Way of thiking leads to Way of Working Which Leads to Culture
Way of Thinking → Way of Working → Culture: The Invisible Chain of Organisational Transformation
In every transformation program, leaders aspire to change culture. But culture is not a switch you flip. It is the long shadow cast by how people think and how they work. If you wish to transform an organisation, you must first understand the invisible chain: Way of Thinking leads to Way of Working, which leads to Culture.
The Cognitive Foundation: Way of Thinking
At the root of every organisation lies its collective mindset. This is how leaders, teams, and individuals perceive the world, make decisions, and interpret complexity. Mental models shape whether people embrace ambiguity or resist change, collaborate or compete, innovate or stagnate.
Our Ways of Working defined by not just the types of meetings we have but also how we run those meetings define how people interact with each other which ultimately leads to culture.
For example, when leadership embraces a growth mindset, encourages curiosity, and views failure as a learning process, it creates a cognitive environment that allows new behaviours to emerge. Systems thinking, for example, enables organisations to see interdependencies rather than isolated tasks, fostering better decision-making at all levels. When we coach meetings to have these types of mindsets we start curating a culture. Over time it becomes how people interact with each other which inevitably leads to culture.
Without shifting these underlying beliefs, any operational or process change will struggle to take root. As the saying goes: "You cannot install agile on top of a fixed mindset."
Operationalising Mindsets: Way of Working
When ways of thinking begin to shift, they naturally translate into ways of working. Frameworks such as Agile, Lean, DevOps, or Design Thinking are all practical expressions of specific mindsets.
Transparency becomes daily stand-ups.
Continuous learning becomes retrospectives.
Outcome-focus becomes OKRs.
Collaboration becomes cross-functional squads.
Customer-centricity becomes rapid feedback loops.
But these tools only function when the thinking behind them is authentic. Imposed without the cognitive shift, they become hollow rituals that fail to deliver results. True change embeds itself in behaviours, rituals, language, and team dynamics.
The Emergent Property: Culture
Culture is the collective pattern of behaviour that becomes normalised over time. It is reinforced through stories, symbols, shared language, and tacit rules of engagement.
At Amazon, "Day 1" thinking shapes how people approach decisions.
At Toyota, continuous improvement (Kaizen) is embedded in every conversation.
In high-performing teams, psychological safety becomes the bedrock of innovation.
Amazon: The Discipline of “Day 1” Thinking
Jeff Bezos’ repeated mantra — “It’s always Day 1” — is not a slogan. It is a deliberate thinking model designed to counter organisational entropy.
Way of Thinking:
Assume nothing is guaranteed. Success creates inertia; Day 1 thinking enforces a permanent start-up mindset.
Obsess over customer needs, not internal convenience.
Fear complacency; view bureaucracy and process as decay agents.
Way of Working:
Customer-centric metrics drive all decisions (e.g. Net Promoter Score, friction points).
Leadership Principles codify behaviours into hiring, performance reviews, and promotions.
Mechanisms like PR/FAQ (Press Release / Frequently Asked Questions) force teams to validate customer value before building products.
Culture Outcome:
Decision-making remains agile despite scale.
Frugality and inventiveness are embedded.
Teams prioritise customer needs over political interests.
Employees operate with urgency, ownership, and calculated risk-taking.
Key Insight:
Amazon’s culture wasn’t engineered directly. The Day 1 cognitive frame shaped every work practice, and over decades it crystallised into a deeply embedded culture of customer obsession and operational speed.
Leaders often attempt to "change culture" directly, without attending to the ways of thinking and working that generate culture. This approach inevitably fails or produces superficial compliance. Sustainable cultural transformation requires patient design: influence mindset, guide behaviours, let culture emerge.
Toyota: The Embedding of Kaizen
Toyota’s global success is not primarily about manufacturing excellence — it’s about thinking differently about problems.
Way of Thinking:
No process is perfect; every process is improvable.
Problems are opportunities for learning, not blame.
Responsibility for improvement sits with those closest to the work.
Way of Working:
Visual management (e.g. Kanban boards, Andon cords) makes work and problems visible.
Structured problem-solving methods (e.g. 5 Whys, A3 Reports) enable root cause analysis.
