The Living System: Why Workplace Culture Matters and How to Change It

I want to begin with water.

As a child, I spent many a happy hour rock pooling on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. Places like Kimmeridge Bay (pictured below) still hold a special fascination for me.

Here in this Marine Conservation Zone, hundreds of millions of years of time are laid bare in the rock itself. The dark, layered mudstone underfoot was formed around 155 million years ago. Ammonites are still found pressed between its layers today, drifting into view for anyone paddling along the ledges. The rockpools are full of anemones, blennies and crabs - a tiny universe revealed twice a day by the turning tide.

Photo of Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset by Peter North on Unsplash

Author Adam Nicolson spent years watching life in the rockpools of the Morvern peninsula, a beautiful stretch of coastline on the west coast of Scotland. His descriptions of sandhoppers finding their way by some inherited compass, and prawns reading the tide through senses far finer than ours, make you want to kneel down at the water's edge and look properly, maybe for the first time.

In his book The Sea is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides is a line that has stayed with me since I first read it: "The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes." In other words, the sea is a living system. It is alive, and made up of everything that inhabits it, the shrimp, the kelp, the plankton, and everything else besides. The lives inside it are constantly shaping it and being shaped by it, generation after generation.

I think organisational culture works the same way. In the past, we had a tendency to view culture as static, an intangible, passive medium that people move through or operate inside, without quite noticing. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Most of us swim in our organisation's culture every day without seeing it as the thing that's either holding us up, or quietly failing to support our flourishing.

Here's what I've come to believe. Culture is a living system. It's not like one - it is one. Simply defined as "the way we do things around here", culture is a dynamic, interconnected web of relationships, stories, habits. rituals, artefacts and unspoken agreements that supports how organisations function day to day. It's the fabric of life that holds us up, or weakens performance, depending on its health and vitality.

Culture closes the gap between vision and reality. It turns what strategies say into what really happens on the ground. We ignore it at our peril

Culture is not invisible. A large part of it exists above the waterline. It is expressed in patterns of observable behaviour and the everyday moments and events that make up organisational life. It is there in the detail of our daily choices, in the actions we recognise and reward, and the things people do when nobody's watching. It is right at the core of the stories that get told and retold until they harden into "how we do things here."

Culture is also there in the depths. Below the waterline, it is found in the patterns that keep repeating, the structures that frame our actions, and the mental models, our values, principles, beliefs and assumptions, that shape our ways of seeing and being in business.

Whether we know it or not, we are all making culture, and it is making us. We are the creatures in the rock pools, forever navigating and generating the conditions we swim in, every single day.

I've spent more than twenty five years working with organisations evolving themselves from the inside, out. And the more I've learned about how living systems actually work, the more I've come to think we've been getting transformation wrong. Not wrong in the details of execution per se; wrong in the model that informs it all.

The trouble with treating culture like a project

Most organisations approach culture the way they approach everything else: as a problem to solve, on a timeline, with a dashboard. They commission a survey. They launch a values refresh. They hold an offsite with a facilitator and a flipchart and a lot of good intentions. Eighteen months later, not much has actually moved, and everyone is quietly relieved to have moved on to the next initiative.

Traditionally, mechanistic models suggested organisational culture was something that could be "programmed." Consultants would be brought in. Multi-layered programmes would be architected and rolled out.

But the impact was short-lived. When we try to control culture too tightly - pushing change through, forcing conformity, clearing out what looks untidy, discouraging dissent - it becomes less alive, not more. It loses the diversity, autonomy, freedom, creativity, and energy of early stage cultures in which innovation thrives.

That kind of control can work, for a while, right up until it doesn't.

The same thing happens when organisations try to change culture through communications alone. A new values poster. A leadership offsite with a slide about the future we're building together.

These things aren't wrong exactly, but they mistake the visible layer of culture, what's said and seen, for the deeper layer that actually holds things in place. This is what's rewarded, what's tolerated, and what's quietly understood to be true even when nobody says it out loud.

When culture change fails, it's rarely a failure of effort; it's a failure of framing. You cannot manage a living thing the way you manage a project, because a project has a start and an end, and a living thing does not. It has seasons. It has cycles of growth and dormancy and renewal. It skews towards diversity and not uniformity. It responds to its environment and is forever changing and adapting, not once a year in a strategy review, but constantly.

The first frame is simple: culture is not a project, it's a system. If we want to help it evolve, we have to embrace its true nature, and our roles within it.

Understanding culture's true power

Here's the part that gets missed most often, and it's the part that matters most to anyone running a business, not just anyone interested in people.

Culture isn't a nice-to-have: it's what carries your strategy into the world. Whatever you're planning to achieve, culture creates the conditions that determine whether strategy survives contact with reality. It can quietly undermine your ambitions or help them take flight. This link is where the power lies.

As leaders, it's critical that we take in the scale of what's at stake. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. That's not a story about individual bad managers. It's a story about the water most organisations are swimming in. It's not healthy, by any stretch of the imagination.

