Cultural Strategy

Cultural strategy services decide what kind of organization a company has to be in order to do what its strategy requires, before any change program starts spending. The work names the behaviors the strategy depends on, the trade-offs between running the current business reliably and reinventing it, and the reward systems that currently argue against both. Vivaldi has worked on strategy and organization since 1999, from ten offices on four continents.

• Since 1999strategy, culture and organization work
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

Cultural strategy is usually commissioned at a moment when the stated culture and the operating one have visibly separated, and someone senior has stopped pretending otherwise.

• A new strategy has been signed off and nobody can say what it asks people to do differently on a Tuesday
• A cultural transformation program is being scoped and there is no agreed destination for it to move toward
• The company needs to protect a reliable core and build something genuinely new, and the same standards are being applied to both
• The values statement and the promotion record disagree, and employees have noticed first
• A merger has put two working cultures in one building and the integration plan treats that as a communications task

Why a values exercise does not change the culture

Most culture work starts by asking people what the company should stand for. The output is a list of virtues, and the list is almost always the same list: integrity, courage, customer obsession, speed. It is not wrong. It is simply not a strategy, because it rules nothing out.

Culture is what the organization does when no rule applies and nobody is enforcing anything. That is set by what gets promoted, funded and forgiven, not by what gets stated. A principle that has no cost attached is not a principle, it is a preference, and it loses every time it meets a deadline or a quarterly number.

The harder failure is more specific. Most companies need to do two contradictory things at once: run the current business reliably and reinvent it before someone else does. Reliability rewards consistency and the avoidance of mistakes. Reinvention requires acting on incomplete information and being wrong in public without career consequences. An organization optimized for the first will select against the second without ever deciding to, because every individual decision to favor reliability is defensible on its own terms. No values statement has ever resolved that, because the statement claims both.

What our cultural strategy services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements use three of them, and which three is a scoping conversation rather than a package.

1. The culture the strategy actually requires

We start from the business strategy and translate it into observable behavior, because a strategy that cannot be stated as something a person does differently has not been finished.

• What the strategy asks people to do that they do not do now, written as behavior rather than as attitude
• Which existing cultural strengths are load bearing and must be protected, since most culture work damages working things on the way past
• Where the required behavior and the current reward system are in direct conflict, named specifically enough to be argued with

2. The operating principles and what they rule out

Principles are only useful where two defensible options conflict, so each one has to be written with the thing it defeats attached to it.

• The principles that will govern decisions when no rule applies, each stated as a choice rather than a virtue
• What the organization will deliberately be bad at, because a culture that claims every virtue gives nobody guidance at the moment guidance is needed
• Which principles apply across the company and which legitimately vary by business unit, market or function

3. The reward systems that have to change

This is the part most firms skip, and it is the part that decides whether anything else holds.

• What the last two years of promotions, budget decisions and quiet exits say about the culture the company actually has
• The specific changes to measurement, promotion criteria and funding gates that would make the new principles credible
• Who is protected when a considered bet does not pay off, stated in advance rather than discovered afterward

4. Making it decidable rather than aspirational

A principle that cannot be applied by a mid-level manager under time pressure will not survive its first collision with a deadline.

• Each principle expressed as a decision rule, with worked examples from decisions the company has actually faced
• The handful of recurring decisions where the new culture will be visible first, so there is something to watch
• The language leaders use, tested against the awkward cases rather than the flattering ones

5. The handover into transformation

Cultural strategy produces a destination. Something else has to close the distance, and the handover is where this work most often leaks away.

• The gap between the agreed destination and the working culture, sized and sequenced
• What belongs to a cultural transformation program, what belongs to structure, and what belongs to leadership
• Governance, review triggers and the measures that tell you whether the destination is still the right one in a year

How a cultural strategy engagement works

1. Read the real culture. Leadership interviews, a read of decisions the company has actually taken, and the promotion, funding and exit record behind them. The output is a specific account of the working culture, not a survey score.
2. Name the trade-off. Where the business needs reliability, where it needs reinvention, and what that implies for standards, tolerance for failure and who moves between the two. This is the decision the rest depends on.
3. Write the principles. A short set of operating principles with what each one rules out, tested against real decisions in the room with the people who own the reward system.
4. Hand over. The gap to the current culture, the incentive changes required, and a sequenced brief for whoever runs the transformation. We stay for the first reviews, not for the duration.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for cultural strategy

We come at culture from the business strategy rather than from the people function. The question we start with is what the company is trying to win, and the culture work is an answer to that question rather than a parallel exercise with its own vocabulary.

We also write the trade-off down. A cultural strategy that does not say what the organization will be worse at is a description of a good company, and every company already has one of those. Naming the cost is the part clients tell us they could not get elsewhere, and it is the part that makes the strategy usable by someone who was not in the room.

The work is short. This is weeks of senior time, not a program, and we would rather hand a clear destination to your own people than staff a change office. Where the distance is large, the transformation that follows is a separate decision with a separate business case.

How to evaluate a cultural strategy consultant

• Ask what the culture is for. A firm that discusses culture without reference to the business strategy is running a values exercise with a consulting invoice attached.
• Ask what the company will deliberately be bad at. If the answer is nothing, you are buying a list of virtues that will give no guidance the first time two of them conflict.
• Ask how a principle becomes a decision. Request a worked example on a decision your company faced last quarter. The answer separates the strategists from the facilitators quickly.
• Ask which reward systems they expect to change. Culture is set by what gets promoted, funded and forgiven. A firm that has not asked to see your promotion record has looked at the statement rather than the culture.
• Ask what they will protect. Your existing culture usually contains the reason the company succeeded. Work that treats all of it as a problem tends to remove the wrong things first.

Cultural strategy firm vs cultural transformation program vs culture survey?

Running the transformation without the strategy is the most common error in this field. It produces energetic change work with no agreed destination, which is why so many culture programs end up defending their own existence at the second annual review.

Related work

Cultural strategy is one of four capabilities in this group, and the boundaries between them matter when you are scoping.

• Cultural transformation when the destination is agreed and the organization has to be moved to it. Strategy decides what the culture should be, transformation changes what it is, and the second without the first is the expensive mistake.
• Change management when one specific change has to land, with an end state and a date. Change management consulting is the right brief when the destination is not in question.
• Growth culture when the required culture is already known to be a growth culture and the work is building the specific behaviors behind it.
• Employee engagement when the culture is broadly right and the issue is how connected people feel to it and how you would know.
• Organizational design when the behavior the strategy needs is prevented by structure and decision rights rather than by what gets rewarded.
• Leadership development when the strategy requires leaders to hold two standards at once and they have never had to.

One distinction worth making before you brief anyone. This page is about organizational culture, the internal kind. If what you need is brand strategy that works through culture in the anthropological sense, reading cultural tension and building a brand position on it, that is brand strategy and corporate brand positioning, and it is a different team and a different brief.

This work sits inside our People, Culture & Capabilities practice at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field. Further reading: what a reinvention mindset asks of an organization and Ella F. Washington on building stronger workplace cultures.

Cultural strategy in the US and worldwide

Our culture work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Multi-market cultural strategy carries a specific complication: a principle that reads as empowering in one country reads as an absence of direction in another, and tolerance for public disagreement is not distributed evenly across an organization that operates in both. We write principles at the level of the decision rather than the sentiment, which travels better, and we test the awkward translations before they are published rather than after. German and Swiss engagements run from our Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Zurich offices, and Latin American work from Buenos Aires and Lima.