What actually eats strategy for breakfast

How culture turned into a convenient hideaway for leaders who keep missing their own responsibility

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ebb and flow of organizational patterns.

If you zoom out far enough, you start to see the same cycle repeating itself under different names: reinvention, reimagination, transformation, culture reset. Each cycle comes with casualties. Leaders are removed. New leaders are brought in. Strategies are announced. Narratives shift. And somewhere along the way, accountability suddenly becomes a thing.

I often hear senior leaders say, when the tide is turning, that people should either get in the boat and row or get out. Some people leave on their own. Some are told to leave. And while all of this is framed as necessary, decisive, even courageous, I keep wondering:

If people were able to survive, and often succeed, in the same organization for years while not being held accountable for things that now suddenly matter, how exactly is a new strategy, a few new faces, and a set of bold announcements supposed to magically rewrite behavior?

If the system trained them one way, why are we shocked when they keep behaving accordingly?

This question kept nagging at me long enough that I had to sit with it properly. Because when the same cycle keeps repeating across industries, organizations, and decades, it’s usually a sign that we’re refusing to look at something fundamental.

Culture as the perfect hiding place

When organizations run into trouble, culture is often the first thing that gets blamed.

Leaders announce a “new culture.” Desired behaviors are broadcast. They get embedded into performance reviews and leadership principles. Trainings are rolled out. Exactly the things hundreds of experts have already pointed out as largely ineffective.

When none of this produces meaningful change, we conclude that culture is hard to change. And that conclusion sounds wise. Human. Reasonable. It also does something very convenient: it removes the need for responsibility.

Culture becomes this abstract, almost mystical force that explains everything while clarifies nothing. There are no villains, no designers, no owners. Instead there is this invisible fog that somehow resists strategy.

Which is exactly why culture, as it’s usually talked about, explains nothing.

What culture actually is

Whenever I think seriously about culture, two things come to mind.

First: every book I’ve ever read about organizational culture ultimately described leadership behavior. Not values. Not structures. Behavior.

Second: the old parable about the monkeys and the ladder.

You probably know it. Monkeys in a cage. A banana on top of a ladder. Every time a monkey climbs, something unpleasant happens. Eventually, they stop trying. Then the monkeys are replaced one by one. New monkeys never experience the punishment, yet they’re still stopped by the group. In the end, only new monkeys remain and none of them know why the ladder is forbidden. They just know it is.

Whether this experiment ever happened is beside the point. The story survives because it captures something painfully accurate:

• Rules outlive reasons

• Social enforcement replaces lived experience

• Newcomers inherit constraints without context

Which leads to a question we rarely ask honestly:

Is it fair to punish people for behaving exactly as the system trained and rewarded them to behave? Does replacing people without redesigning conditions actually change anything? Or does it simply reproduce the same outcomes with new actors?

Dismantling the culture myth

To answer this, we need to dismantle the idea of culture altogether.

Culture is not a force. It cannot decide. It cannot resist. It cannot act.

Culture is behavior that makes sense inside a design.

• What gets rewarded?

• What gets punished?

• What gets ignored?

  
  

Those three questions shape behavior far more reliably than any value statement ever will. What we often label as “culture problems” are simply people adapting intelligently to broken systems with unintended rules.

Take something as basic as course correction. Is it safe to call out when something isn’t working? When it’s called out, does anything actually change? Do people experience that raising red flags is worth the cost? Or do they learn, very quickly, that silence is smarter?

Systems are not shaped by intention. They are shaped by incentives.

Once you see this, it becomes impossible to unsee: culture is not something organizations have. It’s something they design, consciously or not.

So why did culture as design never really enter the language organizations actually use?

The avoidance at the center

Because responsibility is heavy.

Assuming responsibility for culture means facing a few deeply uncomfortable aspects:

• Identity gets threatened. If I’m a senior leader designing incentives and rewards, am I complicit in the outcomes?

• Plausible deniability disappears. If culture is designed, then someone owns it. And ownership is risky.

• Moral debt surfaces. Were the rules fair? Did they harm people? Did I hide behind abstractions?

• Belonging is at stake. If I challenge the system openly, will the group turn on me?

None of this is easy. Avoidance, at an individual level is deeply human. The real problem is that we institutionalized avoidance.

Leadership and the misuse of responsibility

This is where leadership language becomes dangerous. I’m deeply triggered when I hear senior leaders say things like:

People need to be more accountable. People need to show ownership. People need to be more innovative. People need to work harder for their wages.

These statements sound tough. Responsible. No-nonsense. They are also a category error.

Accountability, ownership, innovation, and effort are not personality traits. They are responses to conditions. A system can make these behaviors safe or dangerous, rewarded or punished, meaningful or pointless.

When leaders demand these behaviors without redesigning the conditions, they are outsourcing responsibility downward. In doing so, responsibility gets weaponized against people who don’t control the conditions.

This is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. Because it doesn’t produce the behaviors leaders claim to want; it distorts behavior while it produces silence, compliance, and risk avoidance.

Put it simply: It doesn’t matter how much you pay or how tough you are Chad, if you ask a fish to climb a tree, it will fail. Not because it’s lazy or resistant, but because the environment was designed for something else. And keep in mind, fish did climb out of the ocean some million years ago, but not because they were told to do so.

Leaders don’t get paid more to demand more. They get paid more to design and enable conditions under which more becomes possible.

Where this leaves us

We keep repeating the line “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I don’t think that’s true anymore.

What eats strategy for breakfast is the absence of redesigning the conditions that make current behavior rational. Strategy fails not because people resist change, but because the human was never properly accounted for in the design.

Until we stop blaming culture and keep replacing people instead of conditions while moralizing system failures as individual shortcomings, the cycle will continue. Predictably, efficiently, and with fresh casualties.