Culture is what people do next

My 12-year-old tried to teach me the viral King Nasir dance this week and, because I am very much a product of the eighties, I made it harder than it needed to be. My innocent “Am I doing this right?” was met with: “It’s not that deep, bro.”

He didn’t need the steps explained. He’d already absorbed the vibe, the references, the timing, just from being around people who knew it. I was still trying to get it “right.”

Culture is something people can use

Workplace culture works the same way, with higher stakes. It is the mix of everyday behaviours and symbols that shape how an organisation performs. People read what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, who can speak freely, and what happens when someone gets it wrong.

AI is now rewriting that deal. It makes work faster and easier to measure, but harder to read. Culture has to help people understand what good looks like and what impact their work is meant to create. That only happens when culture is treated as something people can use.

The question underneath that shift is simple: how does culture hold together when the old rules do not?

An operating system for culture

No leadership team would leave risk, safety or finance to chance. Culture deserves the same discipline: an operating system that makes expectations visible and turns values into choices people can make, including the new choices AI puts in front of them every day.

Gartner’s research this year backs this up: only 40% of employees feel their daily workflows support their organisation’s stated values, and 43% of HR teams say the systems themselves are misaligned.

As Birthe Mester, founder of Culture Dividend and former Global Head of Performance, Engagement and Culture at Deutsche Bank, puts it: “Every gap between what leaders say and what they do teaches employees what truly matters. Tone from the Top must become Action from the Top, grounded in a clear behavioural framework.”

One of my clients keeps a visible permission board: a short list of what needs sign-off, with everything else left to the team to decide. It does the same job as the famous Ritz-Carlton rule that lets any employee spend up to $2,000 per guest to fix a problem, just at a scale most businesses can afford. Neither of them tells people they are empowered. Both show them what to do next. Call it the 2k test: could a new starter explain what they are trusted to do by week two?

Keep it moving with the work

That discipline has to keep moving as the work itself changes. The values stay put. What has to evolve is how people practise them day to day, or people start to assume everything is up for grabs.

One leader I know puts culture on the weekly team agenda: what is changing, what does good now look like, what is safe to say out loud? AI makes those questions concrete. If it helped write something, do we hide it or own it? If we own it, will we be judged?

That standing agenda item is rare. Too often, the rule changes before anyone has said what it means, leaving people exposed.

It is the kind of exposure executive coach, psychologist and resilience expert Dr. Silja Litvin warns against: “We built machines that never tire, never doubt, and never need to feel anything to keep going. Then we asked humans to keep up with them, as if we were built the same way. We are not. Doubt and feeling are not weaknesses. They are part of the work. Tiredness is not either. It is the signal that tells you when the work has gone too far.”

Her answer is not to slow everything down. It is to build a protective human layer into the work by design, so people have room to question and apply judgement before speed becomes the only measure that counts.

People bring other cultures with them

That protection is the job of a real operating system for culture. It also explains why culture cannot just be handed down. Organisations no longer have a monopoly on it. People are already part of half a dozen cultures before they arrive at work: family groups, WhatsApp threads, peer circles, professional communities, school-gate networks and online spaces. Work is only one of them.

As Sophy Norris, founder of PR consultancy The Alligator Pi Agency and host of The Dangerous Women Collective podcast, puts it: “The most powerful cultures are not always the ones organisations design for people. Increasingly I see people creating ‘purposeful tribes,’ the colleagues and collaborators people choose, build and carry with them.”

People already use those trusted communities to test ideas and solve problems. Companies do not need to compete with that. They need to learn from it.

What the dance still teaches

That is why the viral dance still matters, even if the dance itself does not. My son’s generation understands instinctively that a sound, meme or dance only works when the group already shares the reference, picks it up, changes it slightly and passes it on.

When I told him I was writing about him and King Nasir, he said, “That’s old. It’s Cat in the Hat now.” Leaders cannot control every shift, and they do not need to. Their job is to build a system people can read, keep it moving with the work, and recognise the cultures people already bring in. Because culture is not what the organisation says. It is what people do next.

Courtney Ellul is an internal communications strategist and founder of Convene Associates, where she works with global brands on the moments where communication shapes culture and employee experience.

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