Culture Generates Structure Which Generates Culture...

Sobering after-dinner thought: today I had a chat with a friend who’s just joined a large — and quite dysfunctional — organisation. She’s frustrated and a bit defeated after talking to her boss. She’d taken the initiative to highlight several problems and asked for help in fixing them. The answer she got was lukewarm.

One of those classic middle-management responses designed to stay neutral and avoid any real risk.

That conversation reminded me of how organisations evolve. At the start, culture dominates. A small group of people, clear purpose, everyone wears multiple hats. You handle the technical side, someone else manages commercial. There’s trust, alignment, energy. As the business grows, success brings structure. We hire more people. Roles appear. Processes emerge. But with every layer added, structure starts to shape behaviour more than culture does.

That’s when we start hitting those invisible walls. We think we’re talking to a person, but often we’re actually talking to structure — to the way the organisation has been set up to protect itself from change. It’s not that our manager doesn’t care. It’s that the structure around them rewards stability, not transformation.

Craig Larman captured this brilliantly in what he calls the _Larman Laws of Organisational Behaviour. My favourite one says: “Organisations are implicitly optimised to avoid changing the status quo of the middle and first-level manager and specialist positions.” Another one: “As a corollary to Conway’s Law, any organisation will structure its communication systems to mirror its existing structure.”

In plain terms, the organisation’s shape — its reporting lines, approval paths, job titles — starts to dictate how people think and behave.

So culture creates structure, and then structure generates new culture. Over time, the original intent gets buried under layers of process, titles, and protection mechanisms. What started as “let’s build something great together” becomes “let’s not rock the boat.”

Originally posted on LinkedIn.