The River Is Flowing the Wrong Way
Standing beside the deafening roar of the mighty Zambezi River, it would never occur to us to criticise the water for flowing in the wrong direction.
We understand instinctively that the river’s course is shaped by forces much deeper and older than the water itself: gravity, geology, rainfall patterns, seasonal cycles and the contours of the land through which it passes. Its complex trajectory reflects a continuous relationship with the landscape through which it flows.
And if we wished to change the course of the river, we would not begin by asking the water to behave differently. We would begin by asking what features of the landscape — both visible and hidden — were producing this flow.
Consider the tributaries that feed a river, the sediment it carries, the banks reshaped by decades of previous flow. Organisations have their own tributaries and sediment: past restructures, broken promises, quiet exits, unresolved conflicts, and the memory of what happened to the last person who challenged the status quo.
Human beings possess agency, intention, and the capacity to shape the systems we inhabit. But our choices are never made in isolation from context. Incentives matter. Histories matter. Relationships matter. Power matters.
Human beings possess agency, intention, and the capacity to shape the systems we inhabit. But our choices are never made in isolation from context. Incentives matter. Histories matter. Relationships matter. Power matters.
Mark Anderson
Organisational cultures emerge not simply from individual intentions, nor solely from structural conditions, but through the continual interaction between human agency and the environments within which that agency is exercised.
Yet organisations often do something surprisingly similar to blaming the river.
Leaders observe disengagement, territoriality, risk aversion, resistance or dishonesty and quickly arrive at a familiar diagnosis: ‘We have a culture problem.’
Holding Culture More Gently
The conclusion that organisations have a culture problem often rests upon a deeper assumption: that culture is a thing that organisations possess.
If culture can be possessed, it follows naturally that it can be diagnosed, redesigned and ultimately changed.
Anthropologists have long been cautious about such assumptions. One of the discipline’s enduring concerns has been the tendency to reify the concept of culture itself — to take something dynamic, relational and emergent and treat it like something stable and concrete.
This is not merely an academic distinction. It shapes what leaders believe is possible, and how they set about pursuing it. A thing can be redesigned by decree. A pattern of relationships can only be changed by changing what people repeatedly experience.
Perhaps culture is something we should hold more like water in our hands than an object on our desks.
Perhaps culture is something we should hold more like water in our hands than an object on our desks.
Mark Anderson
Not because culture is unreal. Far from it. Its effects are often profound.
But the moment we begin treating culture as a thing, we risk forgetting that it is constantly being created and recreated through interactions between people, institutions, incentives, histories and structures of power.
The anthropological question is different:
What would have to become true for a different culture to emerge?
Culture Is Not a Mechanism
It is rarely helpful to think of culture as some sort of mechanism or a resource.
Culture is an expression of deeper human and systemic realities.
Power. Incentives. Hierarchy. Identity. Uncertainty. Institutional memory. Reward structures. Informal norms. Historical experience.
Fingers burned, prizes promised and meanings made.
These forces combine, interact and reinforce one another in ways that are often difficult to observe directly, yet they shape the conditions within which behaviour becomes possible, desirable, risky or irrational.
We also speak as though organisations themselves possess independent agency: that the organisation values innovation, fears risk, or simply doesn’t trust its people.
These are useful shorthand expressions, but anthropology becomes cautious whenever abstractions begin behaving like people.
Organisations do not think, trust, fear or innovate.
People do.
Remove the people and the organisation disappears as a social phenomenon, leaving behind buildings, policies, logos and archives, but no culture and no behaviour.
If culture emerges anywhere, it emerges in the countless interactions between people navigating a shared landscape.
Culture is not the explanation. Culture is the outcome.
Adaptive to What?
Anthropologists have long worked from a simple assumption: human behaviour generally makes sense within the contexts in which it emerges.
Consider silence.
Leaders may interpret a lack of challenge or feedback as disengagement or resistance. But what happens to the people who speak up? Are difficult questions welcomed or quietly remembered? Do careers advance through candour or compliance? How does speaking up influence relationships between participants, perhaps long after the meeting has ended?
Suddenly silence begins to look less like apathy and more like adaptation.
The same may be true of risk aversion. Organisations often claim to value experimentation and learning. But what happens to failed experiments? Which failures become learning opportunities and which become cautionary tales? Which mistakes linger heavily in collective memories?
People pay close attention to these signals — often more attention than they pay to mission statements or leadership communications.
