🪜 Introduction
Culture isn’t written. It’s built.
And yet, too many organizations try to “define” their culture the way they define a slogan — clean, aspirational, framed on a wall. The problem is that culture isn’t a sentence. It’s a set of microdecisions repeated under pressure.
If you want to influence culture, you don’t start with words.
You start with prototypes.
📉 The Problem
Let’s face it: the classic approach to shaping culture is too slow and too abstract. You gather executives, pick five values, write a manifesto, maybe print some posters.
Meanwhile, people on the ground are navigating real constraints, unspoken rules, and incentives that contradict those values.
Culture doesn’t live in statements.
It lives in behaviors.
Especially the ones we reward, tolerate, or ignore.
🧠The Culture Prototype Mindset
Think of culture not as something you define — but something you prototype.
A culture prototype is a deliberately designed experience that tests a future behavior, belief, or interaction in a safe, observable environment. It’s a cultural “mock-up” where you make the invisible visible and invite people to react, reshape and refine.
This changes everything.
Instead of launching culture with a town hall, you start by testing it like a product. You explore hypotheses, observe reactions, iterate language and rituals.
You design culture like a living interface — not a brand guide.
🔧 Three Practical Prototypes
The Feedback Currency
Create a prototype week where every piece of feedback must be given in the form of a “coin” — physical or digital — that carries one insight and one appreciation. Then track the flow: who gives most, who hoards, who exchanges. Culture shows up in the economy of attention.Failure Narratives Wall
Design a digital (or physical) wall where team members post not just failures, but the narrative about the failure: how they made sense of it, what changed, what still hurts. You’ll notice who dares to go first, who reframes, who hides. That’s the real psychological safety index — not a survey.Curiosity Permission Slips
Run a sprint where everyone is required to use 10% of their time to explore something irrelevant to their role, but deeply interesting. The key is not the content — it’s whether people feel they have permission to do so. Culture is shaped by what people feel they can do without asking.
🧪 A Real Case
In a European fintech company, leadership wanted to promote a more open and experimental culture. Instead of declaring it, they launched a “Culture Sprint”.
Every week, a new behavior was prototyped:
Monday standups began with curiosity challenges.
Slack bots celebrated unpolished work.
Teams voted on micro-rituals they wanted to test.
By week 4, they didn’t need a new culture statement — they had new habits. Participation rates were over 80%, and managers reported a sharp drop in “silent resistance”.
Culture wasn’t introduced. It was experienced, shaped, owned.
đź” A Strong Analogy
Designing culture without prototyping is like writing an app description without building the interface.
It might sound good, but the first click breaks the illusion.
đźš© Pitfalls to Avoid
The biggest risk is theater. Culture prototyping must feel real, not staged.
If participants sense it’s performative, they’ll adapt superficially and withdraw emotionally.
Another trap is over-controlling the prototype. You’re not presenting a finished product — you’re co-designing. Leave room for emergence, even if it’s messy.
And perhaps the most subtle danger: not following up. A prototype without continuity feels like betrayal. Design the next step before launching the first.
🎯 Closing
Culture doesn’t need better definitions.
It needs better experiments.
Culture change starts when we make behavior safe to test, language safe to stretch, and meaning safe to negotiate.
So stop asking what your culture is.
Start asking: what’s your next prototype?
