Culture isn’t just the backdrop, it’s the engine.
When we started creating this second section of the Charity Change Collective toolkit, I felt both excited and daunted. Excited because this topic, culture and mindset, is the part I care most about. Daunted because it’s hard to pin down.
Culture is slippery. It lives in the gaps between what we say and what we do. It shapes how people interact, how teams behave, how they respond to risk and uncertainty, and how they adapt in the face of transformation. It’s not what’s written in your strategy documents, it’s what happens in the room when things get messy.
I’ve spent a lot of time coaching leaders who are trying to drive change. And it might sound obvious, but culture is often the bit that gets left behind. It doesn’t have a neat action plan or a tidy spreadsheet. But if you ignore it, it has a habit of quietly deciding what gets done and what doesn’t.
What was really heartening, as the Charity Change Collective spoke to leaders and pulled together stories, was how many examples we found where cultural change was what unlocked progress.
One of my favourites came from Lara Burns, Chief Digital Officer at Scouts. She talked about how they approached digital transformation and culture change as a single, joined-up challenge, not separate pieces owned by different teams. It wasn’t easy, but it helped land a much wider shift across the organisation.
That’s the kind of thinking we try to embed at Tilt. The world around us is changing constantly. So while the tools and strategies will keep evolving, it’s your culture - your ability to adapt, learn and keep moving - that determines whether you’ll thrive.
At Tilt, we help organisations create cultures that are more empowered, more experimental, more connected. Cultures where people speak up, challenge assumptions and work across silos. Not because it sounds nice, but because it’s the only way to respond to the complexity charities are facing now.
We’ve seen the difference this makes. At Refuge, cultural shifts unlocked deeper collaboration between fundraising and comms which delivered impressive financial gains. At British Red Cross, taking an agile approach enabled the creation of a “transformative”, co-created strategy which created a solution to a longheld tension. At Marie Curie, focusing on how they work has enabled them to reduced their innovation cycle time from 6 months to 8 weeks - getting more ideas out there faster. .
Culture and mindset shape your organisation’s capacity for change. They determine how your teams work together, how decisions are made, and how you respond when things are uncertain. If you’re serious about transformation, culture isn’t the soft stuff - it’s the foundation.