Consider a team that quietly stops escalating problems to senior leadership. On paper, the organisation operates a ‘no-blame’ reporting culture. In practice, the last three people who raised early warnings found themselves managed out within the year, ostensibly for unrelated reasons. Nobody needs to be told to stay quiet. The landscape has already taught them.
Nobody needs to be told to stay quiet. The landscape has already taught them.
Mark Anderson
The same questions can be asked of blame, bullying, information hoarding and territoriality.
What does this behaviour enable?
Whose power does it preserve?
What risks does it help people manage?
What conditions allow it to persist?
In other words, what realities is this behaviour an adaptation to?
Behaviour that appears irrational from outside the system often looks entirely rational from within it. Even the most toxic behaviours are likely paying off for someone, somewhere in the logic of the system in which they occur.
The anthropological task is not to excuse or rationalise harmful behaviours. It is to understand them before attempting to change them, so that the changes can be authentic and sustainable.
Redirecting the River
Viewed through this lens, many culture change initiatives begin to look rather different.
Values exercises, leadership programmes and communication campaigns can create valuable conversations and sometimes become important catalysts for change.
The problem arises when interventions become detached from the realities producing the behaviours they seek to change.
A hospital launches a ‘speak up’ initiative.
A business introduces a programme designed to increase innovation.
An organisation invests heavily in collaboration across departmental boundaries.
The intentions are often admirable. The landscape they are launched into, however, is rarely examined with the same care — the informal hierarchies, the historical grievances, the reward structures nobody designed on purpose but everybody has learned to read.
But if speaking up remains professionally or emotionally dangerous, if failed experiments quietly damage careers, or if departments continue competing for resources and influence, behaviour may prove remarkably resistant to intervention.
Not because people are unwilling to change, but because the deeper landscape of the riverbed remains untouched.
Values statements still compete with real incentive structures. Communication campaigns compete with lived experience. Leadership messages compete with the stories people tell one another about what really happens here.
And in human systems, lived experience and meaning making usually win.
Many culture change programmes attempt to redirect the river while leaving the landscape untouched.
From Engineering to Ethnography
If culture cannot simply be redesigned, and if behaviour is often more adaptive than it first appears, what does this mean for leaders seeking change?
The question is not whether change is possible. The question is where change begins.
Anthropology suggests that meaningful change often starts not with intervention but with inquiry.
What landscape is producing this flow? What are people adapting to, and how is it working for them? What would have to become true for trust, innovation or accountability to emerge?
These questions direct attention towards incentives, structures, relationships, histories, symbols and power.
This is perhaps where anthropology offers something distinctive to leaders. Not a new model for controlling culture. But a disciplined curiosity about the conditions from which culture emerges.
This is perhaps where anthropology offers something distinctive to leaders. Not a new model for controlling culture. But a disciplined curiosity about the conditions from which culture emerges.
Mark Anderson
The task becomes less like engineering and more like ethnography.
Observe before intervening.
Seek to understand before seeking to change.
Listen for the difference between official narratives and lived experience — the version of events told in a town hall, and the version told afterwards in the corridor, or contemplated heavily on the homeward commute.
We must learn to read the human system before attempting to redesign it.
Becoming Navigators of Human Systems
This is not an argument against culture change. Cultures change constantly, human systems evolve, relationships shift and new patterns emerge.
The question is not whether culture can change.
The question is how.
Culture emerges less from what leaders intend than from what systems repeatedly make true for the people operating within them.
Culture emerges less from what leaders intend than from what systems repeatedly make true for the people operating within them.
Mark Anderson
Trust emerges when people repeatedly experience trustworthiness.
Psychological safety emerges when speaking honestly and acting authentically becomes genuinely safe.
Innovation emerges when intelligent failure becomes survivable — even encouraged.
Collaboration emerges when cooperation becomes more fruitful than competition.
None of these are produced by declaration. All of them are produced by the accumulated, repeated experience of what the system actually rewards, tolerates and punishes, long after the memo has been forgotten.
Leaders seeking meaningful change may first need to become students of the landscapes through which their organisations flow — curious about the terrain their people are navigating every day, rather than convinced they already know it.
That shift, from certainty to curiosity, is often the harder discipline. It is far easier to launch an initiative than to sit with an uncomfortable question about why the current landscape produces the behaviour it does.
Less engineers of culture. More ethnographers of human systems. Because the flow we observe is rarely where change begins.
Perhaps the most important leadership question is not:
How do we change this culture?
But:
What would have to become true for a different culture to emerge?