Fathoming: Surfacing Your Culture's Hidden Value

In 1989, a twenty-six-year-old British sailor called Tracy Edwards announced she was putting together the first all-female crew ever to enter the Whitbread Round the World Race, one of the longest and most brutal ocean races on earth.

The press mocked her. Rival skippers gave her no chance of finishing, let alone competing. What nobody accounted for was how well prepared the crew had decided to be before they embarked on the journey. Maiden won two legs of the race outright - the best result by a British boat in over a decade and the best result ever by an all-female crew.

Maiden's all female crew, skippered by Tracy Edwards in 1990. Source: Wikimedia

This is a story about being underestimated and confounding expectations. It also highlights what a team can achieve when it's fully prepared for a difficult challenge.

These sailors, dismissed as a novelty, were exceptionally well prepared. As Edwards put it afterwards, her crew had knowingly built, rigged and sailed Maiden themselves. They didn’t just pore over weather systems and understand the waters they were navigating; they believed they knew their boat better than any other team in the race. They also had a deep appreciation and respect for each other.

In an interview with American journalist Katie Couric in 2019, Edwards reported “being that close to other people on a boat... having to trust and rely on them, you see how hard everyone else’s job is.” It was this connection and shared understanding, not raw talent or luck, that got them home safely, and ahead of the rest.

Leadership teams aren’t so very different from sailing crews. Whether we’re at the helm of a business heading into open water, preparing for a funding round, exploring a merger or acquisition opportunity, or priming ourselves for the next strategic pivot, we’re constantly facing pivotal moments that test our mettle. To drive breakthrough results, we don’t need superficial data; we need meaningful insight we can act on.

The insight is all out there, waiting to be uncovered. What’s intriguing is how often organisations choose not to surface it. This is especially true in the case of culture.

Words Build Worlds

When we’re navigating change, language matters. Words build worlds, and sometimes a single word or phrase can profoundly alter how you see your work. This was certainly the case for me.

In a recent conversation with a former client and now collaborator, Marcia Murphy, we were discussing the place where strategy, brand, culture, and organisation design meet. I described the current exploratory mode I was in as “reading the water”. I meant I was going deep to surface unexpected truths worth bringing back.

She said, “It sounds like you’re fathoming.”

I looked the word up afterwards. It was a gift.

Fathom comes from Old English fæthm, meaning outstretched arms, or the span of a person’s reach. By the 1600s, sailors had taken it to sea, using it to measure depth with a sounding line. By the 1620s, it had taken on the meaning we use today: to get to the bottom of something, to understand it thoroughly.

Arms outstretched. Then the depths. Then the understanding. All in one word, four hundred years old.

This is what I believe: if leadership teams are serious about achieving transformation, it's crucial to get a full picture of the culture that will underpin (or quietly undermine) our success. This process demands much more than a quick engagement survey or a single measurement taken from one angle. To discover culture’s true character and value, we need to fathom its many dimensions.

What Pivotal Moments Reveal

Organisational culture work has an image problem, and it’s one the industry has largely brought on itself. Culture is often framed as a soft good - solely the preserve of People & Culture or HR teams, and not business critical. While few Boards and Executive teams today would disagree that culture matters, it is typically positioned some way below strategy and finance on the list of priorities to tackle. It just doesn’t feel, well, urgent enough. Until it does.

Much like brand, another driver of long-term sustainable success, if managed correctly, the choice to deprioritise or devalue culture as a strategic asset can be a costly misstep.

Culture tends to show its true colours at high-stakes moments. At critical inflection points, it can become mission-critical. Here are some “factional” examples, rooted in the real world but adjusted for anonymity.

An iconic heritage charity is facing a reckoning. After several difficult years, the deficit has grown too large to ignore. There are rising costs, a donor base that isn’t growing fast enough, and funding streams that have dried up. The board approves a restructure, a leaner staffing model, and shorter opening hours. Cost-cutting is inevitable. But there’s a catch. This organisation runs on goodwill: specialist staff and front-of-house teams who give more than their contracted hours because they believe in what they’re protecting, and that goodwill is already stretched thin. The pivotal question isn’t simply “where can we cut costs?”, it’s “can this organisation absorb another shock to the system without its culture, and the goodwill it depends on, breaking for good?”

