The company had changed its operating model. The businesses now reported globally, and the country no longer controlled its own operation. It was announced as a more aligned model, one that would simplify local operations and make them more agile. What it produced in the first few months, to be honest, was anxiety. People wanted clarity: what happens to my role, to my career, who decides my future now, and how.
A regional team, a couple of people from each business, decided to do something with those questions. They organized a workshop with leaders from different countries and roles, each one telling their own career story, with its detours and what they had learned along the way. The idea was simple: people would feel heard, they would have a safe place to ask, and they would see in people close to them that there was no single path. It took weeks to put together. Videos, agendas, guests. Everything was ready to launch.
A few days before, one of the team members told her global boss what they had prepared. She told him with pride, and with an extra reason to be proud: they had done it across all the businesses, at a moment when the new model was pushing each one to go its own way. He listened, and the next day he asked her to cancel it.
He had escalated it, and the global team was upset that they had not been involved. Nobody asked what was in the workshop. Nobody asked to see the agenda. The reaction came before the question.
What stayed with me was not the cancellation. It was that the workshop was completely aligned with the new model, and that was easy to show as soon as someone sat down and looked at it. In fact, it went ahead with minor changes. The problem was never the content. The problem was that someone had acted without asking, in an organization that had just announced it wanted to be more agile.
I have seen this there and in other places: culture does not show itself in how the new model is described. It shows itself in the first thing that happens when someone takes it seriously.
More agile for whom
To be fair to the global team, they had a mandate for consistency. A model that had just been rolled out, that they needed to prove would work, and a regional initiative launched without them could look like the region was still working around the model instead of inside it. From where they sat, the reaction made sense.
And that is exactly the interesting part. Every party acted reasonably within its own logic, and what came out of it was an organization that, in its first month of agility, learned that agile meant align before you act. More agile, yes, but upward. For each market, one more approval.
Nobody designed that message. People worked it out on their own, and that lesson outlasts the announcement of the model by years.
The question that usually goes missing
When a company wants to change its culture, the first question is almost always what culture do we want. It is a good question. I do not think it is the first one.
A culture that worked for years can start to get in the way when what the business needs changes. The discipline that protected quality makes the organization slow. The consensus that avoided mistakes ends in an inability to decide. None of that makes it a bad culture; it makes it an expensive culture for today's strategy. And that cost almost never shows up under that label. It shows up spread across escalations, weeks of preparation stopped by one phone call, and people who stop proposing things because they have already learned what it costs.
That is why the question I find most useful, and most uncomfortable, is what is it costing us to keep the culture we have.
The system has to make the behavior reasonable
It is hard to ask for initiative when the first initiative gets cancelled for not going through the right channel. People do not work in a vacuum. They read the system and respond to what they read. If every local action waits until someone above signs off, asking for agility is asking for a favor.
But changing the system is not clean either. I have seen organizations that, to fix this, let go of all control and ended up with twenty versions of the same program in twenty countries, none of them alike. When you move one lever, something else always moves. Whoever removes an approval without asking what behavior they have just made convenient is in for a surprise a couple of quarters later.
What should change
A growing organization cannot depend on decisions reaching the top. It has to distribute them, and distributing decisions is not the same as giving permission. It means more people understand the why behind what has already been decided, so they can use that judgment when something comes up that nobody planned for. With permission, people act when they are allowed to. When they understand the why, they know when to act without asking and when asking is the right call.
That regional team had no rule against running the workshop. They had understood what the new model was for, they knew people needed clarity, and they were trying to answer that. Whether the organization stopped them or thanked them was the only thing that would decide if anyone else tried next time.
To me, that is the result that matters when a company changes its culture. Not that everyone can describe the new model, but that more and more people know what to do when nobody has told them exactly what to do, and that what happens to them afterward does not teach them never to do it again.
If you have to start somewhere, I would start with three questions, before the values and the workshops:
What is working today that we do not want to lose?
Which decisions are holding back our strategy?
What would have to change in the system so that the behaviors we ask for are reasonable, not exceptional?
This month's question:
If someone ignored everything we say about our model and looked only at what happened to the last team that took an initiative without asking permission, what culture would they say we have?