Is your culture going stale?

Somewhere in the world right now, there is a laminated poster on a wall. It was printed in 2015. It lists five company values in a font that was fashionable then but has long ceased to be so. One of the values is ‘integrity.’ Another is almost certainly ‘innovation.’ Maybe there’s another statement nearby about being ‘one team’.

Nobody reads it. Nobody needs to. They know it's there the way they know the fire extinguisher is there - technically reassuring, practically inert.

This is how some organisations think about culture. You define it. You print it. You laminate it. And then, crucially, you leave it there. To rot.

Culture is not a poster. It is not a document, a set of values, or a one-day offsite with a catered lunch and a facilitator who says ‘yes, and’ a lot. (I got out of that habit in 2016!)

Culture is a living thing. And like all living things, it either grows or it decays. There is no standing still.

Microsoft is a great case study. In 2014, Satya Nadella inherited a company that had stagnated around a culture of internal competition and a belief - almost theological in its certainty - that it already knew everything worth knowing. Between 2000 and 2014, Microsoft's value had barely moved while Apple's had grown by 4,000%.

Nadella introduced a single, deceptively simple idea: that Microsoft needed to shift from a company of ‘know-it-alls’ to one of ‘learn-it-alls.’ He didn't just change strategy. He changed the culture. Deliberately. Then continuously. By 2024, Microsoft had become one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Now consider Nokia. In 2007, Nokia held over 50% of the global mobile phone market. Its culture was widely admired - collaborative, values-driven, internally cohesive. And yet that same culture was deeply resistant to the uncomfortable self-examination that continual evolution demands. By 2013, Nokia's mobile division had been sold to Microsoft for a fraction of its former worth.

The culture that made Nokia great in 1998 was the same culture that stagnated and made it fragile in 2008.

The paradox of cultural success is that the things that work, eventually become the things that harm. The values that unite people in growth become the assumptions that blind them to the change required.

Evolving your culture is not an admission that you got it wrong. It is proof that you're paying attention. That you understand the world your people are actually working in now, not the world you imagined they would.

The organisations that thrive over the next decade won't be the ones who got their culture right once. They'll be the ones who understand that getting it right is an annual evolutionary process, not a poster.