From Judging Behaviour to Designing Systems
Why Organisational Culture Change Fails, and What Leaders Must Do Instead
The Seduction of Behaviour
Modern organisations are obsessed with behaviour.
We measure it, rate it, train it, nudge it, coach it and, often judge it. When delivery falters, trust erodes, or transformation stalls, the diagnosis is frequently behavioural: people are resistant, not accountable enough, too siloed, too cautious, or not collaborative. This framing is attractive. It feels actionable. It suggests that with the right leadership programme, values refresh, or capability uplift, culture will shift. Yet decades of evidence, from behavioural science, organisational theory, and lived experience, suggest something more uncomfortable: behaviour-focused change rarely delivers lasting results because it mistakes symptoms for causes.
To understand why, we must examine what behavioural science actually tells us, and where it has been misapplied in organisations.
The Limits of Behavioural Change
Behavioural science popularised the idea that small interventions, “nudges” could lead to meaningful improvements in outcomes. Change the choice architecture, and people will make better decisions. In narrow, well-defined contexts, this can work. But when applied to complex social systems, governments, economies, or large organisations, the effects are consistently limited:
Behavioural interventions produce small gains
Effects decay quickly
Results do not scale
And they fail entirely when structural incentives remain unchanged
This is not a failure of people. It is a failure of framing. Human psychology has remained broadly stable for centuries. What has changed, dramatically, are the systems people operate within: industrialisation, mechanisation, financialisation, digitalisation, and increasingly complex governance structures. Expecting individual behaviour to compensate for systemic design is unrealistic, and, in leadership contexts, often unfair.
The Organisational Trap: Individualising Systemic Problems
In organisations, this misapplication takes a familiar form. We tell people:
To “be more empowered” while approval chains grow longer
To “take accountability” while risk is punished
To “collaborate” while incentives reward local optimisation
To “innovate” while governance enforces predictability
When behaviour doesn’t change, we conclude there is a mindset problem. This is a profound category error, people do not behave according to stated values, they behave according to what the system makes safe, sensible, and survivable. Judging behaviour in isolation does two damaging things:
It absolves leaders of responsibility for system design
It creates moral pressure on individuals to compensate for structural dysfunction
Over time, this erodes trust and credibility. People learn that “culture change” means doing more emotional labour inside the same constraints.
Culture Is an Emergent Property, Not a Target
Organisational culture is not something leaders can mandate or train into existence. It is an emergent property of the system. Culture arises from:
How decisions are made
How power is distributed
How success is measured
How failure is treated
How conflicts are resolved
This is where Frederic Laloux’s work is instructive. In Reinventing Organizations, Laloux shows that behaviour consistently follows the organisation’s underlying operating model. Change the model, authority, incentives, governance, purpose and behaviour shifts naturally. Don’t, and it won’t. In this light, culture programmes that focus primarily on behaviour are attempting to override gravity.
Why Judging Behaviour Feels So Appealing to Leaders
If behaviour-led change is ineffective, why is it so common? Because it is:
Cheaper than redesigning systems
Faster than changing governance
Politically safer than confronting power structures
Psychologically comforting for leaders
Judging behaviour preserves the status quo. It allows leaders to say, implicitly:
“The system is fine. The people need to adapt.”
This dynamic mirrors what behavioural scientists now acknowledge at societal level: an over-focus on individual responsibility often serves those who benefit from existing systems. In organisations, the result is the same, stalled transformation dressed up as progress.
What Actually Drives Sustainable Behaviour Change
If behaviour cannot be nudged into lasting change, what can? The evidence is consistent: behaviour changes when the system changes. Effective leaders focus on:
Incentives: What behaviours are rewarded, formally and informally?
Constraints: What behaviours are realistically possible?
Risk distribution: Who pays the price when things go wrong?
Decision rights: Where does authority genuinely sit?
Feedback loops: How quickly does the system learn?
When these shift, behaviour follows, often without training, slogans, or resistance, this is why system redesign feels harder. It is. It requires leaders to move from judging others to examining their own choices: strategy, structure, metrics, and power.
The Leader’s Real Work
The most powerful question a leader can ask is not
“Why are people behaving like this?”
But:
“What have we designed that makes this behaviour the rational choice?”
This reframes leadership from performance management to system stewardship, it shifts accountability upward, where it belongs, and it replaces judgement with curiosity, blame with design, and frustration with leverage.
From Moral Pressure to Structural Change
Behavioural change fails not because people are unwilling, but because leaders too often ask behaviour to compensate for system flaws. True culture change is not about asking people to be better. It is about designing organisations that make better behaviour inevitable. That is slower work. Braver work. And profoundly more effective. If leaders are serious about transformation, the path forward is clear:
Stop judging behaviour.
Start redesigning the system that produces it.