Two Questions To Answer Before Starting Your Culture Project

When you lead enough culture, values and EVP projects, you start to spot patterns, and there are two things that - when sorted early - make everything run much smoother later on down the line. Understanding these before you properly kick things off ensures stakeholders are aligned on two critical areas that can derail things if not agree upon upfront.

1. Who Are Your Values Actually For?

Here's a simple framework that'll save you months of painful stakeholder misalignment.

Draw a quadrant. On one axis put 'Internal' vs. 'External' audience. On the other put 'Today's reality' vs. 'Tomorrow's ambition'.

You don't have to sit squarely in one box, but you do need to agree on what you're aiming for. If you don't, then when you start asking people for feedback on drafts of future articulation, you'll usually find that Marketing wants values that work externally - something consumer-facing that builds brand equity. HR wants them as an internal engagement mechanism - something that shapes behaviour and performance. Leadership wants them aspirational - describing where you're heading, not where you are today. Colleagues call BS if they're too aspirational and not reflective of their 'here-and-now'.

Without alignment on this, you'll end up with schizophrenic articulation that tries to please everyone and resonates with no one. Your values become bland, generic statements that could belong to any company because they're trying to serve every master simultaneously.

Get everyone in a room , plot where they think the values should sit, have the uncomfortable conversations about trade-offs, land on a weighting and move forward with clarity. Then you have something to remind people of when you're showing them draft copy of how you intend to 'go to market' - who the primary audience is, and what narrative you're focusing on.

2. Where Is Your Business Right Now?

The culture work a start-up needs is fundamentally different from what a company in turnaround requires. Sounds obvious, but understanding this properly before you start can be a huge help.

I'm a big fan of Michael D. Watkins' STARS model from The First 90 Days. It identifies five typical situations companies find themselves in:

Start-up – Building capabilities (people, funding, tech) from scratch. You're shaping the architecture of the business.

Turnaround – Company's in trouble. Burning platform. Needs rapid, decisive action. These are "ready, fire, aim" situations where you make tough calls with incomplete information.

Accelerated growth – Scaling hard. Structures, processes, and systems being built to get bigger. Resource-intensive construction work.

Realignment – You have strengths but serious constraints. Clouds are gathering but the storm hasn't broken yet. Often there's denial and you need to open people's eyes to the trouble ahead and build urgency.

Sustaining success – Maintaining what's working whilst staying relevant and competitive.

Each situation requires different cultural priorities. A turnaround doesn't need aspirational purpose work about changing the world - it needs clarity, speed, and decisive action embedded in its values. A scale-up doesn't need "sustaining success" behaviours - it needs builder mindsets and comfort with ambiguity.

And here's another layer of complexity - In large companies with multiple departments or regions, different parts of your business might be in different situations. Your UK office might be in accelerated growth whilst your US operation is in realignment so 'One-size-fits-all' culture work will fail (although it usually always does. Flexibility and fluidity are often always needed. Thinking you can have one culture that everyone religiously aligns to isn't 'culture'. It's a 'cult').

For example, if your product team is in start-up mode (building new capabilities, high ambiguity) whilst your operations team is sustaining success (optimising established processes), your values articulation needs nuance. "Move fast and break things" might work for one team whilst it terrifies the other.

Why This Matters

Getting clarity on these two things early - who your values are for and where your business actually is - creates alignment that makes everything downstream easier.

It won't guarantee success, but it significantly improves your odds of creating something that your stakeholders will actually sign off during your regular check-ins with them (please tell me you've having regular check-ins with them), and it will help ensure where you land actually fits your organisation's reality rather than fighting against it.