In recent years, “company culture” has become the ultimate scapegoat in the workplace.

A project fails? Blame the culture. A key employee leaves? Culture wasn’t properly embedded. Teams are fractured? Culture must be the issue. It’s like a ghost that shows up at every accident scene, yet no one has ever truly seen it.

But is culture really the problem?

The more I think about it, the more I believe it isn’t.

In many cases, what we call a “culture problem” is just a convenient smokescreen for organizations unwilling to face their real issues. Rigid systems, misaligned incentives, ambiguous authority—these are hard to fix. “Culture,” on the other hand, sounds noble, vague, and harmless. It signals reflection without requiring any real change. So it becomes the perfect stand-in. It’s like when someone says in a meeting, “We need to improve communication.” Everyone knows the only thing that will actually change is that another meeting will be scheduled.

You might think culture is just slogans, right? Not really. The walls may say “open communication,” but the meetings are dead silent. The company may claim to be “people-first,” but performance reviews only care about numbers. They talk about “innovation,” yet have zero tolerance for risk.

I’ve come to realize that true culture is how an organization responds to human nature. When someone voices a dissenting opinion, do you encourage it or roll your eyes? When someone makes a mistake, do you conduct a retrospective or read them the policy manual? When a new idea emerges, do you give it a try or send it through five rounds of approval? Sitting in a conference room, I’ve found that you don’t need to observe deliberately—just look at how people dance around each other’s boundaries, and you can feel the temperature of the culture.

Culture and systems are like form and spirit. Systems define what you can do; culture determines what you dare to do. A perfect system is dead in the water if the culture silences people. A culture that encourages openness will be ground down by reality if the systems don’t support it. Good culture is like the air conditioning in an office—you don’t notice it working, but without it, everyone feels suffocated. I often joke that culture is like air: you can’t smell it, but it can leave people with a whole range of expressions on their faces.

How do you tell if a company’s culture is good? Based on my years of experience, I’ve boiled it down to three core indicators:

  • Information Leverage: How many layers does a decision have to pass through before everyone in the organization knows about it? Can it be explained in one sentence?
  • Cost of Experimentation: How many people need to say yes, and how much risk must be taken, to run a minimal experiment on a wild idea?
  • Retribution Index: How much does someone’s compensation change in the next performance cycle after they publicly disagree with a superior?

Rebuilding culture doesn’t start with slogans on the wall. It starts with the surrender of control. Are you willing to allow dissenting voices? Can you tolerate a little chaos? Do you choose to trust people even when processes don’t require it? Culture grows when an organization dares to give up some control. It’s not “built”—it’s “permitted.” Culture, at its core, is the collective breath of a group. The harder you try to control it, the thinner it becomes. The more you tolerate, the more it thrives. It’s like a cup of tea: if it’s too full, it spills the moment you stir it; if there’s less tea, it slowly seeps into the bottom of the cup.

So, when someone says, “Our culture has a problem,” the first question shouldn’t be about how to communicate it better. Instead, ask: Which processes make people afraid to speak the truth? Which incentives reward only safe behavior? Which management actions are quietly tightening the air? These are the real roots of cultural dysfunction. Culture isn’t a scapegoat—it’s a thermometer. It doesn’t measure what an organization says; it measures what an organization does. If the temperature is too low, the mechanisms are cold. If it’s too high, trust has been burned.

A truly healthy culture doesn’t need to be proclaimed. It lives in the tone of meetings, in how failures are handled, and in that moment when someone dares to say one more thing. Culture is not a company’s brochure—it’s its unfiltered portrait. Whether you can look at it, whether you dare to look at it, and whether you change after seeing it—that’s what determines an organization’s future.