Leadership & Organisational Culture
Why Most Change Initiatives Fail
UNLEARN
Name the actual rules governing promotion, voice, and legitimacy, not the stated values.
- What Organisational Culture Actually Is
- How Culture Forms (Whether You Intend It or Not)
- Leadership Is an Emotional Role
- Power Isn’t the Problem—Unconscious Power Is
- The Recognition Problem: How Organisations Bleed Talent
- Authentic Leadership vs. Performed Leadership
- How Organisational Scripts Work
- The Cost of Cultural Blindness
- Why Culture Change Initiatives Fail
- The UNSCRIPT™ Approach to Organisational Change
- FAQ
- Related Articles
What Organisational Culture Actually Is
Culture is the shared identity of an organization.
It’s what gets rewarded, tolerated, ignored, or punished, especially under pressure.
Culture answers unspoken questions like:
- What happens if I disagree?
- Who gets heard and who doesn’t?
- Is it safe to make mistakes here?
- What kind of person succeeds in this environment?
These answers are rarely explicit. They’re learned through observation.
Most organisations don’t fail because of strategy. They fail because of culture.
And culture doesn’t live in values decks, mission statements, or off-sites. It lives in behaviour, especially the behaviour people don’t talk about.
Example:
A tech company posts values about “bold thinking” and “challenging assumptions.” In practice:
- Junior engineers who challenge senior decisions get labeled “difficult”
- Women who speak directly in meetings are told they’re “abrasive”
- People who don’t socialise after hours are seen as “not team players”
The stated culture says one thing. The enacted culture rewards another.
This gap is because of organisational scripting. The people enacting the contradictory patterns genuinely believe they’re aligned. They can’t see the scripts they’re performing.
Culture is not designed. It’s absorbed.
How Culture Forms
(Whether You Intend It or Not)
Leadership Behaviour Sets the Tone
Leaders are always modelling, especially when they think they’re not.
How you handle dissent teaches people whether honesty is welcome.
How you respond to failure teaches people whether risk is safe.
How you manage pressure teaches people what matters when things get hard.
“People don’t do what leaders say. They do what leaders get away with.”
If a leader says “speak up” but punishes disagreement through silence, withdrawal, or passive retaliation, people learn the actual rule: compliance, not candor.
Invisible Rules Take Over
Over time, teams internalise unwritten norms:
- Don’t challenge senior voices
- Don’t bring emotions to work
- Don’t slow things down with questions
- Don’t outshine the boss
These rules shape behaviour more powerfully than any stated value.
They’re not written in policy.
They’re encoded in who gets promoted, whose ideas get implemented, and who gets quietly managed out.
Unregulated leaders create regulated teams – through silence, compliance, or burnout.
Power doesn’t disappear by pretending it’s not there.
It operates invisibly, shaping who speaks, who’s heard, and whose reality counts.
The Recognition Problem
Your best people aren’t leaving because of money.
They’re leaving because their competence isn’t legible to your systems.
The Quiet Leak
A mid-level manager who is methodical, low-volume, terrifyingly reliable, rewires a legacy process so the company stops losing a day of work every other week. No one at the monthly meeting reads that line on the slide.
The director notices the loud presenter with the flashier deck and hires two junior analysts to “scale the idea.”
Six months later, the quiet manager resigns. Nobody knows why the best systems thinker left. They only know the churn number went up.
This is the quiet leak. It’s invisible until it’s costly.
If your recognition systems reward performative visibility over actual value creation, you’ll systematically lose your most valuable people.
What Gets Recognised
Most organisations filter for legible signals:
- Charisma and presentation skill
- Meeting visibility and speaking volume
- Quick turnarounds on visible projects
- Cultural fluency with dominant norms
What Goes Unrecognised
- Pattern-spotting and systems thinking
- Depth over speed
- Cultural stewardship and relationship maintenance
- Neurodivergent or immigrant ways of demonstrating competence
- Long-horizon thinking that doesn’t deliver quarterly wins
Gallup estimates replacing a leader costs tens to hundreds of thousands.
But the real cost is strategic.
You lose institutional knowledge, pattern recognition, and trust networks you didn’t know you had.
Performed authenticity maintains the existing power structure while looking inclusive.
Actual authenticity disrupts power by redistributing who gets heard and whose competence counts.
How Organisational Scripts Work
Organisations don’t just have cultures. They have scripts.
Just like individuals perform inherited scripts from family systems, organisations perform scripts inherited from:
- Founders’ unconscious patterns
- Industry norms
- Dominant cultural conditioning
- Historical survival strategies
Example:
A consulting firm claims to value work-life balance. But:
- Partners brag about late-night emails
- Weekend work is normalized in casual conversation
- People who leave on time are called “not hungry enough”
- Promotions go to those who mirror partner availability patterns
The script isn’t written anywhere. But it’s understood that availability = commitment = advancement.
Anyone who tries to set boundaries gets culturally selected out.
Common Organizational Scripts
“Move fast and break things”
Translation: Urgency over sustainability. Burnout as loyalty. Speed mistaken for progress.
“Culture fit”
Translation: Conform to dominant patterns. Difference as threat. Homogeneity as safety.
