What if culture isn't something you build, but something you're already doing?
Most organizations treat culture as a noun. A thing they have or need to create. They write values on walls, design onboarding programs, hire culture consultants. But culture isn't a thing. It's a verb. It's happening right now in every conversation, every meeting, every decision about who gets heard and who gets ignored. Culture is the ongoing dialogue of the organization with itself. The question isn't whether you have culture. The question is what kind of conversation are you having?
I've seen this work in both directions. Companies where the dominant conversation is about blame naturally develop defensive cultures. People protect themselves. Information hoards. Mistakes get hidden. Companies where the dominant conversation is about learning develop adaptive cultures. People experiment. Information flows. Failures become fuel. Same market, same pressures, completely different outcomes, because the conversation is different.
The leverage point here is that you can change a conversation faster than you can change a structure or a system. You can start asking different questions in tomorrow's meeting. You can notice what's not being said and create space for it. You can model a different kind of exchange in your own interactions and watch it spread. Culture change doesn't require permission slips and strategic plans. It requires someone willing to have a different conversation and see who joins.
This doesn't mean it's easy. The existing conversation has momentum. It's self-reinforcing. People have learned what's safe to say and what isn't, and they won't risk changing that without evidence that the risk has changed. But evidence is created by action. Every conversation is an opportunity to demonstrate that something new is possible.
I've come to believe that culture work is fundamentally communication work. Not in the corporate communications sense, but in the human sense. What are we really saying to each other here? What are we not saying? What conversation would change everything if we finally had it? Those are the questions that move culture. Everything else is decoration.