What We Talk About When We Talk About Culture
I thought I understood culture until I tried to write about it.
For days, I'd been wrestling with a piece about how teams survive pressure. I kept hitting the same contradiction: I'd observed culture crumbling under stress, teams abandoning their stated values the moment deadlines loomed. But I'd also seen culture become the very thing that held teams together when everything else fell apart.
How could culture be both the first casualty of pressure and the ultimate source of resilience?
The breakthrough came during a conversation with my husband. As I described my frustration about how the article felt muddled and how I couldn't reconcile these opposing observations, he stopped me mid-sentence.
"Maybe you're talking about two different things," he said.
He was right. I'd been using one word to describe two entirely different phenomena, and the confusion was more than semantic. It revealed something fundamental about how we misunderstand what actually drives team performance when stakes are high.
The Culture We Think We Have
Walk into most tech companies and you'll see culture everywhere. It's on the walls colourful graphics proclaiming values like "People First" and "Be Bold" It's in the employee handbook, the onboarding presentations, the quarterly all-hands where leadership talks about "our culture of innovation."
You'll see the practices too: regular retrospectives, one-on-ones scheduled like clockwork, learning budgets, team building events, wellness programs. These are the visible artifacts of culture, the things we point to when we want to show we care about more than just shipping code.
I used to think this was culture. Many leaders still do.
But I've learned that these practices, however well-intentioned, are not culture itself. They're cultural artifacts. And when pressure hits, they're often the first things to disappear.
I've watched it happen repeatedly. The retrospective that gets canceled because there's no time. The one-on-one that becomes a status update because there are fires to fight. The team building budget that gets reallocated to hiring contractors. The wellness program that everyone's too stressed to use.
This is what I now call Cultural Practices, the visible, manageable expressions of what we hope our culture to be. They're important, but they're not the foundation. And when we mistake them for culture itself, we're building on sand.
The Culture We Actually Live
Real culture isn't what's written on walls or scheduled in calendars. It's what happens in the spaces between the formal processes. It's the texture of daily interactions. it’s the assumptions that guide behavior when no one's watching. It’s the reflexes that kick in when things get difficult.
I've seen teams with minimal formal processes stay cohesive under extreme pressure because they had something deeper: genuine trust, transparent communication, and leaders who treated people as humans rather than resources.
The difference shows up in small moments. When someone says "I'm at capacity," is that treated as valuable information or a personal failing? When stress levels rise, do people turn toward each other or away? When mistakes happen, is the first instinct to understand or to blame?
This is Cultural Foundation, the largely invisible substrate that determines how a team actually functions. Unlike Cultural Practices, it often grows stronger under pressure rather than weaker.
The paradox I'd been struggling with suddenly made sense. Cultural Practices crumble under pressure because they're add-ons, extras that seem dispensable when survival is at stake. Cultural Foundation becomes more important under pressure because it's what enables survival in the first place.
Why This Distinction Matters Now
This isn't just an academic exercise in organisational theory. The distinction between Cultural Practices and Cultural Foundation has never been more critical.
We're living through a period of intense workplace pressure. AI adoption is reshaping roles and expectations at breakneck speed. Teams are expected to pivot strategies while hitting existing targets and to adapt continuously while delivering consistently.
Under this kind of sustained stress, the gap between surface culture and deep culture becomes a chasm. Organisations with strong Cultural Practices but weak Cultural Foundations might discover their teams can't handle the pressure. Meanwhile, organisations that have invested in genuine trust and psychological safety might find their people more resilient and adaptable than ever.
The Questions We Should Be Asking
Most conversations about workplace culture focus on the wrong things. We debate ping pong tables and flexible work policies when we should be examining the fundamental assumptions that guide how we treat each other when pressure mounts.
Instead of measuring engagement through surveys, we should be observing behavior during crisis. Instead of implementing programs to fix culture, we should be examining the leadership behaviors that create culture in the first place.
These aren't comfortable questions because they force us to confront gaps between our stated values and our lived reality. But they're necessary questions if we want to build organisations that can thrive under pressure rather than merely survive it.
What Comes Next
Over the coming weeks, I'll be exploring these themes more deeply. We'll examine what Cultural Practices actually accomplish and when they matter. And we'll dig into what creates genuine Cultural Foundation and why it's often invisible until tested.
The goal isn't to dismiss the importance of Cultural Practices or to suggest that good intentions don't matter. It's to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what actually creates resilient, high-performing teams in an age of relentless change.
Because if we're going to ask people to navigate unprecedented challenges, we owe them more than motivational posters and team building exercises.
The conversation starts with acknowledging what we've been getting wrong. It continues with the harder work of building something better.