I’ve noticed some people saying that institutions should adopt a ‘culture-first’ approach to organizational development — even going so far as to say that institutions should fix culture before focusing on strategy. My gut says this is bad advice, but should our guts be doing anything other than reminding us to eat? That’s the topic of today’s post.
Unpacking:
Some community members had interesting thoughts on this, and I want to point you to their comments, which, as always, are at least as interesting as my own.
“Why is this even a question?” is a recurring thought I’ve had — that is, haven’t people already actually studied this question of a) whether an organization should approach Improving Culture and Developing Strategy as separate things that should be sequenced and b) if so, what should that sequence be?
Is it possible for me, in a single post, to put the question to rest? Probably not, but I like the idea of holding myself to that standard, even if only briefly before perhaps accepting that the most I can offer is a useful heuristic you can apply to your day-to-day work. The next time someone says, “We really need to fix our culture”, you should be able to recall this post and respond to the person in question in a way that actually supports the need or desire being expressed.
Misdiagnosis
I think ‘culture problems’ show themselves more often when people aren’t aligned, and alignment is a question of strategy. When an organization has, at best, a plan and no strategy, there’s much more room for low morale, internal friction, and teams working at cross-purposes.
Imagine a rowing team where everyone stops trying their hardest to beat their best time — everyone pulls in their oars, the boat drifts, and Tom starts to notice that Jane has the annoying habit of biting her nails. Tom and his allies approach the captain (apparently called a ‘coxswain in the rowing world): “We need to implement a policy of no nailbaiting on the boat.” Jane and her friends counter: “What about rower autonomy? If we can’t bite our nails, then we need to reconsider whether emotional support animals are permitted on board.” Finally, Andrew suggests a culture-building workshop to address workplace toxicity.
This is a misdiagnosis. The root cause is that the group is no longer working toward a common purpose, which is what Strategy is all about.
Edgar Schein, whose research on organizational culture is foundational, was clear about this in Organizational Culture and Leadership: culture changes when people solve real problems together and see results from new ways of working. Not when they attend workshops about values.
What Research Shows
I used Consensus to dig up 50 studies on culture-strategy sequencing (pdf). The takeaway: simultaneous development and alignment consistently outperform sequential approaches.
The data seems to support my rejection of culture-first approaches while also rejecting my intuition that Strategy should come first.
But context matters.
We should account for systemic error — that is, assuming the tendency to prioritize a fix-culture-first approach is real, it may be best to compensate with a guardrail that says, “Hold on a second, what would happen if we examined this as a strategy problem first?”
I also think there’s a tendency to use “culture work” as a way to delay strategy development. Strategy is fundamentally about creating great choices and choosing one — it’s risky business. Rituals that amount to burning sage to dispel ‘workplace toxicity’ are easy by comparison, and you can never burn enough sage — that is, you can spend infinite time and resources on ‘fixing culture’ if you’re not careful; a good strategy is its own form of accountability. Roger Martin has written about this, too — leaders who are uncomfortable with strategy latch onto culture as safer territory. (Incidentally, the popular phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is widely misattributed to Peter Drucker; he never actually said it.) “We can’t make strategic decisions yet; our culture isn’t ready” becomes an indefinite holding pattern.
Similarly, Richard Rumelt (Good Strategy, Bad Strategy) warns against confusing cultural aspirations (“We value innovation!”) with actual Strategy. His definition of good Strategy — diagnosis, guiding policy, coordinated action — suggests that if culture actively blocks needed actions, then changing specific behaviors becomes part of the Strategy, not a prerequisite to having one. Rumelt points to Lou Gerstner’s IBM turnaround as an example: strategic moves (market repositioning, breaking silos) came first, then culture was tackled as part of execution.
When Culture Actually Matters
Culture does matter. Toxic behavior requires direct action. (Though why you would make everyone suffer through culture-building efforts rather than address the offending party and/or review what hiring policies got you to where you are today is another topic entirely.) And there are situations where cultural norms actively block change: risk-aversion so severe that experimentation is punished, silos so entrenched that collaboration is impossible.
But even then, the solution isn’t abstract culture change. It’s building new cultural norms through strategic work: pilot projects that reward experimentation, cross-functional teams that break down silos, and revised processes that distribute authority differently.
What This Means for a Thursday Morning
I promised some if/then rules, so here’s the diagnostic sequence. The next time someone suggests fixing culture before addressing Strategy:
What actual behaviors are blocking progress?
Vague answers (“low morale,” “bad culture,” “toxicity”) signal a strategy/alignment problem.
Specific answers (“We can’t experiment because mistakes trigger punishment,” “Cross-department collaboration is actively discouraged”) identify concrete behaviors that strategic work can address directly.
What would change if we had perfect culture alignment tomorrow?
If the answer is “We’d finally be able to develop a strategy” or “Then we could make decisions,” you’re looking at culture-as-delay. Strategy work can begin now.
If the answer identifies specific capabilities (“We could test new program models,” “We could coordinate across departments”), those capabilities can be built through strategic initiatives rather than culture workshops.
What’s one strategic move we could make that would require — and build — the cultural norms we need?
Instead of fixing culture as a prerequisite, identify strategic work that makes new behaviors necessary. Assign a small project that requires two departments to solve a problem together. Build a practice of treating experiments as data rather than success-or-failure verdicts.
The cultural norms you need emerge from solving real problems together, not from aspirational statements about who you want to be.
The Guardrail
Yes, culture and strategy are intertwined. In the research, simultaneous development seems to outperform sequential approaches (though specific testing of that hypothesis is admittedly limited). But sequence shapes outcomes, and when the sector defaults to using culture work as a delay tactic for strategy development, examine it as a strategy problem first. If specific cultural barriers emerge through that work, address them as part of strategic execution — new behaviors built through coordinated action, not workshops about values.