​Culture As A Woven Bowl

You're sitting in yet another culture transformation meeting. Someone's drawn arrows on a whiteboard - State A to State B, old culture (“siloed, risk-averse”) to new culture ("collaborative, innovative"). The plan involves new values posters, perhaps a workshop series, definitely some town halls. And somewhere in your chest, you feel that familiar mixture of hope and resignation, because you've seen this film before. You know how it ends. (You might even be the one presenting it.)

Here's what those arrows on the whiteboard never quite capture: culture isn't something you can simply pick up and relocate. It behaves more like water finding its level - always flowing toward the path of least resistance, settling into the deepest groove available. And the moment you stop actively pushing it uphill, it flows right back to where it started.

But what if the problem isn't the culture itself? What if it's the shape of the container?

The Physics Of Organisational Behaviour

Let me show what I mean. Imagine culture as a ball resting in a woven bowl. The ball naturally rolls to the lowest point and stays there - not through stubbornness or resistance to change, but through simple physics. This is your organisational culture in its resting state. It's not good or bad; it's simply responding to the contours of its environment. (And there’s always a “resting” state - even in the most dynamic organisations.)

Most culture change efforts amount to pushing that ball up the side of the bowl. "We need to be more customer-centric!" leaders declare, and everyone dutifully pushes the ball upward. Meetings are restructured. Customer metrics are displayed on dashboards. Success stories are shared. And yes, while everyone's actively pushing, the ball stays in its new position.

You know what happens next. The initiative ends, attention shifts to the next priority, hands come off the ball. And with an almost audible sigh of relief, it rolls back to that familiar low point. Six months later, someone asks, "Whatever happened to that customer-centricity initiative?"

What Actually Shapes The Bowl

The bowl itself - that's where things get interesting. It's woven from every system, process, metric, and structure in your organisation. Your promotion criteria weave one section. Your budget allocation process weaves another. The stories people tell about who gets ahead, how meetings run, what gets celebrated and what gets quietly buried - each thread shapes the contours that guide behaviour.

I saw this in a tech company recently. The CEO championed “intelligent risk-taking” while their capital approval process required three committees and sign-off from a senior director for any project over $50K. The real message from the culture? Innovation is expensive and dangerous. And the people signing it off, with all due respect, have probably got there by following the rules, not innovating. The CEO said one thing, the process wove a different pattern entirely. You can imagine which way people leaned.

The ball kept rolling back to "risk-averse" not because people resisted change (they rarely do, actually - it’s often the system that works as an immune system), but because that's where the bowl's weave directed it. The physics of their organisation made playing it safe the lowest-energy state.

The Threads You Don't Notice

Perhaps the most powerful threads in your cultural bowl are the ones that have become invisible through familiarity. That weekly report that nobody reads but everyone still produces - it's a thread. The way senior leaders' calendars get protected while everyone else's time is treated as freely available - that's a thread. That expense approval system? It was someone's solution to a cost overrun problem from five years ago. Now it's part of the weave, shaping behaviour in ways its creators never intended. The unwritten rule about not disagreeing with certain people in public - definitely a thread.

These invisible threads often reveal themselves through contradictions - “Why doesn't collaboration improve despite significant investment?” Perhaps look at the expense system that requires director-level approval for travel between offices. The message woven into that thread? Stay in your silo; visiting colleagues is suspicious behaviour requiring senior oversight. One small thread, yet it runs through the entire bowl, creating a groove that guides behaviour away from collaboration every single time.

And yet (there's always an "and yet" when you're looking at systems), changing these threads isn't as simple as just pulling them out. Each one connects to others, creating a pattern that often serves purposes you might not immediately see.

The Patience Of Changing The Weave

Here's where leaders often get frustrated. Changing the weave of the bowl takes time, much more time than just pushing the ball to a new position. You have to identify which threads are creating the current shape, understand what purpose they serve (or once served), and carefully adjust them while maintaining the bowl's basic integrity. You can't just rip threads out - the whole thing might unravel.

But when you do change the weave thoughtfully, something rather remarkable happens. The ball starts rolling to a different point naturally. You don't have to push it there. You don't have to hold it in place. (In organisational terms, you don’t have to pour more resources into pushing values or ensuring compliance.) The new configuration of systems, processes, and structures creates a different low point, and behaviour flows there as naturally as water finding its level.

The shift happens through accumulation rather than announcement. Change how you measure success - from procedures completed to outcomes over time. Alter meeting structures so different voices lead discussions. Modify hiring processes to include diverse perspectives. None of these changes demands that people behave differently. They simply make new behaviours the easier path, the natural place for the ball to settle.

