Why the behaviour you are trying to change might be the most rational thing in your organisation
There is a version of organisational diagnosis that goes like this: the teams aren’t collaborating, the silos are entrenched, the behaviour is territorial. The conclusion you come to is that you have a culture problem. The solution is culture change.
It is not wrong, exactly. But it is almost always incomplete.
Culture debt is real. It accumulates over time, in the same way technical debt does: through decisions made under pressure, through workarounds that become habits, through norms that calcify long after the conditions that created them have changed. It is costly, it compounds, and it is genuinely hard to shift.
But here is what I have seen consistently across organisations of different sizes and sectors: a significant portion of what looks like cultural debt is downstream of structural and process debt that has never been addressed. The behaviour that gets diagnosed as cultural is often a rational response to a system that has never made collaboration structurally possible.
You cannot culture-change your way out of a structural problem.
What this looks like in practice
I worked with a large global organisation where the relationship between central product teams and regional and market teams was, at best, haphazard. There was no consistent process for engagement. There were no defined roles or decision rights that made clear who needed to be involved, at what point, and with what authority. There was no shared place where the work was visible to both sides. And there were no incentives, formal or informal, that rewarded the effort of cross-boundary collaboration.
The result looked cultural. Central teams weren’t engaging the regions. Regional teams weren’t trusting the centre. Both sides had developed narratives about the other that made the gap feel permanent.
I understood the case for change. I could articulate why better engagement would reduce friction, accelerate delivery, and produce better outcomes for both sides. In conversations, people agreed. They could see it. They wanted it.
But nothing changed after those conversations. Because wanting a different culture, and even understanding why it matters, is not sufficient when the system underneath doesn’t support the behaviour you are asking for.
The structural fix
What changed things was not a culture programme. It was building the infrastructure that made a different way of working possible.
That meant three things in combination. First, a clear framework for how global and regional teams would engage: when, on what, with what expectations on both sides. Not a bureaucratic process for its own sake, but a clear structure that removed the ambiguity about whether engagement was expected and what form it should take.
Second, governance: a formal engagement model with explicit decision rights and defined roles for regional teams at multiple levels and at key moments in the process. Not a vague expectation that the regions would be involved in decision-making, but a structured model that specified when they were consulted, when they had input that had to be addressed, and when they had a formal role in sign-off. When that was in place, the territorial behaviour reduced. Not because the culture had changed, but because the structural ambiguity that had been feeding it had.
Third, visibility: a shared place where the work existed for both sides. When central and regional teams could see the same information, in the same place, the asymmetry that had been generating mistrust started to close.
None of this was culturally neutral. Building the infrastructure sent a signal about what the organisation valued and expected. But the sequence mattered: structure first, then the culture could shift in response to it.
The diagnostic implication
This is not an argument that culture doesn’t matter, or that cultural debt is imaginary. It is an argument about sequencing and diagnosis.
When an organisation identifies a culture problem, the right next question is: what structural and process conditions have produced and sustained this behaviour? In most cases, the culture you are trying to change has been entirely rational given the system people have been operating in. Asking people to behave differently, without changing the system, is asking them to absorb the cost of a problem they didn’t create.
Cultural debt is real. But the most effective way to address it is usually to start with the structural and process debt underneath it. Fix the system. Give people the governance, the process, and the visibility that enable the behaviour you want.
The culture often follows.
If you are looking at a culture problem in your organisation and wondering whether you are addressing the right thing, I work with leadership teams to diagnose what is actually driving the behaviour before deciding what to fix.