“The culture wasn’t ready” is what people say when they can’t name what actually went wrong.
A team rolls out a new tool, say a shared planning system meant to replace a tangle of spreadsheets. Six months later half the organization still uses the spreadsheets. At the postmortem someone says the culture wasn’t ready, and everyone nods, because it sounds like a diagnosis.
Venkatesh Rao argues that it is the opposite of one. Framing an initiative as “culture change” is a show-stopper. It lets you see yourself as a visionary and everyone else as obdurate idiots, it gives you an abstract scapegoat when the initiative fails, and it replaces hard, context-specific analysis with lazy thinking. The phrase “culture change” needs to be eliminated from your vocabulary and replaced with actual diagnosis. Why be so strict about a phrase? Because of how cultures actually shift.
How cultures shift
The only real process, Rao says, is Darwinian natural selection: a marginal culture displacing a central one. In a healthy business the odds against that are astronomical, and only slightly better in a strategic crisis that demands a new business model. The naysayers will not be converted; they will be replaced, slowly, as the organization hires differently and the old guard ages out.
Even turnover has no built-in direction; in the Dead Sea Effect the misfits leave and the rest reproduce what is there. So “culture change” is not a thing you do — it is a thing that happens as a side effect of changing who is there, what they are incentivized to do, and what tools they have.
What to ask instead
Take the spreadsheets one lever at a time. If the planning system is not simpler and more convenient than a spreadsheet, that is an engineering problem, not a culture one: fix the product, not the people.
Then ask who benefits from the spreadsheets and who pays their costs, because retooling costs money, and gatekeepers protect rivers of money, not systems. So add value to the legacy before replacing it. The people who built it have their identity invested in it, and displacing it without acknowledging them invites a defense that is swift, total, and disguised as reasonable objections.
And if the culture you need is truly incompatible with the one you have, the honest answer may be to find a startup that already has it.
None of this denies that culture is real; social connections and shared values resist precisely because they are real. The phrase also costs you directly: smart, productive people hear “culture change” and classify you as a hand-wringer, and you lose the credibility you would need to change anything. If you cannot name the specific mechanism, whether hiring, incentives, tooling or trust, you are using “culture” as a label for your confusion. The team at the postmortem had three concrete questions available, and the word let them skip all of them.
References:
- Venkatesh Rao, There Is No Such Thing as Culture Change, Ribbonfarm