Work Culture

“Culture” has many definitions, and people understand it in very different ways. In Business Design, we keep it simple: culture is expected behaviour. It’s rarely written down, but every employee feels it — directly and indirectly — in what gets rewarded and what gets punished. Most employees adjust their behaviour accordingly. Leaders shape culture first. But every employee shapes it too, through their own behaviour.

That’s why a company’s culture is so strongly shaped by its leaders and their Leadership style. Many leaders don’t even realise how much their behaviour influences everyone else’s. If the boss shows up to meetings unprepared, some employees will follow suit. If a manager decides quickly and boldly, employees may do the same. So which cultural traits actually help innovation work?

1. Culture Traits

Our Guiding Principles for Business Design already point to some pillars of a strong innovation culture.

• Dream Big, Act Small: We build innovation today by defining a big vision for tomorrow, then reverse-engineering it into digestible pieces. We call the path to the vision “strategy”.

• Customers First: We build innovation for customers, so we bring them into our work at the right moments, using the right methods. Not too early, not too late.

• Think Business, Not Product: The keyword here is holistic thinking. We consider every element that affects an innovation’s success.

• Demo or Die: It’s easier to talk about something new once you’ve turned the idea into a prototype, a model or a demo.

• Facts Over Opinions: We decide how to shape innovation mostly on facts — not gut feel.

In addition, we also value these traits in an innovation culture:

1. The drive to excite others with results: Business Design needs leaders and employees who approach their work wanting to excite customers, colleagues and partners with what they deliver. Just completing tasks without drawing negative attention might be a fine survival strategy in many companies. Business Design needs more. But watch out: wanting to excite people is not the same as perfectionism.

2. Momentum over perfectionism: Some companies chase perfection. They search for the perfect solution, the perfect strategy, the perfect product — and keep working in secret until they feel they’ve arrived. Business Design replaces “perfect” with “as good as possible” and tests ideas early, under real conditions. Business Design needs movement and a felt sense of progress. Sometimes in big steps, sometimes in small ones. Every day.

3. Decide! When a Project Sponsor doesn’t quickly decide what happens next after an innovation project, it wastes money, time and the motivation of the best people. Sure, some decisions are hard to make and take courage. But it’s rare that a decision can’t be refined — or even corrected — later.

4. Mistakes are bad. Making no mistakes is worse: The so-called “failure culture” is another ingredient many companies try to implement. And this is good. However, the execution sometimes runs into problems: At one extreme, people demonise mistakes. At the other, they celebrate them (do you know “fuck-up nights”?) or bring up their failure culture in every meeting. Both extremes miss the point. Mistakes are mistakes, and they’re bad at first — negative emotions about them are natural, sometimes even healthy. However, making no mistakes at all would be worse. We need a culture that balances the two extremes.

2. Culture and Rewards

Every company has two cultures: the one on the poster and the one in the promotion list. Employees read the second one — and they read it accurately. So look at last year. Who got promoted? Which projects kept their budget when money got tight? Whose presentation did the boss forward? And what happened to the people whose project was stopped? Those four answers describe your innovation culture better than any survey. Let's say your values talk about courage, and the last three promotions went to people who delivered on time and never questioned the brief. Everyone in the building has already drawn the correct conclusion. If you want different behaviour, change what gets rewarded. Nothing else on this page works without that.

3. Culture Programme: Stop it!

Culture doesn’t change in workshops about culture. It changes when daily practice changes — the meetings, the formats, the questions, who speaks first. Behaviour comes first and the values follow it, not the other way round. So instead of a values initiative, take five recurring meetings and rebuild them. Replace the status round with “what did we learn, what did we falsify”. Put customer quotes on the first slide instead of in the appendix. End every meeting with a decision, or with the date one will be taken. Follow the Guiding Principles of Business Design – always. Let’s say a company spends a serious budget on a culture campaign while its portfolio meeting still runs on opinions and traffic lights. The campaign loses. It always loses.

4. Q & A

• Our reward system is set by HR. We can't change it – does this page apply to us at all? Yes, because most rewards never touch the HR system. Who gets asked into the next project, whose slide the boss forwards, which team gets the budget when money is tight, what happens to the people whose project was stopped – you decide all of that this week, without a policy change. Formal criteria follow years later. Start with the rewards you already own.

• Our leaders don't play along. Can we build the culture bottom-up anyway? Not across the organisation. A culture that contradicts what leadership rewards loses every time – that is why "evolution from the bottom up" sits in the pitfalls of the Roadmap for Implementation. Inside one team it works, as long as one leader with real authority shields it – often the Project Sponsor. Use that protection to produce results other teams can see. Results move leaders. Workshops about culture do not.

• How long does it take before we see a change? Behaviour changes the moment the meeting changes – that is a matter of weeks. Culture, meaning what people expect of each other without being told, follows after two or three project cycles. If nothing has moved after a year of real projects, don't run another campaign. Look at what got rewarded in that year.

• Can't we simply hire people with the right mindset? Hire them – and then watch them adapt. New people read expected behaviour within their first months and adjust to it, exactly like everyone else. Hiring buys you a head start, nothing more. If the rewards stay as they are, you either lose these people again or you turn them into the people you already have.