Developing the cultural foundations for change

Culture often feels intangible — too abstract to define, too big to shift. But if you’re leading change in your organisation, culture isn’t just important — it’s essential. It shapes how people interact, how teams behave, how they respond to risk and uncertainty, and how effectively they adapt in the face of transformation.

Culture doesn’t just support transformation, it drives it.

Transformation that only invests in technology and skills, without addressing culture, risks delivering surface-level change. The biggest barriers to digital progress often aren’t technical. They’re cultural: the mindsets, habits and unspoken norms that decide whether change takes root or dies in a drawer.

As a senior leader, you might be grappling with familiar challenges:

• Why does change feel so slow, even when the strategy is clear?

• Why do the same patterns keep resurfacing: siloed thinking, risk aversion, passive behaviours?

• Why does transformation stall, even with the right ideas, technology and tools?

The answer lies in your culture. Culture isn’t values written on the wall. It’s how people show up every day – their default behaviours, what gets rewarded or ignored, how decisions get made, and how people respond when things are uncertain.

These patterns, however informal, shape your organisation’s capacity for transformation. When teams reflect, experiment and learn together, change becomes a habit. When fear, perfectionism or inertia dominate, transformation struggles – no matter how good the tech or strategy.

Get the culture right, and the transformation will follow.

That’s the fundamental argument of this toolkit: that transformation isn’t just a technical challenge, it’s also a cultural one. The tools and approaches will keep evolving – whether it's AI, automation, data platforms, or next-gen infrastructure. What will set you apart over time is your organisation’s ability to adapt, learn, and change. That resilience comes from culture.

We’ve spoken to more than 40 nonprofit and public sector leaders. The ones making the most progress weren’t always those with the biggest budgets or flashiest tech. They were the ones who deliberately invested in shaping culture by modelling behaviours, telling compelling stories about change, and building trust through consistency.

This toolkit is designed to help you build a resilient, adaptable culture.

We’ll help you:

• Understand culture as a set of observable, influenceable behaviours

• Identify the habits and assumptions holding your organisation back

• Model and reinforce the behaviours you want to see

• Build cultural momentum that supports long-term transformation

In this section, you’ll find ideas, case studies, and practical ways to lead cultural change with intention - because culture doesn’t sit in the background of transformation, it leads the way.