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Values don’t change behaviour. Environments do, and most culture work never gets there. Culture has become a buzzword. Everyone wants a ‘different’ one. Few know how to build one. Most of the work stops at the same two places: values painted on a wall, and a five-year vision and mission everyone nods along to once a year. Both matter. Neither is where culture actually lives. Culture lives on a Tuesday morning. It's what someone does when no one important is watching, when the deadline is tight, when the easy thing and the right thing aren't the same thing. If we haven't designed for that moment, we haven't designed culture, we've designed a poster. The habit loop we keep getting wrong Charles Duhigg's habit loop, cue, routine, reward; explains why so much culture work fails. Most organisations pour their energy into the routine: the training, the handbook, the “this is how we do things here” conversation. Telling people what to do. But a routine without a cue never fires. If the environment doesn't make the right behaviour obvious, whether that's seeing a colleague model it, or a workspace that makes the right thing the easy thing, the routine sits unused, no matter how well it's written down. And a routine without a reward doesn't stick. If we don't notice and recognise the moment someone does the right thing, in the moment, not at the next review cycle, there's nothing reinforcing it. The loop breaks at both ends, and we only ever worked on the middle. We spend our effort on the routine, telling people what to do, and almost none on the cue or the reward that would make it stick. It starts with desire Before any of that works, there has to be desire: a genuine feeling of connection to why this matters. Not a value statement, a reason someone actually feels. Skip this and the rest of the loop is just mechanics bolted onto nothing. Motivation is easy. Discipline is hard. This is where most culture effort goes wrong. Motivation is easy to manufacture: a talk, a poster, a launch event. It creates a spike. Discipline, the quiet, repeated, unglamorous consistency that culture actually depends on, is hard, and it doesn't come from another motivational push. Discipline comes from environment. It comes from making the cue obvious, the right behaviour the path of least resistance, and the recognition immediate. We consistently put more effort into motivating people than into building the conditions for consistency, and then wonder why the culture doesn't hold once the energy fades. What this means on a Tuesday If you're serious about culture, the questions worth asking aren't about the wall or the five-year plan. They're smaller, and harder: • What's the cue? Is the right behaviour visible, modelled, and easy to spot in the flow of a normal day? • What's the environment? Have we made the right thing the easy thing, or are we asking people to swim upstream to do it? • What's the reward? Are we recognising the behaviour in the moment it happens, or only mentioning it months later, if at all? • What's the desire? Do people feel a real reason to do this, or are we relying on a value on a wall to do the work? Get those four right, consistently, and culture stops being a buzzword. It becomes what people do without thinking, on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody's watching. Lee Houghton, Get Knowledge |
