PRODUCTHEAD: Beliefs and culture

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tl;dr

Changing behaviour and beliefs is crucial for people to adopt a fundamentally new org strategy

Culture optimised without alignment has unintended consequences

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve only just about started to remember to type ‘2026’ instead of ‘2025’. For me, this is the true start to the year.

The two articles I would like to share with you this week both offer insights into the mechanics of organisational culture. Caroline Clark introduces her Belief OS™ as a framework for understanding why people in organisations behave as they do, then applies it to a tangible example: the much-maligned process of transformation. Underpinning the system is her assertion that “culture is an emergent property of a system of beliefs”, and that many problematic corporate cultures arise because of mismatches in beliefs between individuals, teams and functions.

As a good companion piece, Mike Fisher writes about “culture debt: the hidden cost of neglecting the systems that govern how people work together”. Just as the more familiar technical debt arises when cutting corners – trading off quality for speed – so also culture debt comes from the same trade-off, except from cutting corners in behavioural norms, expectations and interpersonal relationships. As with Caroline’s piece above, Mike observes that the symptoms of culture debt also include mismatches between what is stated as valued and what is actually rewarded.

2026 is going to be eventful for all sorts of reasons. Let’s kick off with a push towards more rational thinking and generally being better humans.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

Why organisational transformations fail

Organisation-wide transformation is hard. Culture and ways of working are well established and often resistant to large-scale change. What helped the organisation maintain stability and grow incrementally when times were good is precisely what is now putting them at risk. That resistance is not individual or accidental, but structural and systemic.

A systems perspective on culture, power, and change

[Caroline Clark / Lift-Off with Caroline]

Culture Debt

In the early days of Uber’s rise, the story was simple: build fast, hire fast, expand fast. Travis Kalanick embodied speed as a leadership philosophy. It became the company’s competitive weapon, and its cultural center of gravity. “Always be hustlin’” wasn’t just an attitude, it was an operating model. And for a while, it worked flawlessly. Cities opened. Riders flooded in. Valuations soared.

But inside the company, the invisible interest payments were accumulating.

Leaders assume culture will scale on its own. It never does.

[Mike Fisher / Fish Food for Thought]

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recent posts

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• recommendations for automated infrastructure monitoring;
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• the value of building a trustworthy community over superficial personalisation.

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So simple, anyone could do it. Wait – don’t fire me

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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from delayed onset muscle soreness.