Imagine the leadership team of a desert has just completed its annual strategy session.
The world is changing. What worked in the past won't get them where they need to go. After considerable analysis, they reach an important conclusion:
The future requires a rainforest. So, they set out to transform the culture. They define the attributes of the rainforest they want to become: diverse, interconnected, adaptive, abundant.
Leaders attend training on how to model rainforest behaviors. Rainforest Champions are identified throughout the desert. The cacti attend workshops designed to build a rainforest mindset. Performance expectations are updated to reinforce the new ways of being.
Six months later, they conduct a Rainforest Readiness Survey.
The results are encouraging. People understand the rainforest strategy. Leaders report strong alignment with the vision. Most employees can identify the behaviors expected of them. There is just one problem.
It's still a desert. And the cacti seem particularly stuck. At some point, someone asks an embarrassingly obvious question: Why is it a desert in the first place?
Well, for starters, it doesn't rain very much. But rainfall is only part of it. The soil, temperature, water, vegetation, and wildlife — and the relationships among them — developed together over time. The organisms that thrive there are adapted to those conditions. The cactus isn't failing to demonstrate rainforest behaviors. It's succeeding in the environment it lives in. Which makes sending it to another workshop on becoming a fern seem a little ridiculous.
And yet organizations do some version of this all the time.
We look around and see things we don't like. People don't speak up. Functions protect their own territory. Decisions move upward. People avoid risk. Teams don't collaborate. Innovation is slow. We collect those observations and give the pattern a name: culture. Then we make culture the thing we're going to change. A culture of innovation. A culture of collaboration. A speak-up culture.
But culture isn't a thing sitting somewhere in the organization waiting to be changed. You can't point to it — only to evidence of it: who talks and who stays quiet, who makes decisions, what happens when someone disagrees, what gets rewarded, and what gets ignored. Thousands of ordinary interactions eventually form patterns recognizable enough to name. Culture isn't something the organization has. It's something the organization keeps producing.
That distinction matters, because it changes the question. Not “what culture do we want,” but “what keeps producing the culture we have.”
Take an organization that says it wants a speak-up culture. It looks around and notices that supervisors do most of the talking while employees sit quietly. That observation is useful. It isn't a diagnosis.
Maybe supervisors leave little room for anyone else. Maybe employees have learned that challenging the boss carries consequences. Maybe employees expect the person in charge to have the answer. Maybe supervisors have tried turning decisions over to employees, only to have those decisions pushed straight back to them. Maybe the boss talking and everyone else deferring have been reinforcing each other for so long that nobody thinks about it anymore.
“We have a culture where people don't speak up” doesn't explain any of that. It names the pattern. It doesn't touch what's producing it. Once we've named the culture we want, we tend to translate it into things we want people to become: collaborate more, take more ownership, speak up, think enterprise-first.
Now imagine being the cactus.
You've spent years learning how to succeed in this environment. Maybe you learned that bringing another function into a decision slows you down and puts your own target at risk. Maybe you learned that the person who arrives with the answer gets promoted. Maybe you learned that challenging decisions isencouraged in theory and remembered in practice. Maybe you learned that when something goes wrong, ownership quickly becomes blame. Nobody had to teach you any of this directly. The environment did.
And now the organization announces that the future requires something different. It wants a rainforest. So it tells you to start behaving like a fern. This isn't an argument that people can't change. It's an argument that we've started in the wrong place.
If people aren't collaborating, what keeps producing silos? If people aren't speaking up, what keeps producing silence? If decisions keep moving upward, what keeps pulling them there? If people avoid risk, what happens here when a risk doesn't pay off? If people don't take ownership, what's made handing it back to someone else the reasonable move?
That's the diagnostic work. It's also the step most culture-change efforts skip — we name the pattern, define its opposite, and start asking people to behave differently before understanding what's producing the behavior we already have. Once you understand what's producing it, the next move is different in kind: change the conditions, not the behaviors.
The lever isn't always the same one. What if people aren't collaborating because nothing important requires them to? What if ownership doesn't need more exhortation, but a real problem people have the authority to solve? What if innovation is slow only because the existing answer still looks sufficient, and nobody's been given room to find another one? What if the silo holds simply because nothing yet requires success to reach past it?
Now collaboration, ownership, experimentation, and cross-functional thinking aren't behaviors people perform because they showed up on a culture slide. They're how the work actually getsdone. Given enough time, those ways of working become as ordinary as the ones they replaced.
That's culture changing — not because someone worked directly on “the culture,” but because some of the conditions producing it changed.
So yes, pay attention to what you're seeing. It's useful information — the cumulative effect of countless decisions, incentives, and habits that are hard to see one at a time. But don't start by asking how to change what you're seeing.
Start by asking what's producing it.
A rainforest isn't built workshop by workshop. It's built condition by condition — water, soil, shade, time — until one day the ferns are simply what grows there, and nobody remembers there was ever a cactus to persuade.