what would surprise me?"

What Gets Time and Attention

Culture lives in calendars and budgets, not in mission statements.

• What do leaders actually spend their time on? (Not what they say — what does the calendar show?)
• What gets measured obsessively? What never gets measured at all?
• When there's a conflict between a stated value and a quarterly target, which wins? Every time?
• "Where does the money actually go? Follow it. The budget tells you what the culture truly values."

Part 3: The Culture Underneath the Culture

Every organisation has subcultures. The engineering team has a different culture than sales. The London office isn't the same as the factory floor. That's normal. The question is whether these subcultures are complementary or at war.

Subcultures

• "Are there teams or locations that feel like different companies? What makes them different?"
• Which subculture is dominant? Which is marginalized? Who sets the cultural tone?
• Is there a "headquarters culture" that the rest of the organisation resents?

Fault Lines

• Where are the tensions? Not the obvious ones — the ones everyone knows about but nobody says out loud.
• Old guard vs. new hires? Founders vs. professional management? Remote vs. in-office?
• "If this company were a family, what would the Thanksgiving dinner arguments be about?"

History

Culture isn't designed. It accumulates. Like geological strata, every era leaves a layer.

• "What cultural artifacts remain from previous eras? What habits persist even though the reason for them is gone?"
• Has there been a previous culture change effort? What happened? (If it failed, that failure is now part of the culture — people learned that culture initiatives are performative.)
• Are there pieces of furniture from a previous apartment — habits, processes, norms that made sense in an earlier version of the company but no longer fit? Name them.

Part 4: The Gap Analysis

Now the hard part. Put the culture you actually have next to the culture your strategy demands.

Every strategy assumes a certain kind of organisation. A speed-based strategy needs a culture that tolerates fast failure. A quality-based strategy needs obsessive attention to detail. A growth strategy needs a culture comfortable with ambiguity and change. An innovation strategy needs psychological safety. These aren't nice-to-haves — they're prerequisites.

For each gap, push on the "Changeable?" column hard:

• "Is this a skill gap (trainable), a structural gap (fixable with systems), or an identity gap (people would have to become different people)?"
• Skill and structural gaps are addressable. Identity gaps are the ones that break culture change programmes.
• A slide deck never changed a culture. If the gap requires people to behave differently, what would make that behavior the path of least resistance? (Incentives, structure, who gets promoted, what gets measured.)

Closing the Diagnostic

No culture change plan. Not yet. Anyone who walks out of a single session with a culture change plan is fooling themselves. Instead:

1. Reflect the gap. Say it back plainly. "Here's the culture you described. Here's the culture the evidence points to. Here's the distance between them."

2. Name what's working. Every culture has strengths — things that persist because they genuinely serve the organisation. Don't lose those in a rush to fix the gaps. Culture change that destroys the good stuff is just vandalism.

3. Surface the hard question. There's always one thing that came up in this session that nobody wants to deal with. Name it. Don't solve it — just make sure it's on the table and can't be un-seen.

4. The owner question: "Who in this organisation has the authority, credibility, and will to actually shift culture? Not who should — who can? Is that person in the room?"

If the answer to the owner question is "nobody" or "we'd need to hire someone," that's the real finding of this session.

Update company-context.md

After the diagnostic, update the following in company-context.md:

Culture section: Update with:

• Declared culture summary (the dating profile)
• Observed culture summary (the behavioral evidence)
• Key subcultures and fault lines
• The gap analysis table (full, with Changeable? column)

Add a row to the Session log:

Add any unresolved tensions or the "hard question" to the Open questions section.

Mode 2: Review

Time guidance: 10-15 minutes if the world hasn't moved much. If you start finding surprises, stop the review and switch to a full Diagnostic — something shifted and a quick pass won't cut it.

This is the "since last time" check. Run it quarterly if there's an active culture effort, every 6 months otherwise, or whenever something meaningful changes.

Steps

1. Load company-context.md. Read the existing Culture section, gap analysis table, and session log.

2. Check: has behavior shifted?

   • Walk through each row of the gap analysis table.
   • For each gap: "Is there concrete evidence — not intention, evidence — that this has moved?"
   • Evidence means: different decisions being made, different people getting promoted, different conversations happening, different things getting measured.
   • If someone says "we're working on it" but can't point to a behavioral change, the gap hasn't moved. Record that honestly.

