If Behaviors Drive Culture... what drives behavior then?
We all know that culture shapes what feels expected, what gets rewarded, and what people learn to avoid in an organization, but how do we get to the root cause of it all?
If we want to change or evolve culture, we can’t just stop at naming the behaviors we’d like to see more of, we also have to understand what’s making those behaviors hard or misaligned with how things currently work.
I took this simple culture map, and added a few examples to help illustrate how it works. This isn't a template to copy, because of course it is incomplete, but I like to show things so they are visual and easy to understand.
This mapping or canvas becomes useful, because it helps your team see what’s underneath the behavior... think beliefs norms, expectations, structures, and feedback loops that quietly shape what people do, even when no one is looking.
This is the part that most people get wrong... because they go from what’s visible to what they think is a solution, without understanding what kind of barrier they’re dealing with.
This is where real behavioral change needs to become operational!
You need a way to classify what’s going on - you need models and frameworks to help answer:
• Is it a lack of skill or knowledge? • A belief that’s outdated but persistent? • A social norm no one questions? • A structural constraint that makes the behavior impractical? •An identity issue, where doing the new behavior would mean not being seen as a “good colleague” or “strong leader”?
If you can’t distinguish these nuances, then any solution you design is essentially a guess because you are working with intuition and not evidence.
This is the most important part to get right and where most of my clients ask me to work with them on, because In every project we run, whether it’s cultural alignment, policy redesign, or transformation strategy, we build this kind of behavioral mapping in from the start.
1) We identify the behaviors that matter. 2) We map what’s reinforcing or blocking them. 3) We use models like COM-B, TDF, and BNOS to analyze the patterns. 4) We match techniques to the actual barrier so the solution fits the mechanism, not just the symptoms.
Most of my careers, I used to go straight from behavior to idea, without doing the work in the middle, but once I learned how to build this kind of analysis into the process, things started working more consistently and more systemically.
In the end, if you want to change behavior, you have to understand what holds it in place and If you want to evolve culture, that’s where you start.
What’s quietly holding your current behaviors in place, even when everyone says they want change?
(Canvas adapted from - Dave Grey/Strategyzer)