“Meritocracy”
Translation: Success = worthiness. Structural barriers invisible. Performance as morality.
“We’re a family”
Translation: Boundaries are betrayal. Unlimited availability expected. Leaving is abandonment.
“Data-driven decisions”
Translation: Only quantifiable value counts. Relationship work, cultural stewardship, and long-horizon thinking get deprioritised.
How Scripts Get Enforced
Scripts don’t need explicit policy. They’re maintained through:
- Promotion patterns – Who gets advanced and why
- Meeting dynamics – Whose ideas get airtime and follow-through
- Resource allocation – What work gets funded and supported
- Storytelling – Whose success stories get told and celebrated
- Crisis response – What gets prioritized when things break
Leaders can’t see the patterns they’re swimming in. Especially when those patterns created their success.
The Cost of Cultural Blindness
Innovation stagnation – If only certain types of thinking are legible, you lose the pattern disruptors who see what you can’t.
Talent churn – People don’t leave bad jobs. They leave jobs that can’t recognize their value.
Reputation damage – One viral Glassdoor review or LinkedIn post exposes the gap between stated and enacted values.
Strategic blindspots – Homogeneous thinking creates predictable failure modes. You can’t see the risks your culture trains you to ignore.
Legal and ethical risk – When scripts maintain bias (about gender, race, class, neurodivergence), the organisation becomes legally vulnerable.
Why Diversity Initiatives Fail Without Script Work
You can’t diversify an organisation without changing the scripts that define success.
If “leadership presence” means white, male, neurotypical extroversion patterns, you’ll hire diverse candidates and then select them out through performance reviews that penalize difference.
Real inclusion requires making success legible across different ways of:
- Communicating (direct vs. indirect, verbal vs. written)
- Problem-solving (speed vs. depth, individual vs. collective)
- Leading (visible vs. structural, charismatic vs. steady)
- Contributing (innovation vs. stewardship, disruption vs. maintenance)
This isn’t “lowering standards.” It’s expanding what counts as competence.
Why Culture Change Initiatives Fail
Most culture change follows the same playbook:
- Leadership identifies a problem (low engagement, high turnover, innovation stagnation)
- Consultants are hired to diagnose and prescribe
- New values are articulated
- Workshops and trainings are rolled out
- Behaviors are measured and incentivized
- Things improve slightly, then drift back
It Treats Culture as Content, Not System
You can’t change culture by adding new content (values, training modules, posters). Culture is systemic. It’s reinforced through hiring, promotion, resource allocation, meeting dynamics, and who gets heard.
If you train people on psychological safety but promote the loudest voices, the system wins.
It Targets Behavior Without Touching Scripts
Telling people to “be more collaborative” or “embrace failure” doesn’t work if the underlying scripts say:
- “Asking for help is weakness”
- “Making mistakes gets you demoted”
- “Challenging leadership is career suicide”
Scripts operate unconsciously. Behavioural interventions alone can’t reach them.
It Assumes Leadership Can See the Problem
Leaders often can’t see the scripts they’re reinforcing because they benefit from those scripts. If you rose through the system by performing a certain way, you’ll unconsciously select for people who perform similarly.
This is why diversity initiatives fail. You can’t hire differently if your assessment of “culture fit” is actually “performs the dominant script.”
It Lacks Accountability for Pattern Disruption
Most initiatives focus on “raising awareness” without building mechanisms for pattern interruption. Awareness helps. But it’s not enough. You need people who can name the pattern when it’s happening and have the authority to interrupt it.
You can’t mandate trust. You have to earn it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can organisational culture really change?
Yes, but not through content alone. Culture changes when the systems that enforce scripts change.
This requires leadership willing to disrupt patterns they benefit from.
How long does culture transformation take?
Minimum 12-18 months for meaningful shifts.
Faster attempts usually create performance without integration—people learn to say new things while acting old patterns.
What if leadership doesn’t see the problem?
Then the problem won’t get solved. Cultural blindness at the top prevents pattern recognition below.
External facilitation helps when internal sight is limited.
Do we need to change everything at once?
No. Identify the highest-cost scripts first.
What’s driving turnover? What’s blocking innovation? Start there. Momentum builds.
How do we measure culture change?
Not with engagement surveys alone.
Track: turnover patterns (who’s leaving and why), promotion patterns (who gets advanced), meeting dynamics (who speaks and whose ideas stick), resource allocation (what work gets funded), feedback patterns (what gets dismissed vs. integrated).
What if the scripts come from the founder?
This is common and difficult. Founders often can’t see their patterns as scripts—they see them as “how we do things.”
External intervention helps. Or succession planning that explicitly names what will change.
Is UNSCRIPT™ just diversity training?
No. Diversity training adds content (“be inclusive”).
UNSCRIPT™ dismantles systems that penalise difference. The work overlaps, but the mechanism is different.
What happens to people who can’t adapt?
Some won’t. People whose success depends on the old scripts will experience culture change as loss.
The question is whether you’re optimising for their comfort or organisational health.
Ready to Transform Your Organization’s Culture?
You need pattern disruption at the system level.