3. Any new cultural evidence?

   • Incidents, departures, hires, conflicts, wins, or failures that reveal something about the real culture.
   • "Has anything happened since last time that made you think 'that's who we really are'?"
   • Exit interviews, if available, are gold. People tell the truth on the way out.

4. Has the strategy changed?

   • If the strategy has shifted (new markets, new model, different growth target), the "Culture the strategy requires" column may need updating.
   • A strategy pivot without a culture check is like changing the destination without checking whether the vehicle can handle the new road.

5. Update the gap analysis table. For each dimension:

   • Has the gap narrowed? (Evidence.)
   • Has the gap held? (Why — resistance, neglect, or it's harder than expected?)
   • Has the gap widened? (Flag this immediately. A widening culture-strategy gap is an early sign the strategy will fail.)

6. Log the review in the session log. Note what moved, what didn't, and whether any gaps are widening.

Mode 3: Alert Triggers

These are tripwires. Define them once, monitor them continuously. When a trigger fires, it's time to act — not to have another conversation about acting.

Culture-Strategy Misalignment Triggers

These fire when the culture gap is actively threatening strategy execution.

• "If decision speed hasn't improved by [date], the [specific strategy initiative] is at risk."
• "If cross-team collaboration on [project] hasn't improved within [timeframe], the integration won't deliver."
• "If we still can't have honest conversations about [topic] by [date], we'll keep making the same mistake."
• "If the gap between declared and actual culture on [dimension] hasn't narrowed in [timeframe], the values statement is fiction and should be retired or rewritten."

Regression Triggers

Old patterns returning. Culture change is not linear — it regresses under stress.

• "If [old behavior pattern] reappears during [stressful period — e.g., quarter-end, a crisis, a missed target], the change hasn't taken root."
• "If [new hire / promoted leader] reverts to [old cultural norm], the culture isn't strong enough to absorb newcomers yet."
• "If [the thing that was supposed to stop] happens again, it means the incentives haven't actually changed — only the rhetoric."

Integration Triggers

Events that reshape culture whether you plan for it or not.

• "If a merger or acquisition closes, run a full Diagnostic within 90 days. Two cultures are now colliding — ignoring that doesn't make it go away."
• "If a reorganisation moves more than 20% of people into new reporting lines, check subculture dynamics within 60 days."
• "If a senior leader departs or arrives, assess which cultural norms they carried. Leaders are culture carriers — when they move, culture moves."
• "If headcount grows by more than 30% in a year, the culture you had is being diluted. That's not automatically bad, but it's automatic."

Recording Triggers

Add triggers to the Active assumptions table in company-context.md:

When a trigger fires, run either a Review (if it's a single dimension) or a full Diagnostic (if the landscape has shifted broadly).

Connection to Other Skills

Culture doesn't exist in isolation. It shows up — or fails to show up — in everything else.

• Strategy Map (eterdis-strategy-map): Culture gaps often explain delivery gaps. If the strategy map shows a broken link between resources and delivery capability, check whether culture is the missing bridge. An organisation that can't collaborate won't deliver an integrated product, no matter what the project plan says.

• Playing to Win (eterdis-playing-to-win): The "What management systems do we need?" choice requires cultural support. You can design the perfect management system, but if the culture resists transparency, accountability, or speed, the system is dead on arrival.

• Protoloop (eterdis-protoloop): Track Two — building toward a future offering — demands specific cultural traits: tolerance for ambiguity, patience with non-linear progress, willingness to fund things that don't have immediate ROI. If the culture is purely execution-oriented, Track Two will starve.

• Pre-mortem (eterdis-pre-mortem): Culture is one of the most common failure modes. When a pre-mortem surfaces "we won't actually do this because that's not how things work here," that's a culture flag. Route it back to this skill.

Framework References

• Schein, Edgar (2010), Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4th edition. The three-level model (artifacts, espoused values, underlying assumptions) remains the gold standard for understanding why culture is hard to see and harder to change.
• Westrum, Ron (2004), "A typology of organisational cultures," BMJ Quality & Safety. Pathological, bureaucratic, and generative cultures — useful for classifying what you find.
• Sull, Donald & Sull, Charles (2022), "Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation," MIT Sloan Management Review. Empirical evidence that culture is not a soft issue — it's the #1 predictor of attrition.

Culture assessment applied through Eterdis consulting practice. Culture is the operating system your organisation is actually running — not the one in the brochure. To work through culture gaps with a guide who won't let you look away, visit eterdis.com or book a conversation at eterdis.com/contact.