A cultural imperative: From values to value creation
19 January 2026
Culture is much more than a soft concept – it is a hard driver of performance, resilience and risk. For Boards, the question is not if culture matters, but whether an organisation’s strategic choices, leadership behaviours, and governance systems consistently produce the behaviours required for sustainable growth. Ultimately, culture is an output – not an initiative. And in 2026, the stakes have never been higher.
Regulators, investors, employees and customers are scrutinising whether stated purpose and values genuinely align with decisions and do so under pressure. Failures rarely stem from “bad culture” alone, they emerge from misaligned incentives, opaque accountability, overloaded priorities, and decision environments where challenge is weak or risk signals are muted. Hybrid work, accelerated change programmes, and AI-enabled decision-making introduce new forms of cultural drift – including ones that aren't always easy to spot. Boards must anticipate these shifts and act before misalignment becomes a systemic risk.
A critical blind spot remains the disconnect between culture and risk appetite. Too often, risk management is treated as a compliance domain instead of a strategic lever. In reality, a well-defined and well-understood risk appetite enables smarter decisions, responsible innovation, and behaviours that hold consistently regardless of pressure. Boards that embed risk appetite into cultural drivers will unlock advantage – not just avoid failure.
The culture imperative is clear: move beyond engagement scores and surface-level sentiment. Focus on whether strategy, values, and operating environments enable the behaviours required for resilience and growth. Culture intelligence must become as rigorous as financial reporting – combining qualitative insight with well-defined metrics to reveal where pressure points and behavioural risks truly lie.
With that in mind – what questions should Boards be asking in 2026?
- Strategic alignment: Do goals, key performance indicators, and resource choices reinforce the behaviours we say we value?
- Quality of challenge: Is there real debate, visible dissent, and timely escalation – or just polite agreement?
- Stakeholder impact signals: What complaints, service failures, safety data, turnover patterns, or sentiment trends tell us the truth?
- Pressure points: Where are stretched teams, change programmes, third parties, or over-reliance on AI models introducing behavioural risk?
Similarly, what practical actions should Boards take?
- Embed purpose and values: Make them measurable and tied to decisions, customer outcomes, and risk appetite.
- Refine incentives: Use balanced scorecards and behavioural metrics – ensuring incentives and consequences genuinely shift behaviour.
- Clarify accountability: Define decision rights, escalation norms, and leadership expectations.
- Enhance culture intelligence: Combine qualitative listening with quantitative indicators. Build both into actionable culture dashboards that tell the full story.
- Run focused deep dives: Examine high-pressure units, vulnerable user journeys, third-party processes, and algorithmic decisions.
- Build assurance loops: Include tried-and-true culture drivers and behavioural risk themes in internal audit, retrospectives, and learning cycles.
