Shaping Culture From Defense
I’ve spent the past several weeks arguing that organizations can become overprotected. Defense is an essential element of Organizational Design. Organizations need mechanisms that help them survive threats, manage risk, and recover when things go wrong. But those mechanisms don’t operate in isolation. A control that reduces risk may also increase bureaucracy, slow decision-making, constrain innovation, or undermine the Culture the organization is trying to create. That’s why I’ve argued that when Culture leads the Organizational Design, Defense should ordinarily be designed around it—not the other way around.
But that raises an interesting question. Should Defense ever cause us to change Culture? Yes. But not for the reason you might think.
Culture-Led Doesn’t Mean Culture-Immutable
In my book, Grow Your Business UP!, I introduce the PLB Method—Post, Lever, and Balance—as a way of making design decisions when several competing considerations must work together. The classic application is establishing a Management Philosophy for Project Management. Scope, time, and throughput all matter, but treating them as equally important when making every decision creates ambiguity. The PLB Method establishes which consideration will Post, which will Lever, and which will Balance.
The same underlying logic can be useful in Organizational Design. When Culture leads the design, Culture effectively becomes the Post. Other elements of the design accommodate it rather than forcing Culture to accommodate them. The Post provides stability. You don’t move it simply because another element creates an unexpected or undesirable consequence. Doing so would defeat the purpose of establishing a Post in the first place.
But stability isn’t the same as immutability. Organizations learn. Conditions change. Assumptions are tested against reality. Sometimes we discover things about the Culture we’ve specified that we didn’t understand when we designed it. And occasionally, Defense is where we make that discovery.
Defense Can Teach Us About Culture
The elements of Organizational Design don’t merely interact operationally. They can inform one another epistemically. In other words, what happens in one element can teach us something we didn’t previously know about another. Suppose an organization deliberately creates a Culture that gives employees considerable autonomy. That’s an intentional cultural choice. Over time, however, the organization experiences a series of undesirable events involving decisions made under that autonomy.
The obvious response is to strengthen Defense: add approvals, tighten controls, increase oversight, restrict authority. That may be appropriate. But it may also be treating the manifestation of the problem rather than understanding its source.
The Defensive consequences have given us new information about the Culture. Before adding controls—or changing the Culture—we should ask what we’ve learned. Defensive consequences should trigger cultural inquiry before they trigger cultural change.
Diagnose Before You Redesign
An undesirable Defensive consequence can reveal several very different conditions. First, there may be a gap between the Culture we’ve specified and the Culture we’re actually observing. Perhaps autonomy was intended to operate alongside strong accountability, but accountability never became part of the lived Culture. In that case, the Culture specification may not need to change at all. The better intervention may be to reinforce the Culture we already intended to create.
Second, the consequence may reveal an opportunity to improve the Culture specification itself. Perhaps experience teaches us that our original conception of autonomy was incomplete. We may discover an important value, behavioral expectation, or boundary that wasn’t sufficiently understood when the Culture was designed. That’s learning. And in a Culture-led design, learning can legitimately cause us to reconsider the Post.
Third, we may conclude that Culture is operating exactly as intended and that changing it would be inappropriate. The consequence may represent acceptable residual risk, or the underlying issue may belong somewhere else in the Organizational Design.
These are very different diagnoses, even though they can begin with exactly the same observable event. The element in which an Organizational Design problem becomes visible is not necessarily the element in which the intervention belongs.
Don’t Let Defense Redesign Culture
This distinction matters because Defense has a natural bias. Defense is designed to protect. When something undesirable happens, the locally rational response is often to add protection.
But the occurrence of a preventable undesirable event does not, by itself, prove that additional Defense is warranted. Nor does the occurrence of an undesirable Defensive consequence, by itself, prove that Culture should change. An organization could eliminate a great deal of risk by eliminating the behaviors that create it. It could reduce employee misconduct by eliminating employee discretion. It could reduce innovation failures by discouraging experimentation. It could reduce cybersecurity exposure by severely restricting access to information and technology. The organization might become safer. It might also become incapable of doing what it was designed to do.
That’s why Defensive consequences should be treated as sources of learning rather than instructions for change. Defense may provide insights that suggest Culture should be reconsidered, but it should not determine what the revised Culture should be. That remains a strategic decision.
A Much Bigger Example
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of the increasingly uncomfortable conversation surrounding artificial intelligence. We are simultaneously racing to make AI more capable while discussing the controls we may need to protect ourselves from increasingly capable AI. That tension is usually framed as a problem of Defense: What safeguards do we need? What should we regulate? What controls should developers implement? How do we prevent increasingly powerful systems from causing serious harm? Those are legitimate questions.
But they may not be the only questions worth asking. Innovation, ambition, competition, scientific discovery, and technological progress are values that have served us extraordinarily well. Our institutions reward them. Markets reward them. Careers are built upon them. Entire industries compete to move faster than one another. Then, as the consequences of that progress become more consequential, we turn to Defense and ask it to keep us safe.
That makes me wonder whether Defense is revealing something about Culture. Perhaps the more interesting question isn’t simply how much protection we need from increasingly powerful technology.
Perhaps we should also ask: What have we taught ourselves to value that brought us here? That question doesn’t tell us that our Culture should change. Nor does it tell us what a different Culture should look like. It does something more modest—and potentially more useful. It gives us a reason to examine what our Defensive concerns might be teaching us about the values motivating the behavior that created those concerns in the first place. Defense becomes a source of insight rather than merely a source of control.
Learn Across the Design
The same principle applies throughout Organizational Design. One element can reveal something important about another without acquiring authority over it. Information may expose a problem with Value. Value may reveal something about Culture. Culture may create consequences for Power. Defense may expose assumptions embedded in any of them.
Those interactions are part of what makes Organizational Design a system rather than a collection of independent design choices. The objective isn’t to prevent one element from affecting another. It’s to learn from those interactions without allowing every undesirable consequence to trigger a reflexive redesign.
When Defensive consequences appear, the sequence should therefore be deliberate:
- Observe the consequence
- Determine whether Culture contributed to it
- Compare the Culture you’re observing with the Culture you specified
- Decide whether the opportunity is to reinforce that Culture, improve its specification, or leave it alone
- Evaluate any proposed change against Strategy
- Then realign the rest of the Organizational Design around the decision.
Culture-led Organizational Design doesn’t require preserving Culture exactly as it was originally conceived. It requires being thoughtful about why you’re changing it. When using DHARMA, an element can inform the design of another element without assuming design authority over it.
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