A fast-growing green economy venture closes its Series A. The new investors push for a merger with a larger, more established player in the same space, drawn by the efficiency and scale the acquirer can offer. On paper, it looks like the perfect fit. In practice, the smaller venture was built on trust and autonomy, decisions made quickly by people close to the problem, and impact judged on more than a spreadsheet. By contrast, the acquirer runs on tight controls and standardisation: hierarchical sign-off chains, dashboards, and KPIs. In the first all-hands meeting as a newly combined company, employees nod along. Nobody asks a question from the floor. Meanwhile, the internal Slack channels are in overdrive. The leadership team senses a gap and wants to know what they’re not seeing. It’s time to bring people with them.

A new CEO takes the reins of a fifth-generation family business. She’s stepped up after years of being groomed for the role, and she arrives with a clear vision for growth. But her predecessor is still around, still being copied on emails, and still quietly influencing from the sidelines. The managers, most of whom have known them both for years, aren’t sure whose lead to follow. Cynicism is running high, morale is low, and the resistance to change is obvious, even if nobody can quite name where it’s coming from. The new CEO wants to understand the gap between the culture they have today and the culture their new vision and strategy demands. She’s keen to know whether the real obstacle is on the org chart, or somewhere nobody’s looked yet.

These aren’t edge cases; they’re all-too-familiar recurring patterns in the life of organisations. At these moments, it’s the people and culture that dictate whether strategies take flight or never leave the ground.

In his 1996 book Only the Paranoid Survive, the former Intel CEO Andy Grove gave this kind of moment a name: the strategic inflection point. This is a moment when a business’s fundamentals are about to shift so profoundly that it either opens the door to real growth, or marks the start of a decline.

Importantly, and rather unnervingly, Grove describes how only the beginning and the end of an inflection point are clear. The transition itself, while you’re inside it, is gradual and confusing.

Many businesses recognise these moments only in hindsight rather than while there’s still time to act. Future-oriented brand leaders spot them coming, and get the data, insight and foresight they need to make good decisions in the here and now. Whether it’s a new funding round, a merger or acquisition, a succession, a scale-up or a strategic pivot, deep understanding of the ‘as is’ and ideal future culture is essential.

In the impact investing world, this need is even keener. Impact investors aren’t just buying a return; they’re underwriting a promise that the stated values of the business will show up in how their people behave under pressure. According to the Global Impact Investing Network’s State of the Market 2025 report, impact investing assets under management are now above $1.6 trillion globally. Impact investors increasingly want the same returns as anyone else, so the promises we make have to hold up commercially and not just morally.

Back to the sailing analogy, good impact investors back strong teams and high-potential brands. When a culture is aligned with what the brand claims to stand for, trust and performance will compound over time. When there’s a gap between the story and the reality, there’s a hole in the boat. Trust will leak gradually, and then all at once capsize the vessel, usually at the worst possible moment. The risk is real. If we want to cross uncharted waters and thrive, we don’t just need tidy maps (aka strategy decks), we need to know if the vessel we’re on, and the crew sailing it, are seaworthy.

Culture doesn’t sit passively underneath strategy; it animates it, and creates the conditions for it to endure. We may have clear visions and objectives, well-chosen target markets, carefully designed operating models, and sound business models, but the courses we chart are only as good as the vessels we’ve built, and the people crewing them. This is why I've come to believe that culture deserves to be read with the same depth as market and competitor landscapes. In the end, we’re asking one question from two directions: is this vessel built to survive the crossing, and is our culture capable of getting us there?

Richer Data, Better Maps

Shallow reads are dangerous, but that doesn’t mean we have to take an age to build a fuller picture. The opportunity lies in better questions, and a more engaging, multi-dimensional culture discovery process that begins the change process from the outset: welcoming and listening to diverse views, challenging assumptions, and giving everyone a hand in shaping the story of the future.

Engagement surveys still have their place, but even the most sophisticated tend to focus on tracking lag metrics: self-reported sentiment and behaviour visible above the waterline. Context is missing, outside perspectives are rare, and the system-level causes rarely get properly plotted.

New AI-enabled tools on the market claim to provide quick, high-quality culture insight without ever setting foot inside a building or speaking to a single person. Feed them your survey data and Slack channel chatter, and the patterns appear instantly - no workshops, no conversations, no participation required. This sounds appealing, but the anthropologist in me recoils. My objection isn't to AI itself; I use it to support my own analysis too. It's to any process, AI-powered or otherwise, that mistakes capturing for understanding.

The most transformative culture work is not extractive; it's participative and regenerative by design. Diverse voices are heard, not just captured. New connections are forged, and learning happens as a natural part of the process. This builds the shared sense of ownership and collective energy that drives change. Skip this, and we miss the point of culture work entirely.