Reading The Current Weave

Before you can reweave anything, you need to understand the current pattern. And here's where it gets tricky - you're inside the bowl, part of the weave yourself. (It's a bit like trying to find your own glasses while you're wearing them.)

Start by mapping contradictions. Not in a blame-seeking way, but as archaeology. As exploring the landscape. Where do stated values and actual rewards point in different directions? These gaps aren’t failures of integrity - they’re evidence of the bowl’s true shape.

Try this: Pick one of your organisation’s stated values. Now ask yourself - who gets promoted? Not who should get promoted, but who actually does. If you say you value collaboration but promote based on individual achievements, there's a thread to examine. If innovation is supposedly prized but failure is career-limiting, you've found another thread. These gaps aren't hypocrisies so much as evidence of your bowl's actual shape - and the place to start experimenting.

Pay particular attention to what happens when pressure increases. Under stress, the ball doesn't just roll to the lowest point - it races there.

Whatever behaviour emerges during crises, that's where your bowl is truly shaped to guide things. If decision-making suddenly becomes hierarchical during emergencies despite all the empowerment rhetoric, well, now you know the real contours of your container.

The Art Of Gentle Adjustment

The temptation is to attempt dramatic reweaving - to pull out all the problematic threads at once and replace them with better ones. This rarely works and often creates more problems than it solves. Remember, even dysfunctional threads are usually holding something together.

Instead, think like someone repairing a basket while it's still holding water. You adjust one thread slightly, see how it affects the overall shape, then adjust another. You might strengthen certain threads that support the direction you want to go. You might gradually loosen others that create unhelpful grooves.

A financial services firm wanted to shift from blame-focused to learning-focused. Rather than announcing a new 'learning culture' programme, they made three small changes: incident reports now asked 'what did we learn?' before 'what went wrong?'; performance reviews included a 'most valuable failure' section; and team leads started sharing their own mistakes in monthly meetings. None of these changes was dramatic enough to trigger resistance. But six months in, people were talking differently about mistakes. The bowl's shape had shifted.

Each change feels small enough to be safe, yet together they gradually reshape the bowl's contours until learning becomes the natural resting place.

These adjustments work best when they're almost boring in their subtlety. The most successful reweaving often goes unnoticed until one day someone remarks, "You know, we handle mistakes differently now." That's when you know the bowl's shape has truly changed - when the new behaviour has become so natural that people barely remember pushing the ball uphill.

What This Means For Your Next Monday Morning

So you're back in that meeting room, staring at those arrows on the whiteboard. The culture transformation journey. Again. What do you do with this bowl-and-weave perspective?

First, perhaps ask different questions. Instead of "How do we get people to be more customer-centric?" try "What in our current systems makes being internally focused the easier choice?" Instead of "How do we drive innovation?" reframe it as "What threads in our organisation make playing it safe the lowest-energy position?"

Second, start with the threads within your own sphere of influence. That report you produce that nobody reads? Consider what would happen if you transformed it into something genuinely useful - or stopped producing it altogether. That meeting you run that always overruns? You might experiment with its structure, perhaps starting with outcomes rather than updates. These aren't acts of rebellion; they're experiments in understanding which threads actually matter and which are merely habits. And here's the interesting bit - when you start adjusting the threads you're responsible for, you often discover how they connect to threads elsewhere in the organisation. Your small changes might reveal larger patterns, or inspire others to examine their own contributions to the weave.

Finally, have patience with both the process and the people. Everyone's responding to the bowl's current shape, including you. When the ball rolls back to its familiar position for the hundredth time, it's not resistance or failure - it's physics. It's showing you exactly where your bowl is shaped to guide things. That's not discouraging; it's diagnostic.

Because here's the thing about bowls and cultures and the shapes that guide behaviour: they're always changing anyway, whether you're conscious of it or not. Every new system you introduce, every process you modify, every story that becomes part of organisational legend - they're all threads being woven into the pattern. The only question is whether you're weaving intentionally or accidentally.

And perhaps, just perhaps, the next time someone suggests pushing harder on culture change, you might quietly ask: "What if we stopped pushing the ball and started reweaving the bowl?"

The answer to that question tends to change everything. Not overnight, not dramatically, but steadily and sustainably. Thread by thread, weave by weave, until one day you notice the ball has rolled somewhere new entirely. And this time, it stays there.

Not because anyone's holding it in place, but because that's simply where it belongs now. Where the bowl naturally guides it. That’s what real change looks like - when it stops needing your attention to keep it there.

Image Source: Canva