Your culture is drifting.
The dangerous part? Nobody feels the current.
Which is why I recently found myself floating backwards through our office on a chair, holding a ship's wheel and reading a document called Culture Strategy 2026. Perfectly normal Wednesday.
But there's a serious idea underneath the ridiculous video. In more than 20 years of watching organisations transform, I have never met a leader who deliberately set out to create a bad culture. Nobody wakes up thinking: "Let's build a company where people stop caring, bad news gets hidden, mediocre behaviour is normal and our best people eventually leave."
It happens much more quietly. Leaders stop designing — and culture fills the vacuum.
It's not an intention gap. It's a design gap.
John Graham, Campbell Harvey, Jillian Popadak and Shivaram Rajgopal surveyed executives at 1,348 companies. 92% believed improving their culture would increase the value of their company. Yet only 16% believed their culture was where it should be.
Think about that gap. Almost everybody wants a great culture. The problem isn't intention. It's design.
Culture never drifts into nothing
It drifts toward something:
- toward the loudest person;
- toward the most influential manager;
- toward the behaviour that gets rewarded;
- toward the behaviour everyone sees but nobody challenges;
- toward the superstar who delivers incredible numbers while leaving human wreckage behind.
People don't learn culture from PowerPoint. They watch each other. Economists Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti found that in a supermarket chain, a 10% increase in the productivity of co-workers was associated with a 1.7% increase in an individual's effort — with visibility and social pressure playing an important role.
People notice who gets promoted. Who gets forgiven. Who gets interrupted. Who gets listened to. What happens when somebody makes a mistake. And what the boss does when the numbers are bad. That is culture being transmitted in real time.
There's an ancient image in Proverbs that captures this: a neglected field covered in thorns and weeds, its wall falling apart. Nobody had to plant the weeds. They appeared because nobody tended the field.
Decay is free. Design takes work.
Is your culture rojak?
I drank a company's culture recently — a smoothie made from leftover vision statements and generic values probably copied from Google. How does your culture taste?
Bad culture simply accumulates. A bit of the founder's habits. A dash of the last crisis. Whatever the loudest department gets away with. Malaysians have a word for this: rojak. A culture left undesigned does not stay neutral. It defaults — to habit, hierarchy and blame. And then we act surprised when the transformation "fades".
Because culture isn't what you announce. It's what people experience, repeatedly. And experiences are shaped by rituals. Rituals are values with a calendar invite.
Aviation learned this the hard way. After the Tenerife disaster in 1977, the industry didn't hang posters about speaking up. It redesigned the ritual: crew resource management trained co-pilots — and expected them — to challenge captains. That ritual is a big part of why flying became one of the safest ways to travel.
Design three ordinary moments
So the key question may not be "What is our culture?" It may be: "What is our culture drifting toward — and who or what is doing the pulling?"
Start by looking at three ordinary moments:
- How do your meetings actually begin?
- What happens when someone brings bad news?
- What happens when a brilliant performer behaves badly?
Then design those moments — one ritual at a time:
- Pick ONE behaviour. Not an adjective ("integrity") but an anchor ("we surface bad news within 24 hours").
- Give it a calendar invite. A question you personally ask in every meeting. A ten-minute Friday review. Small enough to survive your worst week.
- Go first, visibly. Culture is not what leaders approve. It's what leaders repeatedly do.
- Ask one person to check on you in 30 days. Rituals don't die loudly. They die quietly, unwitnessed.
Culture isn't built in the values poster on the wall. It's built in thousands of tiny moments. And if you haven't designed those moments, don't be surprised when one day you grab the steering wheel… and discover it was never connected to anything.
You may not have a culture problem. You may have a culture design problem. That's a very different problem to solve.
Watch: Is your culture drifting? · Is your culture rojak? · Try the rituals: Culture Drift Check · Values With a Calendar Invite
