DS Cohen & Associates
In Part One, I argued that culture is not what an organization announces about itself. It is what people learn over time by watching what happens around them, accumulated through thousands of small daily interactions, until those interactions become the way the place runs. If that is true, an awkward question follows. What happens when the people in charge decide the culture is wrong and set out to fix it?
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has spent time in or around a boardroom. Results come in below expectations, the directors conclude that the culture must be the cause, and they reach for the most intuitive lever they have. They hire a new chief executive. The new CEO arrives with a mandate to change the culture, often backed by a consulting firm that promises a transformation within 12 to 18 months. Both parties sound confident and believe they are doing serious work. Yet two years later, in most cases, almost nothing has helped or stuck.
The reason is not a failure of effort or talent. It is a failure of a mental model. The board, the new CEO, and the consultant are all working from a picture of culture that complexity science exposed as wrong some decades ago. They are treating culture as if it were a setting that the right person, with the right framework, could adjust. It is nothing of the sort. Culture is the standing pattern that an entire human system produces from the way it runs day-to-day. You can no more change it by appointing a single person or purchasing a single program than you can change the weather by replacing the forecaster. What a board sees are outcomes. The thousands of small daily interactions and reinforcers that produce those outcomes remain entirely invisible from the boardroom.
What the New Chief Executive Inherits
A new CEO does not arrive in an empty room. They walk into a system in which people already know with great precision what is rewarded here, what is punished here, who succeeds here, and what is dangerous to say out loud. That working knowledge has been built up and ingrained over years of small experiences and observed outcomes, and a new face at the top does not erase any of it. In the language of complexity science, the existing culture is an attractor, the state to which the system returns whenever it is disturbed. New CEOs are themselves a disturbance. Most are absorbed. The few who shift the pattern are those who, slowly and with very little fanfare, change what the system rewards. They alter who gets promoted, who is publicly praised, what is no longer tolerated, and who is quietly invited to leave. The arrival is the easy part. The reinforcement work is what changes, and it does not happen within a single quarter.
What the Consultant Sells
The consultant arrives with a methodology. There will be a diagnostic, workshops, a refreshed set of values, a rollout plan, and a measurement framework. The deliverables will be impressive. The board will be reassured. And yet almost all this work sits at the layer Edgar Schein called artifacts and espoused values, rarely reaching the underlying assumptions or the reinforcing mechanisms that produce the actual pattern of behaviour.
Adaptive systems are not changed by piling new processes and words on top of them. They are changed by altering the underpinnings that produce the existing pattern. The distinction matters far more than it sounds at first. One kind of change is what an organization says about itself. The other is what the organization does and rewards day to day. One sits on the surface. The other quietly shapes behaviours and results.
A leadership offsite results in a new value and mission statement that is only an aspiration. The revised promotion rubric shapes what the organization will reward. It signals a change in who will get protected and who will be exited. The system absorbs everything that is merely said, and quietly returns to its old pattern, in precisely the same way it absorbs CEOs who arrive bearing nothing but words. The rubberband effect is at play; within a short time, things snap back to the original culture.
Why the Fantasy Persists, and What Comes Next
Both the board and the consultant have their own reasons to prefer the fantasy. The board prefers it because it offers a fast, attributable, boardroom-friendly answer to a slow, distributed, and largely unattributable problem. The consultant prefers it because the fantasy is what gets bought. The honest pitch, which would acknowledge that the work will take years, that it will require difficult changes to who is rewarded and who is asked to go, that several senior people will likely become uncomfortable enough to leave on their own, does not win the engagement. So, the fast version is bought; 18 months later, both parties are quietly disappointed, and the cycle begins again with the CEO or another consulting firm.
If you are sitting on a board reaching for a CEO change in the hope of fixing the culture, the more useful question is not who to hire. The more useful questions are why, what and how this organization is run day to day, is producing these results and which of those things you are willing to change? One question is about people and behaviour. The other is about the way the place is built. Only in combination does anything move.
The CEO and the consultant are not the problem. The expectation that either of them can change a culture on their own within the time frame a board would prefer is the problem.
Cultures are not changed by appointment or decree. They are changed by patiently and persistently altering the small, repeated reinforcing behaviours and structures that keep producing the existing pattern.
And that argument leads somewhere uncomfortable. If a culture cannot be installed by declaration, town hall or program, then those cultures that genuinely endure must be doing something quite different. They must be doing something that does not depend on any one leader, any one engagement, or any one moment in time. Why do some organizations maintain the same culture across multiple generations of CEOs without losing it, while others lose theirs the very moment the founder steps away? Part Three turns to that question.
It is the question every board ought to be asking long before it hires the next person it hopes will fix everything.
David S. Cohen is the author of “Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workplace Driven by Values for Lasting Success,” amplifies each of the points of this article using a combination of research and anecdotal stories. The appendix contains sample behavioural interview questions. Selecting the Best is available on Amazon and other online book sellers.
