Updated June, 2023

Strategy & culture do breakfast together

By Sean Carroll

read time 6 mins

Let’s start by bringing culture and strategy into the same conversation. We find it helpful to ask, what culture is required to achieve your strategy? This brings sharper attention to the notion that the biggest barrier to strategy execution is often the default culture, whose most fundamental role is to protect what’s sacred and keep its many people safe. Therefore, working on strategy without working on culture concurrently, is like having one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake.

Most organisations today conceive of their strategy and growth plans independently or sequentially to culture design. They might be connected in the company story and communications but typically not in action or accountability. There are predictable reasons for why this occurs, including functional reasons – “we do strategy and they do culture and people”. And psychological reasons – “I care about the people issues and leave the big ideas to them”. Regardless of the reason, separating the two topics is porblematic, and it lies at the heart of why most transformations fail. We believe organisations and leaders need to develop their capacity to consider the issues and opportunities inherent in culture and strategy together, iteratively, by design...

Designing culture and strategy together exposes significant questions of alignment and enables better solutions. For example, considering:

  • purpose AND business model
  • employee experience and values AND customer experience and value proposition
  • leadership work AND innovative development

Indeed, culture and strategy are just different lenses on the common organisational problems of performance, reputation and growth.

Another question we find helpful to ask is, what is your strategy for achieving your aspirational culture? This question is anchored in two important beliefs. Firstly, it’s important to set cultural aspirations that are closely tied to your strategy, not just a set of engagement goals or values statements. Engagement is an important component of a high performing culture, but not the same thing. And values are a crucial articulation of the best parts of your culture, that need to be protected, but they don’t typically describe a cultural ambition.

Secondly, you can’t just talk this stuff into reality – culture design is an investment and like all important investments, it needs a plan and some decisions about how to prioritise our scarce resources – time, attention, money and talent.

Finally, let’s talk about design. Strategy and culture are both design challenges, meaning they require intention, curiosity, iteration and learning. The alternative view would be to see strategy and culture as a set of interventions that can be plucked from a management playbook. Our challenge with this approach is that most management playbooks were created in the 20th century, when the world was different.

Treating our strategy and culture as a design challenge causes us to step back and examine our context today and emerging, and to honour and take forward the best of our past. It causes us to make bold choices, and remain humble as we learn our way forward. It causes us to hear the many voices in our system, and to make decisions that won’t always be popular. These are just some of the paradoxes that good design uncovers and requires leadership to examine and manage.

As the great management and life theorist, Dr Suess once said, “nobody said it would be easy, they just said it would be worth it”. We can’t escape the feeling that this work is harder now than it used to be, but the sense of fulfilment is so much greater. So, let’s start with three questions:

  • What is the culture for our strategy?
  • What is the strategy for our culture?
  • How might we design a strategy and culture that meets our emerging context?

—Sean Carroll, ByMany

First published 5 November, 2020

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ByMany acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, traditional owners of the land on which we have our head office. We pay our respects to the Wurundjeri Elders past, present and future.