Part 7 - The shadow of culture: navigating reputation & stakeholder trust risk
Reputation: the shadow your culture casts. Trust doesn’t break in the headlines, it erodes quietly when lived culture doesn’t match stated values. In Part 7 of the Culture Risk Intelligence Series, we examine Reputation & Stakeholder Trust Risk, the hidden cost of cultural misalignment that becomes visible only when pressure hits. Reputation isn’t just brand, it’s the accumulated trust of customers, regulators, employees, and investors. Culture is what protects that trust or quietly puts it at risk. Is your culture reinforcing stakeholder trust or undermining it when it matters most?
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Part 5 - Culture Lag: The Silent Risk Stalling Your Strategic Future
Boards and Executives know this risk well. They’ve seen strategic initiatives and post-merger integrations delayed or derailed not because the strategy was wrong but because the culture wasn’t ready to deliver it. This is what we call Strategic Execution & Transformation Risk: the risk that culture becomes the friction point in executing strategic priorities.
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Part 6 - When culture blocks the pivot: Innovation & Adaptability Risk
This is where Innovation & Adaptability Risk emerges: when the prevailing culture resists change, punishes failure, and reinforces the status quo. In theory, innovation is a strategic priority. In practice, it’s inhibited by unspoken norms - risk-aversion, siloed behaviours, and legacy mindsets that still shape how people collaborate, decide, and learn.
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Part 4 - Regulatory & Compliance Risk: A culture lens on integrity, oversight and exposure
Regulatory & Compliance Risk arises when those behaviours silently drift. When ethical shortcuts are tolerated. Speaking up feels unsafe. And when informal culture begins to overpower formal controls.
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Part 3 - Insight Deficit Risk: A Cultural Blind Spot in Plain Sight
Culture is often attempted to be monitored using engagement surveys. Engagement surveys and sentiment tools provide a surface-level view, often a filtered and incomplete quarterly snapshot of how people feel. Organisational Culture isn’t a story of feelings. It’s a layered system of subcultures with common and unique characteristics, and each its own impact on business performance.
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Is Culture Adelaide's greatest asset?
Adelaideans sense they’re a different breed from other Australians. The Culture Factor Australasia’s Martin Karaffa and Christopher Organ ask whether we can we turn that gut-based conviction into hard data which prove it.
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Part 2 - Governance & Leadership Accountability: The Foundational Culture Risk
As organisations grow, culture becomes more complex — not less. Schein’s insight is a reminder that the challenge isn’t culture in general, but the governance of its many forms. When Boards and Executives fail to set, model, and monitor the culture required to execute strategy, misalignment is not only possible — it’s inevitable. In this post, we explore the most foundational of the ten culture risks: Governance & Leadership Accountability Risk — where weak or absent oversight allows culture to drift, trust to erode, and risk to take root across the enterprise. Why this risk matters In any organisation, culture is shaped less by slogans and more by what is seen, rewarded, and reinforced. Leadership sets the tone — but in large, complex systems, that tone must cascade across a network of subcultures. As Schein points out, managing culture becomes less about uniformity, and more about governing alignment between disparate parts of the organisation.
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Part 1 - Culture Risk: The 10 Governance Priority for Boards and Executives
Launched in Australia at an important time, The Culture Factor Australasia's mission is to help Boards and Executives increase culture risk intelligence capabilities and manage culture risk. We’re rolling out a series of articles that we hope will add to our readers' knowledge about culture risk, starting with this post’s outline of ten critical culture risks Boards & Executives should be considering. Stay tuned as we explore each risk in the coming weeks—and be sure to follow or connect with me to keep these insights front of mind as you navigate today’s complex governance landscape.
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What is Organisational Culture?
A short 10 minute video that covers organisational culture, what it is and how to change it.
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Just because someone says its bad, this does not necessarily mean that the workplace culture is wrong.
Employee engagement feedback is indicating that an organisation has a good, bad, stifling and inspirational culture all at the same time. How can this be? What is the right culture?
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A Cultural Guide to Management: Insights from the Global Report 2024
This interactive webinar will walk you through the key findings of our latest report, "A Cultural Guide to Management: Insights from the Global Report". We'll explore how cultural values influence workplace dynamics across the globe, focusing on areas like decision-making, leadership styles, work-life balance, and employee motivation.
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A conversation with global executive Chris Petit on business transformation and leading multinational business
Chris Petit has worked with some of the most successful organisations in the world. In this conversation we discuss his experience navigating the evolution of the mechanics, organisational and cross-cultural dynamics of global business transformation.
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Why should you get started with Organisational Culture?
The concept of Organisational Culture is a term that is thrown around in the corporate world, but what does it really mean? What is Organisational Culture? What do you need to know before you start an Organisational Culture project? Speakers: Egbert Schram, Group CEO of The Culture Factor Dr. Okey Okere, Regional Vice President, Africa at The Culture Factor
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Are all your pistons firing for productivity?
Although technology investment is the muscle memory solution to productivity improvement, the focus of the article was about something else - Organisational Culture. We have all experienced mis-aligned culture and the impact it can have on productivity, and the flip side the amplifying impact a tuned-in one can have. And also how certain cultures can maintain mediocrity and repel improvement.
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