Strategy is, at heart, a set of decisions made in a room by people at a given point in time. The best are based on data, evidence, and ideally, foresight. The challenge is that the world keeps moving on. Markets shift, technology changes what's possible, people leave and new people arrive. The thing you were sure about six months ago turns out to have been only half true. Ask any start-up what their strategy is, and they'll tell you the horizons they're working with are often very near in.

What determines whether an organisation can meet those ever-shifting tides well isn't the quality of the original plan; it's the quality of the living system underneath it. Adaptive cultures are those in which people trust each other enough to say when something isn't working, and where teams are able to learn, and unlearn, as they go, rather than simply repeating themselves with more conviction.

This is what we mean when we say culture supports resilience, whatever the future holds. This isn't resilience as a buzzword; it's resilience as an actual, observable property of the system. Some cultures can hold people steady under pressure; others crack and sicken. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your organisation’s culture - including its capacity to flex and adapt in the face of change - is mission critical.

And yet, despite this being true, workforce research by McKinsey & Company (Talent Trends Global Survey, 2023) found that only approximately 16% of employers currently invest in adaptability and continuous learning, even though 26% of employees across the globe name adaptability as a top skill they need.

Most organisations know the tides are shifting and waters are rising. Few are doing the work needed to help their people swim.

There's another way of putting the same thing: an organisation is, among everything else, a meaning-making system. People don't just need a strategy to follow; they need a story that makes sense of why the work matters, and a set of relationships that make the work not just bearable but genuinely fulfilling.

A Harvard Business Review study (2018), drawing on original research from BetterUp Labs, found that 9 out of 10 people would trade a significant slice of their lifetime earnings - an average of 23% - for work that felt consistently meaningful. They estimated that highly meaningful work generates roughly $9,078 more in value per worker each year.

My own experience with organisational culture change bears this out. When meaning is present, people bring more of themselves to the work, and everyone benefits: colleagues, shareholders, customers, communities, and the planet. When it's absent, people quietly withhold their energy, capabilities, and commitment. No strategy, however sound, can ever make up the difference.

A systems lens on sustainable change

If culture is a living system, then changing it asks something different of us than simply changing the wording of our values, or adjusting our people practices and policies.

We cannot push a living system into a new shape from the outside and expect it to thrive.

Let's return to the rockpools. At The Fine Foundation Wild Seas Centre in Kimmeridge on the Jurassic Coast, volunteers educate visitors on the Seashore Code. We're taught to check the tide times, tread lightly, observe wildlife where it lives, and replace anything we find very carefully, putting it back exactly as we found it.

This, for me, is a perfect analogy for doing culture work responsibly, even regeneratively. Human curiosity must be balanced with the delicate needs of people in their natural habitats.

Extractive approaches risk disturbing people, generating suspicion and undermining trust. Regenerative approaches, by contrast, focus on making a net positive impact, treating the work as an act of stewardship with a duty of care attached.

When we apply a systems lens to culture change, we begin to ask different questions. It’s less about "how do we get people to behave differently?" and more about "what is this system currently organised to produce, and why?". It's less about "what are our new values statements?" and more about "where are the places in this organisation where small changes might ripple out and change the whole system and pattern?"

Living systems change through careful influence, not force. A single shift in how a leader runs their Monday morning team meeting can do more for a culture than a year of communications about the value of collaboration, because the meeting is where the real pattern lives. The ritual is the moment in which values are enacted, and the arena in which meaningful change can happen in tangible ways people can see and understand.

A word of caution: while quick wins are possible and highly important, systemic culture change work is slower than most organisations want or expect it to be. It asks for patience before urgency, listening before intervention, and understanding what's there before deciding what needs to change.

That slowness isn't a weakness; it's the thing that makes the change durable once it happens. Fast change, forced from outside, tends to spring back the moment the pressure lifts. Change that grows from an honest understanding of the system tends to hold, because the system itself has shifted below the waterline, not just on the surface.

Where this leaves us

None of this means strategy doesn't matter, or that structure and process are somehow beside the point. It means culture isn't a surface layer floating on top of the real work, it's the water the work moves through and the living activity that happens inside it. Get culture right, and our strategies are carried forward. Leave it to chance, and even the best strategies can falter unsupported.

For leaders at the helm of organisations, there's really no way around it: culture matters, it's modelled from the top, and begins with each and every one of us, as individuals.

While leadership is crucial, this is not a top-down project - it’s a system in which we all have agency. Change can come from any corner. The question is, what will you do to make it happen?

If we want to effect change, this cannot be "done to" people - it must be a collaborative act. It is only when we all take personal responsibility for how we think, feel, act and show up in the system, that we can ever hope to change and evolve the cultures of the businesses we are part of.

This is the thinking behind everything that follows in this series.

The next piece looks at what it takes to understand a culture as it really is, not as the annual report or engagement survey says it is. Because before we start the process of changing a living system, we have to understand its purpose and context, imagine its future, and examine the elements that make it what it is today.

Steph Matthews is the founder of Guillemot, an independent change consultancy helping future-positive leaders create the cultures their strategies demand. This is the first in a series of essays exploring workplace cultures and what it takes to evolve them with clarity and care.