Distance.

How culture got flattened, and where it begins to regain shape.

The Most Exciting Place in the World

Step into the headquarters of one of America's most talked-about companies in 1999, and the first thing you notice is the energy. The lobby gleams with glass and steel. There's the faint smell of fresh polish, the kind you notice without quite registering. Phones ring in short, urgent bursts. Screens glow on every desk — some streaming live market data, others crowded with spreadsheets scribbled with notes and half-finished formulas. People move quickly but not frantically, with the purposeful stride of those who believe they're building the future.

On the top floors, a young trader sketches a new market-making idea on a whiteboard for a vice-president. The VP listens, cuts through the buzz with a question, and — with the kind of decisiveness that can change a career — says, "Run with it." Here, if you had the nerve and a half-decent idea, you could find yourself making things happen within days of joining.

Fortune magazine called it "America's Most Innovative Company" six years in a row. Analysts spoke about it as if it were rewriting the rules of the economy. Even competitors, grudgingly, admitted it had changed what was possible in the energy market. Inside, people felt it too. A new hire might be presenting to a senior VP within weeks. Late-night problem-solving brought camaraderie and takeaway boxes stacked in corners. One employee later called it "the most exciting place in the world."

But the pace was relentless, and the performance system cut both ways. Forced ranking pushed the lowest performers out. For those at the top, it felt like meritocracy. For those near the edge, the floor could give way without warning. In smaller offices, the atmosphere could be lighter — whiteboards dense with equations, coffee cups everywhere, bursts of laughter when someone cracked a tricky problem — but the hum of pressure was never far away.

On paper, the story was immaculate. Back then, CEO Ken Lay described a unique culture that combines entrepreneurial spirit with rigorous risk management, creating an environment where the best people can do their best work. The 2000 annual report set out four values — Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence — each presented as a short promise of how the work would be done. You know this company, but you might not recognise it from my description above. You'll certainly know how the story ends. Because the company you've just walked through is Enron.

However, this isn't a story of corporate fraud or wrongdoing. It's a story about distance — the gap between the story a company tells about itself and the pattern of conditions and consequences it actually runs on.

What people feel is the first read-out of those conditions; what the system does is the reality check.

When the gap is small, integrity is cheap; when it's wide, theatre — and sometimes fraud — fills the space.

Declared and Remembered

Enron is just one example. I could have started almost anywhere.

Take Wells Fargo. For years, leaders described a culture of "integrity and principled performance". The brochures were immaculate. Inside the branches, the rhythm was different. "Eight products per household" set the day. Bonuses, jobs and progression hinged on the number. Under those conditions, meanings shifted. Hitting the target wasn't just good performance; it was survival. Front-line staff had little room to challenge the goal or reset expectations — "find a way" travelled faster than "this isn't right". Those who hit the number moved up. Those who questioned the method stalled. It wasn't a grand conspiracy; it was the system teaching people what paid. What the public calls fraud, many employees would recognise as pressure becoming practice. The declared story was integrity. The enacted reality was coercive selling, and once that takes hold, behaviour normalises quicker than anyone wants to admit.

Or the Post Office. For decades, it prided itself on "trust, honesty and integrity". It was one of Britain's most respected institutions. Yet its Horizon IT system produced phantom shortfalls in the accounts of sub-postmasters. When those sub-postmasters called helplines for support, they were told the issue was unique to them, that the system was sound, and that they were to blame. By the time the real picture emerged, lives had been destroyed: people were bankrupted, reputations ruined, some imprisoned, and some took their own lives. The declared culture was trust; the remembered story is cruelty. The distance here isn't about mood; it's the gap between what was said and what the system did to people.

Even admired firms get retold as culture parables. Apple under Jobs mixed enabling conditions with suppressive ones, depending on where you sat — same declarations, different enacted realities.

Declared and remembered are tidy because they travel. Lived is messier because it's local. And the distance that matters isn't between words and feelings; it's between the declared story and the conditions and consequences people actually live. The obvious question is: what happens in between — where meanings, incentives and permissions are traded and enforced?

At some point, the mess got a manual.

How Culture Became Something You Could Print

It's everywhere now. It wasn't then. And it didn't start in a consulting firm or a corner office. It begins, arguably, on a South London shop floor.

In the late 1940s and early '50s, Elliott Jaques studied Glacier Metal. Borrowing a term from anthropology, he used 'culture' to describe the taken-for-granted ways people did things at work — norms, tacit rules, what counted as sensible or risky. The Changing Culture of a Factory (1951) wasn't a manual for designing or managing culture; it was a close description of it. In Jaques's hands, culture was situated and messy: who had a voice, how authority and participation were structured, and how decision latitude was experienced in roles. If you wanted to understand the system, you had to see those lived patterns.

Through the 1970s, scholars deepened the lens. Andrew Pettigrew argued for studying culture in context and over time. Edgar Schein set out how artefacts and espoused values sit over basic assumptions. Still descriptive. Still about meaning, sensemaking and power—what things mean here and how that meaning steers behaviour.