Daily huddles (Obeya) promote real-time collaborative problem-solving.
Leaders act as teachers (sensei), not controllers.
Culture Outcome:
Continuous improvement becomes self-sustaining.
Psychological ownership of process quality exists at every level.
Hierarchy exists, but frontline insights drive systemic changes.
A learning culture that prevents stagnation despite scale.
Key Insight:
Toyota never “installed” a culture program. Instead, they embedded ways of thinking about problems into daily work structures, letting Kaizen become cultural DNA.
High-Performing Teams: The Engine of Psychological Safety
While Amazon and Toyota show large-scale examples, the same chain applies at the micro level inside teams.
Way of Thinking:
Mistakes are learning opportunities, not career threats.
Diverse perspectives are assets, not risks.
Speaking up is expected, not exceptional.
Way of Working:
Rituals such as retrospectives, feedback loops, and open post-mortems normalise learning.
Leaders model vulnerability by admitting mistakes and inviting dissent.
Conflict is reframed as healthy debate, not personal attack.
Culture Outcome:
Innovation flourishes because people experiment without fear of shame.
Complex problems are surfaced earlier due to open communication.
Retention improves; teams become self-sustaining high performers.
Leaders spend less time firefighting, more time scaling capabilities.
Key Insight:
Psychological safety is not an HR initiative — it is a direct outcome of leadership mindsets consistently reflected in team practices.
In all three examples, thinking led working, working led culture. None of these organisations started with culture-change workshops. Instead, they operationalised mindset into daily work — allowing culture to crystallise as a byproduct of doing the work differently.
Why This Sequence Matters: The Physics of Organisational Change
In most transformation efforts, leaders attempt to modify culture directly. They initiate values workshops, roll out new slogans, or launch engagement campaigns. While well-intentioned, these efforts often fail — or worse, produce fragile compliance rather than durable change.
The problem is not intent. The problem is sequence.
Culture is not an input. It is an output.
Attempting to start with Culture skips causality
Culture is the result of repeated shared behaviours, reinforced over time.
Behaviours are driven by habitual ways of working.
Ways of working are shaped and constrained by how people think.
Without first shifting cognitive frames, people simply adapt the old mindset to new cultural slogans leading to symbolic, performative change.
Example:
A bank launches a ‘fail fast’ cultural campaign. Yet, leaders still punish failed initiatives in performance reviews. The mindset of ‘failure equals incompetence’ remains unchallenged. The campaign dies quickly, leaving cynicism in its place.
Thinking must shift first because it governs perception
How people think shapes how they perceive reality.
Mindset filters determine whether an individual views ambiguity as opportunity or threat.
Until these filters shift, no process or ritual will be interpreted as intended.
Example:
An executive introduces Agile sprints to increase speed. But teams, still mentally anchored to project control thinking, experience sprints as compressed waterfall cycles — creating exhaustion, not agility.
Ways of Working act as embodiment of the new mindset
Process design can reinforce or sabotage mindset shifts.
Thoughtfully designed rituals, ceremonies, and mechanisms operationalise abstract concepts into daily behaviour.
Over time, these practices become internalised — producing behavioural consistency.
Example:
A leadership team adopts the discipline of pre-mortems. Initially awkward, the ritual slowly normalises proactive risk-thinking. Over months, this becomes the team’s default way of framing projects.
Culture emerges as the compounding effect of practice
Repeated behaviours create norms.
Norms create expectation.
Expectation creates culture.
Once self-reinforcing, culture stabilises and shapes the next generation of leaders.
Example:
At Toyota, the practice of identifying problems daily eventually generated an expectation that everyone is responsible for quality. This became a non-negotiable cultural norm.
Inverting the sequence creates fragility
When you try to “install” culture without addressing thinking and working, people comply in appearance but resist in substance.
Leaders observe weak uptake, label the change initiative as failed, and default to old models.
The organisation enters transformation fatigue, where change becomes synonymous with disruption, not renewal.
The Governing Formula:
Mindsets → Behaviours → Norms → Culture.
Sustainable transformation requires leaders to act like system designers — sequencing interventions to allow culture to emerge organically from deep shifts in how people think and work.
