Why understanding culture in all its complexity is the foundation of thriving organisations
Walk into almost any meeting room today, and you’ll find a quiet miracle: people from different backgrounds, generations, and worldviews, attempting to build something together. The question isn’t whether culture matters in that room. It does, profoundly. The question is whether we’re thinking about it the right way.
Start With Humility
Edgar Schein, one of the great thinkers on organisational behaviour, offered a deceptively simple formula: “Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships.”
Humble Inquiry isn’t a soft skill. It’s a discipline one that asks us to genuinely not know before we speak, to be curious before we conclude.
In global business, that disposition isn’t just courteous; it’s strategically essential.
Jim O’Neill, former Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs, learned this firsthand navigating the world’s most complex markets: “I think the most formidable challenge is the most basic one: to remember that your ‘normal’ mode of communication with your domestic colleagues almost definitely does not apply on a global level.” His insight cuts to the heart of why so many well-intentioned cross-cultural initiatives fail — we export our assumptions alongside our ambitions.
If organisations want to compete globally, they first need to understand the cultures they’re already operating within. That means paying attention to culture at every level: the individual, the national, the organisational, the departmental, and the professional. Each layer carries its own set of unspoken rules, values, and ways of making meaning.
Culture Is Not a Unifying Force — It’s a Living Tension
Here’s where our thinking often goes wrong. A common thread in leadership and management literature is the idea of organisational culture as a kind of gravitational pull — something that draws people toward shared purpose and collective cohesion. Leaders are encouraged to “build” culture, to “fix” it, or to use it as a lever for alignment.
But this framing misunderstands what culture actually is.
Culture isn’t just about unity. It’s also about division. It isn’t a static “thing” that shapes behaviour from above — it’s something people actively use, often strategically, to pursue their own goals while navigating collective expectations. Culture provides a shared vocabulary, yes, but also a terrain on which people contest, negotiate, and resist.
Consider the word “responsibility.” Ask ten people in an organisation what it means, and you’ll get ten different answers. One person hears accountability. Another hears the duty of care. A third hears the mandate to drive change. All of them may nod in agreement when the value appears in an all-hands presentation — and all of them may be imagining something entirely different.
That gap isn’t a failure of communication. It’s the nature of values themselves. As political scientist James Scott observed, broadly held values only remain “common” as long as people don’t probe too deeply into what they actually mean to one another.
Culture is not the thing that makes organisations run smoothly. It is the thing that makes them human. And working with that reality rather than against it may be the most important leadership skill of our time.
The Power Beneath the Surface
What’s really at work when organisations try to manufacture cultural unity? Power. The attempt to unify a workplace through a declared set of values is ultimately an exercise in power — and people respond to that power in ways that reflect their own positions within it.
Employees may publicly affirm core values while privately disagreeing with them. They may align with the stated culture not because they believe in it, but because they value job security, belonging, or advancement more. They may quietly reshape projects to reflect their own convictions, or express commitment to the organisation precisely by pushing back against its leaders.
None of this is cynical. Much of it is deeply human.
Recognising this complexity doesn’t mean abandoning the project of building healthy, values-driven organisations. It means approaching that project with honesty — and, yes, with humility.
A More Honest Path Forward
What would it look like to lead with this understanding? A few starting points:
Rather than declaring what your culture is, create spaces where people can surface what they actually believe. Cultures shift when people feel genuinely heard, not when they’re handed a values statement.
Invest in the kind of Humble Inquiry Schein describes — asking questions that open rather than direct, that create dialogue rather than compliance. Notice which questions you ask at work and which you ask at home. Are they different? Why?
Reflect on your dependencies. Real collaboration requires acknowledging where you need others — not as a weakness, but as the foundation of trust. The “Here-and-now Humility” that arises when we genuinely need a colleague’s contribution is one of the most undervalued resources in any organisation.
And when you encounter friction — disagreement, disengagement, or quiet non-compliance — resist the temptation to see it as a culture problem to be fixed. It may be culture doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: giving people the tools to say, in whatever way they can, this matters to me.
That, too, is the beginning of something worth building on.