There is a specific way people talk about culture when they do not intend to change it.
They say culture takes time. They say these things are generational. They say mindsets do not shift overnight and they say it carefully, with the tone of adults explaining reality to children. Three to five years is the usual range. Long enough to sound serious while moving the discussion safely beyond the next quarter, and usually beyond the tenure of whoever is speaking.
It is one of management’s more useful myths.
Not because culture can be changed with slogans or because values on the wall are enough, but because “culture takes years” can be a shield. It allows leaders to talk about aspiration without confronting behaviour; it lets them commission surveys, launch roadmaps, refine language, and leave untouched the few daily habits that are actually producing the culture they claim to dislike.
At a recent IMI’s Lunch and Learn, Andrew Saffron—one of the world’s leading culture change practitioners — offered an alternative: culture change does not have to take years, and most organisations do not have years anyway.
Arguably, that matters more now than it might have two decades ago. In a more volatile economy, with competitiveness under pressure and organisations being asked to adapt faster, culture is a competitiveness variable. A leadership team that cannot change a handful of visible behaviours quickly will struggle to execute any strategy that depends on speed, candour, coordination or learning.
Culture is not soft. It is strategic infrastructure.
The mistake is to think culture is soft because it is social.
As Andrew argued, the only useful reason to talk about culture is to ask whether it helps an organisation achieve its goals or gets in the way. This moves culture out of the realm of mood and into the realm of strategic consequence.
It shows up in decision speed, in candour, in what gets escalated, in how conflict is handled, and in whether people learn quickly or hide well. It shows up in whether people raise bad news early or cosmetically improve it on the way up and in whether teams protect the whole business or merely their corner of it.
One of the sharpest ideas in Andrew’s session was that culture is behaviour plus infrastructure. Not behaviour alone or systems alone. Both. The habits people see, and the environment that keeps those habits in place. What leaders do in public. What gets promoted and what gets forgiven. What gets measured and what people need permission for. What they are punished for doing badly, and sometimes for doing well.
If strategy is a set of choices about where to play and how to win, then culture matters only to the extent that it helps those choices survive contact with reality.
Why so much culture work becomes decorative
The organisation announces values, but meeting norms remain unchanged. It asks for innovation, but punishes failed experiments. It talks about accountability, but senior people miss deadlines without consequence. It calls for collaboration, but budgets, incentives and reporting lines still reward local protectionism.
The stated culture and the lived culture diverge, and everyone notices. Staff do not need another explanation at that point. They need evidence.
So the useful question is not, “How do we transform the culture over three years?” It is, “What would people have to see senior leaders doing differently over the next ninety days to conclude this time is real?”
That’s a harder question because it moves the conversation from symbolism to sacrifice.
Every serious culture shift requires leaders giving something up. Usually something they are rather fond of. Like the pet behaviour or the small exemption they grant themselves while speaking earnestly about standards for everyone else.
For one leadership team, it might be the habit of reopening decisions after the meeting or tolerating vague ownership because naming an owner feels impolite. For another, it is rewarding heroics over discipline, noise over clarity, attendance over contribution. Sometimes it is more intimate than that: the senior executive who mistakes visibility for leadership, control for quality, or optimism for honesty.
Culture does not slow down because people do not understand the email. It slows down because the people at the top keep signalling, often quite visibly, that the old rules still apply.
The most credible culture shifts are often mundane at first. Alan Mulally’s turnaround at Ford did not begin with a values campaign. It began with different behaviours in the management room, e.g. clearer visibility, more honest reporting, and fewer theatrical protections of status. Culture changed because the room changed. That is usually how it starts.
The culture your strategy actually requires
This is why Andrew’s emphasis on defining the culture you need matters. Not a generic culture or an “admirable” one, but the one your strategy requires.
That distinction is where many organisations lose a year.
They pursue universal virtues when they need strategic imperatives. They say they want trust, collaboration, innovation and excellence, which is like saying they want health, prosperity and a nice holiday. Fine aspirations, but operationally useless.
A better question is to ask what must be true in the day-to-day behaviour of this organisation if our strategy is to work?
That is where culture becomes strategically serious. Not when it expresses what an organisation admires about itself, but when it clarifies the few behavioural conditions without which the strategy will fail.
If the market is moving quickly, perhaps the culture imperative is speed with learning: we move, we test, we learn, we move again. If the environment is unstable, perhaps it is sharper external sensing and faster cross-functional response. If growth depends on execution across silos, then clarity of trade-offs and handoffs may matter more than another campaign about “belonging.”
The point is specificity. Culture becomes actionable when it is tied to competitive necessity. The question cannot be, “What kind of culture would make us feel proud?” Instead it is, “What kind of culture would make our strategy more likely to work?
What fast culture change actually looks like
And once those imperatives are clear, the work becomes less mystical than people pretend.
Andrew outlined a practical sequence. Start with strategy. From that, define the culture imperatives. Then work top-down with the executive team, not as theatre but as coaching and behavioural reset. Move middle-out with senior leaders, translating the imperatives into concrete action plans. Then support teams across the business to embed them locally.
In other words: do not merely announce a culture. Build it through the chain of management, where most cultures are either protected or quietly murdered.
The organisations that move fastest on culture are usually not the ones with the most eloquent language. They are the ones willing to do four unfashionable things. Define the few behaviours that matter. Set the standards clearly. Give people the time, skill and support to meet them. Then attach consequences, positive and negative, so that the system stops lying.
That final point is where seriousness begins.
A leadership team cannot say collaboration matters and continue rewarding individual empire-building. It cannot say feedback matters and avoid hard conversations. It cannot say pace matters and permit endless recirculation of decisions. Culture is always revealed in consequences: what gets praised, what gets funded, what gets blocked, who advances, and who does not.
A quarter of evidence
This is why culture work, done properly, is not separate from execution. It is execution. It is the removal of ambiguity around how things get done here. It is the reduction of drag and the replacement of ritualised language with visible proof.
And visible proof is the only thing people believe.
Not the poster or the launch deck or the CEO note. Certainly not the annual survey on its own. People believe what leaders repeat under pressure. They believe what happens when someone senior breaks the rule. They believe what gets discussed in Monday’s meeting and what gets quietly ignored.
So perhaps the most useful question is the one you already had: what behaviour, if adopted by the top fifty leaders, would change everything?
It is a good question because it forces choice. It asks leaders to identify the behavioural keystone, the shift that would make other shifts easier: faster decisions, clearer ownership, more honest escalation, better challenge, cleaner trade-offs, more disciplined follow-through.
Once that behaviour is named, the rest becomes harder to evade. Where is it absent? Who models it now? Who undermines it? What routines reinforce the opposite? What must leaders stop doing for this to become credible? What would staff need to see within thirty days to believe the organisation has turned?
That is culture work with some steel in it.
The point is not that deep culture change is effortless. Some histories are entrenched and some systems are perverse. Some leadership teams are not equal to the task. But difficulty is not the same as duration. A culture can begin to change very quickly when senior leaders make a small number of visible, sustained, strategically coherent changes to behaviour and consequence.
The organisations that pull ahead over the next few years are unlikely to be those with the warmest language about culture. They will be the ones whose leaders can reduce friction, increase truth-telling and speed up collective action.
Most organisations do not need another year of talking about culture. They need a solid quarter of evidence.
And that, perhaps, is the real challenge in all this. Not whether culture can move faster. Because it can. But whether leaders are prepared to move first.
