Most culture work stays at the level of posters on a wall...
You define the values.. you roll them out.. maybe there's a workshop, and then everyone goes back to doing what they were doing before because nothing in the actual system changed.
Edgar Schein (MIT Sloan Image credit) breaks organizational culture into three layers.. it's a good starting point but on its own it won't get you to change.
What it needs is a diagnostic lens that starts with behaviors!
The visible stuff
The policies, processes, systems, how meetings run, how decisions get made.. most organizations don't think of these as culture, they think of them as operations, however these structures are shaping behavior every day whether you realize it or not.
If your meeting format doesn't leave room for dissent, you're building a culture of compliance.. even if that wasn't the intention, so the question becomes.. what behaviors are these structures actually enabling?
The stated values
Every organization has values on a slide somewhere.. but values without behaviors attached to them are meaningless...We value collaboration tells you nothing...team leads share draft work with at least one peer before presenting to leadership... now that tells you something you can observe, measure, and design for.
This is how we have been approaching culture change work..by taking a stated value, breaking by its dimension and then it into the specific behaviors it requires, then find the friction of what's making those behaviors easy or hard in the current environment. without that step you're basically just hoping the values translate into action on their own.
The hidden assumptions
This is the gap between the culture you say you have and the culture you actually have, what do people believe about how things really work around here? What's rewarded in practice vs on paper?
You have to trace that gap back to conditions.. do people know how? does the norm actually support it? do people believe it's worth the risk?
The thing you may find is that these layers often contradict each other... you tell people they have autonomy and trust.. but your policy requires them to log every hour and get approval for decisions they should own.
People don't listen to what you say.. they watch what the system does, and when the structures are telling them something different from the values on the wall.. the structures always win.
Schein's model is a simplification.. all models are, but it becomes useful when you connect values to specific behaviors, map the tensions between layers, and actually design for what's happening rather than what leadership wishes was happening.
How does your organization handle the gap between stated values and the behaviors your structures actually enable?