Why culture – not a template – should drive your change strategy
Written By Maciej
Dr Victoria Grady has spent twenty years researching organisational change, since finishing her dissertation in 2005. The lesson that shaped everything after it came early: the research she’d done felt genuinely valuable to her, and almost useless to everyone else, until she figured out how to translate it into something practitioners could actually apply inside a real organisation. That gap between theory and practice runs through everything she covers on this episode of Change Doesn’t Have to Suck, recorded at Change Orlando, where Victoria – an MBA professor at George Mason University – previewed the talk she was giving at the conference the next day.
If you’ve already grabbed the “Culture as Change Strategy” Tip Sheet from this episode, this article goes further into the research, the projects, and the reasoning behind it.
Your organisation doesn't have one culture
The starting point of Victoria’s argument is that the “culture” leadership talks about is really a fiction of convenience. Underneath it sit departmental cultures, divisional cultures, product cultures – and a change strategy that only accounts for the version leadership sees from the top will miss most of the organisation it’s meant to serve.
This gets more complicated, not less, with geography. Victoria described an active project with a team in Dallas working through exactly this problem: how do you maintain a subculture’s connectivity and relationships when people aren’t in the same physical space five days a week, fifty weeks a year – the model everyone was used to a decade ago? Her honest answer is that the field is still actively figuring this out, but the emerging shape of it is “connection points” throughout the year rather than constant physical proximity. Non-verbal culture – how a team dresses, whether they eat lunch together – genuinely gets harder to sustain when people are distributed, and that’s a real cost that has to be designed around, not ignored.
One of the more counterintuitive findings Victoria shared came from her own classroom. Her George Mason undergraduates – juniors and seniors mostly aged 20 to 24 – are exactly the demographic you’d expect to prefer hybrid and virtual work by default. Her course evaluations say otherwise: what came through clearly was a need for more face-to-face connection, not less, and real difficulty working on teams where they didn’t understand how their teammates operated. Victoria’s read is that younger employees, and millennials generally, are chasing a sense of belonging and culture more deliberately than previous generations did, precisely because so much of life outside work already feels isolating.
What grounds a culture when safety isn't the answer
Some of Victoria’s clearest evidence comes from an unlikely place: industries where safety is genuinely life-or-death. Utility companies, the damage prevention industry, healthcare, the Federal Aviation Administration, and a nuclear power plant project she ran in California all share, in her words, a common thread – the work underneath is completely different, but the need for a safety culture is identical across all of them. When that thread is present, it becomes what she calls a strength anchor: something that grounds and connects people in a way that doesn’t happen automatically in organisations without an obvious safety stake.
One of her project stories illustrates this well: a consulting engagement with an Australian utility company that was, in her words, 100% committed to gathering the perspective of workers based in the Outback – genuinely difficult to reach, given unreliable internet and electricity in those locations – and integrating what they heard directly into the change strategy rather than treating it as a box to tick.
The harder question is what does this work for organisations without a life-or-death safety stake. Victoria’s answer, developed partly with her Stuck co-author Patrick McCreesh, points to mission and values – but only the version that’s actually lived, not the version laminated on a wall. Her test for the difference is blunt: “We have these values, we have this mission” – really? Because if no one else in the building can tell you what they are or point to how they show up day to day, it isn’t culture. It’s lip service, and lip service actively undermines an organisation’s ability to manage change well, because there’s nothing real underneath the language to anchor people to.
Why people respond to change so differently
Victoria’s other major research thread is attachment theory – grounded, she’s careful to note, in the developmental psychology of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, and in our earliest childhood experiences. The part worth sitting with is that attachment behaviour isn’t a personality quirk; it’s basic biology, wired into how our brains form relationships, and the vast majority of people carry some form of it.
For change practitioners, the practical value isn’t diagnosing individuals like a clinician would. It’s noticing that how someone absorbs, transitions through, and processes a change is shaped by something deeper than generic “change readiness” or personality typing – and that paying attention to those differences, without needing a psychology credential to do it, is worth the extra effort it takes.
Victoria’s own research process here is a good example of the intellectual honesty the field needs more of. On a video call in 2021, a colleague from South Africa challenged her work on attachment styles directly, in front of a room full of other researchers – suggesting the data showed distinct clusters that warranted formal statistical cluster analysis, a method Victoria hadn’t previously used. Her first reaction was defensive. Her second was to actually run the analysis. He was right, and the three to four years of work that followed meaningfully expanded her understanding of how attachment styles actually show up in the change process. It’s a small story, but it says something real about how she works: being publicly poked at, and taking the poke seriously, produced better research than defending the original position would have.
Building your own framework instead of buying one
This is where Victoria’s research converges into something genuinely practical, and it’s the part of the conversation she’s most animated about. Twenty years of studying change frameworks has shown her that most of them share the same underlying components, even when they’re branded differently – and that taking any one of them off the shelf and applying it regardless of an organisation’s culture, people, demographics, and geography has a low likelihood of actually working.
Her response, developed with her research team and students, is something they’re currently calling a super framework: roughly 21 phases, stages, gears, or levers – the terminology is still evolving – that fall into three buckets: process, people, and behaviour. Rather than running one packaged methodology start to finish, the approach is to pull specific elements from each bucket and assemble a custom framework for the specific change and organisation in front of you. Victoria’s team expects to publish more on this within the next six months.
The practical upside for a working change practitioner is significant: instead of being stuck when a change stalls because “I followed the framework exactly and it didn’t work,” having process, people, and behavioural levers to pull independently means there’s always another angle to try. A framework that only ever offers one path leaves no room to adapt when that path doesn’t land – and Victoria’s experience says it very often doesn’t, because no two organisations, or even two changes inside the same organisation, behave identically.
You don't know your culture the way your people do
Asked what a leader should do before rolling out a major restructure or technology change, Victoria’s answer starts with a hard admission most leaders never make: you cannot look out over your own organisation from the top and accurately understand how the people inside it actually experience its culture. The only way to close that gap is to ask – regularly, and authentically, not through the kind of annual engagement survey or culture pulse that everyone recognises as a checkbox exercise.
One of the tools Victoria previewed for her conference talk the next day is what she calls a culture curve – a literal bell curve built from clearly defined demographic data, which can then be plotted department by department. Line one department’s curve up against another’s and, reliably, they don’t match. The value of seeing that plainly is that it stops leadership from designing a single change strategy as if the whole organisation experiences culture the same way, when the data says otherwise.
The takeaway
Victoria’s parting advice ties directly back to where she started: understanding behaviour matters more than most change strategies give it credit for, precisely because it operates beneath the surface, where it’s easy to miss and expensive to ignore. Subcultures, safety anchors, attachment styles, and the discipline of building a framework instead of buying one are all, in the end, different ways of getting at the same thing – actually seeing the organisation you’re trying to change, rather than the version of it that’s easiest to plan around.
Victoria’s book, Stuck, co-written with Patrick McCreesh, is available on Amazon, and she shares further resources at drvictoriagrady.com.
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