Culture Isn't Your Values - It's Your Landscape

Last week, I was walking through the hills with a group of executives on a corporate retreat. We'd stopped at the top of a valley, looking across to a church on the opposite hillside, when one of them asked about changing their company culture.

"See that church over there?" I said. "How would you get to it?"

"Well, there's a river in the way," came the immediate response.

"Exactly. So you'd have to map it, understand what's available and what's possible, then find the actual route."

This is how culture change really works. It's not about declaring new values and expecting people to teleport to them. It's about understanding the landscape you're in and finding the navigable path to where you want to be.

The Valley Problem

Most culture change initiatives tend to fail because they treat culture like a mission statement rather than a landscape. Leaders point to their desired destination—"We want to be more innovative," "We need better collaboration," "We must become more customer-focused"—and expect their teams to figure out how to get there.

But culture, like landscape, has terrain. There are rivers that can't be crossed directly, mountains that require switchbacks, and marshlands where you'll sink if you don't know the safe path. You can't wish these obstacles away with inspirational posters or town halls.

The executives I work with often make the same mistake. They look at successful companies and think, "We want to be like that," without considering the journey required or whether their current landscape even allows for that destination.

Mapping Your Cultural Terrain

Real culture change starts with honest cartography. You need to understand three things about your current landscape:

Where You Actually Are: Not where your values statement says you are, but where the daily reality of decisions, behaviours, and conversations actually places you. This requires listening to the stories people tell about what really happens in your organisation.

What's Possible from Here: Every culture has certain changes that flow naturally and others that require significant infrastructure. A highly hierarchical organisation can't become flat overnight, but it might be able to create more space for input and feedback.

The Terrain Between: What are the actual barriers between your current state and your desired state? Is it systems, incentives, skills, leadership behaviour, or something else entirely? These aren't just obstacles to overcome—they're the map you need to navigate. And you want to think about your appetite for costs and risks - if you're in a competitive environment, it might be worth investing to make change happen faster.

Following The Contours

When I work with organisations on culture change, we create what I call contour maps. Just like geological contour maps show you how to navigate mountainous terrain, cultural contour maps show you the path of least resistance between where you are and where you want to be. Instead of culture change taking years and burning out your best people, you find the route that actually works.

You might want to reach that church on the hilltop, but the most direct route involves crossing a river and climbing a cliff face. The navigable route might take you downstream to a bridge, then up a gentler slope on the far side. It takes longer, but you actually arrive.

In culture terms, this might mean that becoming "more innovative" requires first building psychological safety (the bridge), then creating space for experimentation (the gentle slope), before you can expect breakthrough thinking (the church).

Reading The Signs

Every landscape gives you signals about what's possible and what isn't. In the hills, you read the vegetation, the rock formations, the way water flows. In organisations, you read the stories people tell, the decisions that get made, the behaviours that get rewarded.

One client wanted to create a "culture of accountability" but kept promoting people who were great at finding excuses when things went wrong. The landscape was telling them something important: the current terrain rewarded political skill over responsibility. Until they changed what got rewarded, no amount of accountability training would create the culture they wanted.

Another organisation talked about wanting collaboration, but had individual performance metrics and competitive ranking systems. They were essentially asking people to build bridges while standing on opposite sides of a canyon. And then wondering why collaboration felt so difficult and dangerous.

The Next Best Step

Culture change isn't about leaping from peak to peak. It's about taking the next best step given the terrain you're actually on. This means:

Start Where You Are: Don't pretend your current culture is something it isn't. Honest assessment isn't pessimistic—it's the foundation for real movement.

Find the Natural Path: Look for changes that flow with your existing organisational patterns rather than against them. What's already working that you could amplify?

Build Infrastructure as You Go: Sometimes you need to build that bridge before you can cross the river. This might mean changing systems, training, or leadership behaviours before you can reach your cultural destination.

Follow the Feedback: The landscape will tell you if you're on the right path. If your culture change efforts feel like pushing water uphill, you're probably fighting the terrain rather than working with it. This doesn't require elaborate culture assessments. It requires paying attention to conversations differently and asking better questions about what you're seeing.

What I Keep Noticing That Surprises Leaders

Here's the thing - when I sit down with leadership teams to map their cultural landscape, the same three patterns keep showing up. And they're never what people expect.

The first is that their "collaboration problem" usually isn't about collaboration at all. I'll hear about teams that won't share information or coordinate properly, but when you look closer, it's not that they don't know how to collaborate. They're brilliant at it when they trust that their contribution won't get appropriated or ignored. Same people, same processes - the difference is whether they believe their input actually matters.

Second, the culture they want already exists somewhere in their organisation (it always does). But it's usually invisible to leadership because it doesn't look like what they expected. I regularly find pockets of real innovation or genuine customer focus tucked away in unexpected corners - the facilities team that redesigned their workflow around what actually helps people, or the accounts department that started proactively solving problems before customers even knew they had them.

Third - and this one's always uncomfortable - their biggest cultural obstacle is often something they're genuinely proud of. High standards become perfectionism paralysis. Data-driven decisions become analysis addiction. "We don't settle for second best" becomes "we don't ship anything." The very strength that got them here becomes the thing holding them back.

Beyond Values & Vision

Culture isn't about the inspiring destination on your wall poster. It's about the daily experience of navigating your organisational landscape. It's the accumulated effect of thousands of small decisions about what matters, what gets attention, and what gets rewarded.

The most successful culture changes I've seen didn't start with grand visions. They started with leaders who took the time to understand their landscape, identified the navigable path to improvement, and then guided their teams step by step along that route.

Your culture is already a landscape. The question isn't what values you want to have—it's whether you're willing to do the hard work of mapping where you are, understanding the terrain, and finding the actual path forward.

Because in the end, culture change isn't about declaring a new destination. It's about becoming the kind of organisation that knows how to navigate any terrain to get where it needs to go.

Ready To Map Your Cultural Terrain?

If you're tired of culture change initiatives that sound inspiring but don't stick, it's time to understand the landscape you're actually navigating. I work with leadership teams to create practical culture change strategies that follow the natural contours of your organisation rather than fighting against them.

Book a conversation with me to explore how cultural contour mapping could transform your approach to organisational change.