Culture is not the Problem, it’s the Alibi
Whether you're watching Law and Order, Only Murders in the Building, or one of the ninety CSI spinoffs still somehow airing, there's a moment that continues to repeat itself about halfway through the episode: the detective leans on a suspect, the suspect offers up an alibi, and the alibi sounds reasonable enough on its face that nobody in the room feels like pushing further. "I was home." Well, of course, you couldn't have done it then, you were home. The suspect gets to leave, and the investigation continues.
Leadership has its own version of "I was home." Somebody says, "It's a culture issue," and something interesting happens, or rather, something interesting stops happening. I've sat in enough rooms to watch it in real time. Employees start leaving one after another, or a team that used to move fast starts grinding to a halt, or rumors around mistrust of leadership become more frequent. Typically, someone reaches for the culture explanation before anybody's actually looked under the hood. It's not always intended to be cynical. Sometimes it's genuinely the first word that comes to mind, but convenient and true aren't the same thing, and this particular word often tends to be more convenient than it is true.
Here's where the metaphor actually breaks. "I was home" is a claim you can check. There's a location, a timestamp, maybe camera footage, or a phone record, something in the world that could prove the suspect wrong. "It's a culture issue" is impossible to corroborate. It doesn't point at a place, a decision, or a person you could go verify. It's not a claim, it's a vibe, and nobody's ever cross-examined a vibe. That's the whole trick: a crime-show alibi has to withstand scrutiny for maybe forty minutes of screen time. "It's a culture issue" can’t even be interrogated for that long.
The costume, not the crime
An organization we worked with described itself as having "a culture of unprofessionalism," and had a whole theory to go with it. The younger staff weren't prepared for the job. Prior leadership had promoted people too fast, before they were ready. There was probably something to both of those claims, honestly, but nobody had done anything with them except talk. Leadership held a round of meetings about "raising the bar" and "doing better," which sounds like action right up until you ask what it actually changed, and the answer was nothing.
What we found wasn't a generation problem or a hiring problem. It was that nobody on the leadership team was mentoring anyone, there wasn't a responsibility matrix that told a single person what they actually owned, and at some point, leadership had stopped delegating altogether, which meant nobody below them had ever gotten the lived experience to learn the job in the first place. You can't blame someone for being unprepared and also be the reason they continue to be unprepared. That's not a contradiction most people say out loud, but it's the one sitting underneath a lot of "culture of unprofessionalism" complaints.
And look, calling it a culture problem isn't wrong exactly, it's just incomplete in a way that matters. A values workshop treats culture like a mood you can talk your way into, something that improves if enough people sit in a room and agree to be better. But culture isn't separate from design; it's the output of it. You get the culture your incentives, your delegation, and your decision rights actually produce, whether you designed for it on purpose or just let it happen by default. The uncomfortable version of this work means going back and redesigning the thing that's actually generating the behavior you don't want, and there's a decent chance things you created end up on that list. I don't think it takes much imagination to guess which gets scheduled first.
The reason the culture costume is reached for so often is that it protects the person reaching, usually without much conscious thought at all. If the problem is "the culture," everybody owns a sliver of it, including the leader who gave the “do better” speech in the first place, and owning a sliver is a fundamentally different experience from owning the thing outright. Darley and Latané (1968) documented this decades ago under a less cinematic name, diffusion of responsibility, the finding that people act less when responsibility feels shared instead of specific. Executive teams are not exempt from that math just because they sit at the top of the org chart. If anything, they have more reason to let it diffuse, since specificity has an uncomfortable habit of pointing somewhere close to home, usually somewhere with their name on the door.
Motive, not mystery
Every good mystery eventually asks who benefits. In this case, ambiguity protects leaders from scrutiny, and it is much easier to stand in front of a room and say "we need to work on our culture" than to say "I built a structure where three people share authority over the same call, and you've all been quietly fighting about that for a year." The first sentence is forgivable and foggy. The second is vulnerable and specific, and specific things can be scrutinized, which is exactly why fog is the more popular choice.
We wrote about a close cousin of this in They Told Me This Place Was Different, where the real gap wasn't between what leaders intended and what people experienced, it was between the values an organization said out loud and the systems quietly contradicting them underneath. Culture language runs the same play: it lets an organization narrate itself in aspirational terms while the actual machinery, the incentives, the decision rights, the reporting lines, the development programs, keep producing the exact results everyone's complaining about, week after week, meeting after meeting.
What the alibi actually costs you
Every round of culture language that substitutes for structural honesty costs twice: once for the fix that didn't happen and again for the credibility of whatever you try next. We've watched organizations run multiple consecutive engagement surveys with nearly identical scores, then greenlight another, on the theory that the culture just hasn't "caught up" yet. Culture doesn't catch up; it reports faithfully on what the system is built to produce, and it will keep reporting the same finding until the system itself changes - no matter how many times you rerun the survey.
There's a related pattern in Why Your Staff Keep Asking for Clarity They Already Have, where repeated requests for clarity turned out to rarely be about missing information at all. They were signals of something nobody felt safe naming outright. "It's a culture issue" is the executive dialect of the same move: a way of gesturing at a real problem without saying what it is, leaving the actual work sitting there, untouched, waiting for someone to finally open the file.
People notice, and they notice more than leaders usually give them credit for. They notice the third year running the same conversation happens, notice the language shifting while the review criteria stay put, notice the values poster getting a fresh design while the escalation path stays exactly as tangled as it was two reorgs ago. Eventually, the culture initiative itself becomes Exhibit A in the case against leadership, evidence that the organization is excellent at naming problems and mediocre at solving them, and everyone in the building already knows it before the next town hall even starts.
The interrogation you should run on yourself
None of this means retiring the word culture, since culture is real (not just vibes) and Schein (2010) describes it well as the accumulated pattern of shared assumptions a group builds up as it solves problems over time. That pattern shapes behavior, no argument there. The mistake is treating culture as a first cause instead of a downstream effect, something you can redesign directly, rather than something that shifts once the structure underneath it changes.
So here's the test for leaders: before you tell your team it's a culture issue, take the word out entirely and ask what specific decision, role, or incentive you'd have to name instead. If you can't answer, you probably don't know what's actually wrong yet, and that's worth exploring before you commission engagement survey number four. If you can answer, congratulations; now fix the actual problem.
This isn't an invitation to blame anyone, yourself included. Leaders build systems under real constraints, with incomplete information, often inheriting structures they never designed in the first place, and naming a structural gap isn't an indictment of whoever's standing in it now. It's closer to a gift, honestly, because structural problems are solvable in a way vague cultural malaise isn’t. You can redesign a decision correctly. You can rewrite an incentive. You cannot all-hands happy hour your way out of a system that's still quietly rewarding the exact behavior you're asking everyone to stop.
Dropping the alibi doesn't mean dropping the compassion for how it got used in the first place. It means giving your organization an honest shot at the thing it actually needs instead of another round of language that feels like progress and changes nothing underneath it.
If you're staring down a version of this and can't quite tell whether you're looking at structure or culture, that's usually the first sign you need someone outside the system looking at it with you. Whether the actual work turns out to be finding the root cause or designing the structure that finally produces the culture you've been asking for, that's what we do. Reach out, we’d be happy to help.