By the early 1980s, the lens had gone mainstream. Walk into an airport bookshop and you couldn't miss In Search of Excellence — bright cover, bold promise. Peters and Waterman gave leaders eight memorable principles: bias for action, close to the customer, stick to the knitting. They were short, optimistic and arrived at a moment of anxiety about American competitiveness. "Copy the habits of winners and you'll do well" travelled fast. Soon there were typologies (Deal & Kennedy), trust-and-commitment models (Ouchi), and values-centric stories (Collins & Porras). None of this was inherently wrong. It helped leaders pay attention to things they had ignored.

But portability had a cost. To travel, culture had to look stable and nameable. Complex, local patterns became labels, lists and signature rituals — things you could declare, cascade and evidence. Case studies became parables. Consulting decks turned histories into models. MBA classrooms taught tidy diagrams because tidy diagrams fit. Soon, a way to think about culture hardened into a way to announce it.

Over time, 'thingification' took hold. We copied what travelled — values statements, posters, rituals you can photograph — because they're visible. We didn't copy the local terms of trade that give those artefacts meaning: who can challenge whom, what actually gets rewarded, and what it costs to say "hang on". The choreography looked right; the terms underneath didn't change.

Call it the copy-and-paste fallacy: rituals travel; the terms don't — and the distance grows.

Why it stuck

After Enron collapsed, the regulatory response was structural. The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 tightened reporting rules and executive accountability, but it didn't touch culture. The wager was simple: stronger controls would produce stronger integrity. Six years later, the financial system melted down anyway.

After the 2008 crash, when trust in banks was shredded, "culture" became the word regulators reached for. You can't regulate integrity directly, but you can demand evidence of it. Boards were told to measure it, monitor it and report on it.

Perhaps this was the moment the die was cast. What had begun as ideas, transmitted via a consulting framework and a string of management bestsellers, became hardened into compliance. The financial sector took the brunt of it first, but the logic didn't stay there. Hospitals were told to evidence patient-safety culture after the Mid Staffordshire inquiry. Energy companies faced scrutiny of their safety culture after major accidents. Public bodies, too, found themselves judged on cultural health as much as policy outcomes. Culture became something you had to produce on paper, whatever sector you were in.

The results were predictable. Dashboards. Heat maps. Values workshops. Engagement campaigns. All designed to compress organisational messiness into something neat enough to discuss and to serve as proof of progress.

Culture, this thing that lacks an agreed definition and that refuses to stand still, reduced to a few values or a statement in the annual report. It's a sign of responsibility. It's supposed to feel rigorous. But mostly it's theatre — a way to cope with demands that don't match reality.

Whether it was a fad or compliance that made flattening culture a requirement isn't really the point. It didn't make it true.

The distance didn't shrink; it just became easier to publish.

Multiplicity revealed

The airport-bestseller idea was seductive. The books were brilliant and energising. They gave structure to something slippery. They made culture feel solid — something you could hold in your hand. I went along with it, like many others.

In 2012, my business had begun running "good to great"-style programmes built on the same logic. We'd identified what successful companies appeared to do and created tools to help others replicate their success. The culture module was the crowd-pleaser. It gave leaders space to pause, reflect, and articulate their organisation at its best. But the instinct underneath was unchanged: culture as something you could codify, replicate, install.

The most interesting thing started when we added a second lens. After executives drew their neat maps of "who we are" and "who we want to be", we revealed a set of employee accounts about how work actually happened — how decisions were made, how change really moved, what created good days and bad ones. The stories were concrete: collaboration preached but not practised; speed demanded while three approvals were needed for trivial choices; empowerment promised but withheld.

Side-by-side, the gap between declared and described was clear. Reactions to this gap were often explosive. Leaders argued about how employees could possibly see things that way. But they weren't seeing it that way. They were living it that way. And we saw the same pattern everywhere.

If culture lives in experience, periodic snapshots aren't enough. We needed continuous sightlines — not a workshop or an annual survey, but a living signal of how an organisation was actually working. That impulse became Harkn: a simple way for people to say what was happening at work, every day. The signals were human and awkward and real — workload pressure building in one team, care and support in another, rules colliding with reality. Richer than aggregates and averages. Closer to life.

At first, we treated this as an information gap: give leaders more (and better) data, and the picture will cohere. It didn't. More signal didn't resolve the contradictions; it revealed them. That's the coherence trap — expecting culture to settle into one true story when it keeps showing up as several true ones at once.

This isn't just an anecdote. Joanne Martin mapped it decades ago: culture can look integrated (shared values), differentiated (subcultures) or fragmented (ambiguous and shifting). All three can be true, depending on where you stand. Standpoint theory makes the same point another way: position shapes perception. What feels like empowerment from a senior seat can feel like surveillance on the front line. A strategy that looks visionary in the boardroom can look reckless to those asked to execute.

