The Real Reasons Culture Change Fails (and How to Fix Them)

Every major consultancy and leadership book lists the same reasons why culture change fails: 

1. No real leadership commitment or organization-wide involvement despite the usual employee survey.

2. No clear link to performance.

3. Change-makers tripping over the real taboos “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

We’ve known these for decades. And yet, culture change programs keep failing.

I’ve tried to change culture myself and failed more than once. 

That experience made me question the usual explanations go searching for the real reasons. I don’t buy the fatalistic view that culture only changes when you replace more than half the management team. There’s more hope than that.

In my search, I found powerful insights in the work of Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, Gary Hamel, Aaron Dignan, and Peter Scott-Morgan, thinkers who understand the human and systemic mechanics of change. Since you’re busy, I’ve summarized what I believe are their most practical lessons below.

Real Reasons and Fixes

1. It starts with a survey and ends with a report.

Most culture change programs begin with long, sometimes even academically accredited, survey that scans the organization like a full-body check. The result: The “from” and “to”, a long list of “areas for improvement” and a thick PowerPoint deck of recommendations. By the time action begins, energy is gone — and culture has become a program, not a practice.

Believe me, as a Management Consultant I am guilty.

The real opportunity is to teach the organization a new muscle: the continuous learning loop. 

At every level, people should habitually ask: “What stands in the way of me doing my best work?” Then try small experiments to change that practice and remove the barriers that prevent those improvements from spreading.

Do this across the company, using MS Teams, Slack, or other collaboration tools and that’s when culture becomes visible and alive. Employees see impact. Leaders see movement. Culture isn’t something you wait for from the top; it’s something you do, every day.

2. We ignore the tensions that shape behaviour.

Every organization culture runs on social tensions — the push and pull between values that are both right but in conflict. 

Centralization vs. decentralization. 

Rules vs. exceptions. 

Short-term delivery vs. long-term innovation.

Speed vs. safety.

When these tensions go unmanaged, they turn into vicious circles, conflicts: the more one side wins, the more the other side resists. Meetings multiply, trust erodes, progress slows. And yet, those same tensions, when recognized and reconciled, become virtuous circles that drive adaptability and innovation.

True culture work isn’t about eliminating tensions; it’s about learning to reconcile them.

3. We ignore the unwritten rules of the game.

Even when leaders genuinely want change, the system often tells a different story. Strategy, structure, and processes can unintentionally reinforce the very behaviours leaders are trying to change.

Take a consumer goods company that struggled to produce breakthrough innovations. Despite years of consultancy interventions and leadership commitment, the organization remained stuck in short-term incremental projects. When drilled into that specific issue, not “culture” in general, but this pattern, the root cause wasn’t in the people or in the values. It was in the career model.

The key motivator for people was to move up the ladder to secure their family’s future. They got what they want through promotions every 3 years, decided by their direct boss, based on one person’s unit P&L performance. Anyone in a major corporate, sounds familiar, no?  That structure made risk-taking irrational.

The solution wasn’t a new value statement. It was a redesign:

• Career decisions made by cross-functional committees, not just line managers.

• Promotion criteria expanded beyond P&L to include collaboration and cross-unit contribution.

That single change rewired the incentives and with it, the culture.

In Summary

Most culture programs fail because they treat culture as a communication exercise. But culture is not what you say; it’s what your system rewards, what your tensions amplify, and what your people practice every day.

The next generation of culture change will succeed not by adding more slogans or surveys, but by mastering three disciplines:

1. Continuous learning loops.

2. Reconciliation of tensions.

3. Rewiring the system beneath the slogans.

What's next

Capturing these insights we develop the Adaptability Audit™ to uncover the hidden barriers that hold organizations back from real culture change. It helps leadership teams see what’s actually blocking adaptability and speed and what to do about it, before launching another program that treats symptoms instead of causes.