In practice, this means stakeholder conversations, strategy reviews and network mapping, ethnographic observation and story collection, horizon scanning and foresight workshops, and a truly participative process, not just a survey link and dashboard. The result is richer data, deeper shared understanding, and better maps.

So where do we start?

The 'How' of Fathoming: Four Dimensions of Discovery

In my own practice at Guillemot, we’ve developed a fathoming framework to capture the dimensions of discovery we believe need to be covered. These can be calibrated for depth and speed, but ideally, all four should feature:

• On the Vessel: Knowing the Organisation & Its Strategy

• In the Water: Understanding the Context

• Above and Below the Waterline: Surfacing Culture

• In the Skies: Exploring the Emerging Future

Here's a quick summary of each one - why it matters, and the questions we can ask to surface new answers.

On the Vessel: Knowing the Organisation and Its Strategy

This dimension always comes first. The better we understand the business and its strategy (organisational, financial/commercial, brand and marketing, people, sustainability, technology), the clearer we can be about the culture needed to support long-term success. We can ask questions such as:

• What’s our strategy, and what does it ask of our people and teams?

• How does this business make money, and how does this shape our culture?

• Who do we want to attract (customers, talent, partners, investors), and why? How magnetic are we currently, and what's getting in the way?

In the Water: Understanding the Culture in Context

Organisations are not isolated entities. Responsible businesses today do not simply exist to serve their own ends; they view themselves as forces for good with the power to shape, and be shaped by, the markets and communities they serve. For this belief to translate into tangible results, our cultures must be understood in context and aligned for impact. We can ask questions such as:

• What external social, technological, economic, environmental, political or regulatory forces are shaping how people feel and act right now?

• How does our culture show up in how we treat others, including our customers, partners, suppliers, and the broader communities we're part of?

• Where is value flowing today, and where will it need to flow in the future?

Above and Below the Waterline: Surfacing Culture

This is the part where we assess the gap between vision and reality. Employee surveys can appear comprehensive, when in fact they only reflect a surface view - observable behaviours, written statements, and self-reported experiences of events happening above the waterline. We need to go deeper to truly fathom the culture at work.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz called this “thick description” - an ethnographic read that describes not just what people do, but what these practices mean to them and why. This work uncovers the hidden patterns and cultural norms that shape how work really gets done, and the underlying structures and mental models (values, beliefs, assumptions) that create them. We can ask questions such as:

• What do people say about how things work here, and does that match what happens day to day?

• Which patterns keep repeating, and how could the underlying structures and mental models be producing them, for better or worse?

• Where would a deeper read of our culture help us access insight that a survey on its own would miss?

In the Skies: Exploring the Emerging Future

Traditional diagnostics are typically light on foresight, even though culture is already being shaped by a future that’s arriving in pieces. Sensing what’s coming is what separates a lead measure from a lag one. Informed by Bill Sharpe’s ‘Three Horizons’ model (Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope, Triarchy Press, 2013), developed through his work with the International Futures Forum, we read this across the three horizons: what’s dominant now, what’s already emerging at the edges, and what else is possible?

We can ask questions such as:

• H1: What’s dominant today, i.e., the ways of working and mindsets everyone would recognise as “how we do things here"? Where is that culture strong or under strain?

• H2: What early signals or pockets of experimentation are already emerging at the edges, and not yet mainstream in our culture?

• H3: What else is possible for our culture? What kind of organisation would we need to be or become to thrive in the future, and how far is that from our reality today?

  
  

Act Before the Sea Decides

None of this is a case against speed, data, or the value of simply asking people how they feel. It's a case for curiosity, and for examining culture from more than one angle if the moment we're in demands deeper understanding before we act.

If you're navigating a strategic inflection point, you'll want to baseline the culture your business needs to thrive. To do this properly, I'd argue it's vital to understand what the system is built to deliver.

Fathoming isn't a navel-gazing exercise; it calls us to look outward at our shifting relationships, forward into the emerging future, and deep beneath the stated version of culture to understand what's true today.

Do this well, and you won't get a comfortable confirmation of what you already believe; you'll get a revelation sharp enough to change conversations in the boardroom for good.

If you're out there on the open water, remember: your vessel may be seaworthy and carving toward bright new horizons, or holed below the waterline and heading for rocks you haven't yet spotted. Proper fathoming is how you find out. Will you act before the sea decides for you? There's no better time to start than now.

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Steph Matthews is the founder of Guillemot, an independent change consultancy helping organisations develop the cultures their strategies demand. This is the second in a series of essays exploring culture as a living system, and what it takes to evolve them.