This isn't a flaw in culture. It is culture. Contradictions, competing truths, shifting meanings — that's what it's made of.

It took me a long time to explain that clearly. But when my work introduced me to Geoff Marlow, he offered a better framing:

“Culture is the way we do things around here — where the ‘we’ and the ‘around here’ are constantly changing.”

It sounds familiar until you sit with the second half. The "we" is never stable: it shifts with team, task, manager, and meeting. "We two" is different from "we eight"; today's cross-functional task force dissolves tomorrow. The "around here" moves just as often: this floor, that function, this city, this month's priorities. If both are in motion, "the way we do things" isn't a fixed truth. It's a pattern continually re-formed in context.

That framing doesn't pretend there is one culture. It gives language to what Harkn surfaced: shifting, situational realities that are intelligible once you stop forcing them to cohere.

You see it everywhere once you look. In one remote-first global firm, corporate roles described the company as steady, supportive, comfortable — the kind of place they couldn't imagine leaving. Yet client-service contractors on flexible hours described unpredictability, demand and strain. Same brand, different weather. In another organisation celebrated for progressive policies, a small call-centre team had every tea break and toilet trip timed. For some, particularly women, the allowance meant choosing between the two. Elsewhere in the business, colleagues were stunned. Surveillance of that kind didn't match the company they thought they worked for.

These aren't outliers. They're reminders that multiple realities run in parallel inside every organisation. What's unusual is seeing them side by side. Flatten culture into a single version, and those differences disappear from view.

If you're a leader, it's worth pausing on how you came to your lens. Values on the wall, engagement scores, consultant frameworks — none of that is accidental. It's the framing handed down by business schools, regulators and peers. That doesn't make you wrong; it means you've been working with an inherited map. I did too. For years, I thought the job was to sharpen the words, align them with the values, and close the gaps. It felt like progress.

Unless we can see beneath the neat version — into the conditions people actually live, and how those conditions shift — we're not seeing culture at all.

Closing the distance

Most of us are still working with a tidy but misleading assumption: that culture is a single, stable thing you can define, measure, and prove on paper — and that publishing the story makes it true. These things create the appearance of control: a way to hold something slippery still long enough to discuss it. But culture isn't what leaders declare or what regulators ask to see. It's what people live — and people live multiples. The "we" changes, and so does the "around here". Morning to afternoon, team to team. For some, it's the best place they've worked; for others, it's exhausting and brittle. Both can be true, sometimes even on the same day. That isn't a flaw in culture. That is culture.

And here's the awkward truth: most people already know the story isn't true in full. Inside companies, the gap lives as an open secret. New joiners learn it quickly; those who have been around longer teach it through their own behaviour. It shows up in eye-rolls at town halls, in the workarounds, and side-channels of "how we really do it", in templates completed after the fact. That translation layer is costly: it drains energy, rewards theatre, slows real signals, and teaches people when to perform and when to keep quiet. That's the distance at work.

We don't need the distance at zero; we need it honest and short. Aspirations can — and should — run ahead of practice, but denial of any distance just widens it. None of this suspends commercial reality. It sharpens it: truth travels faster, risks show up sooner, and participation becomes less performative.

Here's the shift: stop chasing one neat description; manage the distance between what's said and what's done — and keep closing it.

Hold the story up against what the system actually does and keep working on closing the gap. You do that in the run of work: what gets funded and what quietly doesn't; which targets move when reality bites; whether a date slips to protect quality; whether incidents lead to inquiry or blame; how exceptions travel; where the best people spend their best hours; how bad news moves; what customers feel at the edge—the conditions. When the distance is short, these choices work with the story. When it's wide, the system's choices contradict it — and people learn to act the story rather than live it.

This distance won't close with stronger slogans or better values. But we'll get closer by changing the conditions. People bring who they are; the room shapes what they do. We can't rewire personalities at scale, but we can keep reshaping conditions until the story and the system line up. Kurt Lewin saw this nearly a century ago: Behaviour is a function of the person and the environment. Change the situation, and the pattern shifts.

At Enron, the declared story was integrity and rigorous risk management; the lived conditions rewarded speed and cleverness while controls lagged. The distance grew until story triumphed over reality — and then reality arrived all at once. At the Post Office, the declared story was trust; the lived conditions isolated cases and blamed individuals, while a faulty system drove errors. The distance kept truth out of reach long enough to do lasting harm. Mostly to people, but also to the reputation of an institution, one that it may never recover from. And, at Wells Fargo, the declared story was principled performance; the lived conditions made "eight per household" the organising principle. The distance taught people to perform the story against customers and themselves. In each case, declarations travelled; conditions decided outcomes.

Stop trying to hold culture still. Keep the distance short enough that people don't have to act the story to survive it. Change how the work is done and keep backing it — culture follows.

Wouldn't the most exciting place in the world be the one where the story meets reality?