Tell me the conversations you’re avoiding, and I’ll tell you what your culture looks like

5 February 2026

Martin Pettinati:

What better way to start the year than talking about culture in organizations. It’s a topic that I spend a great deal of time talking about because I’m fascinated by the intrinsic and often overlooked power culture has over our actions and, at the same time, because I’m amazed at how little attention, energy, and time is devoted to it in most organizations.

At the end of the day, we are what we do, and we do things according to what we believe. And culture is precisely the engine of that system. And yet, very often, organizations suffer from recurring problems, though it never occurs to anyone to think that they might have a cultural root.

When an organization goes through a crisis, no leader is surprised to see people resign, to feel there’s a heavy atmosphere of demotivation, to notice that some projects start to fall behind, or that clients complain, or that margins shrink, or that conflicts arise more easily, or that the flow of communication is reduced to a minimum. Crisis creates a palpable sense of discomfort, and it almost justifies all of this.

Crises also serve to justify why most things go wrong. “It’s not us, it’s the crisis”. But very often there are underlying problems that were already there before the crisis, and that remain when the crisis has passed.

Culture is a key to unlocking those underlying problems. But before we start unlocking, we have to understand: understand what culture is, understand what the particular culture of our organization is like, and understand how there are structural problems that arise from the way certain situations and behaviors are encoded in our culture.

A conversation that is many conversations

A few days ago I had a conversation with the CEO of an organization I’ve been working with for many years now. But in some way, I’ve also had that same conversation many times, with many other CEOs. During that conversation, we talked precisely about conversations —and more specifically, the ones we are not having. And about why that happens.

This conversation takes place in the context of a transition process that this organization is currently going through, but which is common to all organizations. At one time or another, every organization goes through moments of agitation, crisis, or transformation, in which the context forces them to pivot, to make more or less drastic decisions, more or less pleasant ones. It’s not something that can be avoided.

But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to do in the meantime.

Making decisions is basically 50% of a leader’s role. The other 50%, of course, is taking responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.

When the situation is pressing, it’s important to remain calm. And it’s very difficult to remain calm if we don’t have enough information. That is one of the reasons why communication is fundamental. In moments of crisis, turmoil, transition, or movement toward new contexts, the organization loses its margin for error. We simply can’t afford to miss. And if the people who work in the organization don’t have enough clarity about the context, about what is going on, about urgencies, needs, and potential risks, they don’t have the means to make decisions and take meaningful action.

If at some point you find yourself going through a crisis and you lack clarity about what to do, communicating is always the best idea. And conversely, not communicating is always the worst idea. The best thing a leader can do for their organization is to make available the necessary tools to the people who have to execute. And the second-best thing a leader can do for their organization is to communicate. Why? For the simple reason that tools are more useful when we’re clear about the purpose for which we’re going to use them.

Tools + information. That’s the equation.

There is a certain part of uncertainty that is inherent to the context in which an organization operates: there are always things we can’t know because they depend on the actions of others, which are beyond our control. And, of course, every organization has to navigate the uncertainty of its environment. But there is also another part of uncertainty that is generated within the organization, by the way people manage information. By action or omission, there are things that are not communicated, or which aren’t communicated in due time, and that progressively darkens visibility for the whole team.

It is common for people to think that if they don’t have something good to communicate, the best thing to do is to stay silent. That saying, “if you don’t have anything good to say, best not say anything” really runs deeper than one might think. But the reality is that maintaining active, fluid, and transparent communication is often the difference between surviving or not. True for diving, commercial aviation, navigation and, of course, business.

When everything is going well, it’s important to communicate it, to encourage the team and create a positive feedback loop: we want more of this. When everything is going badly, it’s even more important to create open communication about it.

And that was exactly my recommendation: we are lacking spaces for communication. The CEO’s answer, unfortunately, was one I’ve heard many times before:

“Those kinds of spaces are not going to exist during the transition.”

Commonplaces, common problems

Although this is a very common answer, it never fails to disappoint me. For several reasons. Let’s start with the factual ones.

First, transitions don’t have a clear start and end date. Many crises last for months, even years. Waiting for the wave to pass in order to open communication is a bad idea, because organizations don’t exist without people, and people suffer during crises. The longer crises last, the more people suffer. Providing information, creating spaces for dialogue, and offering emotional support are necessary relief during periods of transition.

Second, crises are not linear or sequential: it is far from uncommon that crises of different nature and origin overlap, and before we manage to bring one problem to a resolution, a new one appears. Sometimes several problems. In this sense, not only is it a bad idea to wait for the wave to pass before communicating, it can be outright impossible.

But there are other, bigger problems with this idea of waiting out the storm, which go beyond objective issues like not being able to know how long it will last, or whether it will overlap with other storms. Because, if those were the only problems, we might even believe that there would eventually come a time when things calm down a bit, and then it would be possible to resume all suspended conversations without major consequences.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

There are no one-directional problems

One thing that needs to be understood about culture in organizations is that communication is not a one-way dynamic.

Many leaders shy away from opening conversations with their teams because “I wouldn’t know what to say” And it takes them a long time to realize that the majority part (and by far the most valuable part) of a conversation is listening to what others have to say.

The equation is anticlimactically simple: whatever it is you have to say, you already know it. Everything there is to be gained and learned from a conversation comes from what others have to say.

Not opening communication channels is equivalent to navigating a complex situation without asking for help or relying on the knowledge and contributions of your team. That and tying your hands and feet before going for a swim in the ocean are not very different.

On a different note, every organization functions by the work and grace of its people. Without spaces for communication, teams begin to fall apart. Sometimes they do so slowly, and other times quite quickly. Perhaps the most important lesson of the story of the Tower of Babel is that when people cannot communicate, they cannot work together, and no project can move forward.

And while it’s possible —and often it’s the only thing that actually happens— for people to organize themselves autonomously to exchange opinions and propose solutions, it is not the ideal scenario. On the one hand, because when these self-managed initiatives don’t have the support of leaders, it’s difficult for them to reach the whole organization, and that makes it much harder for the solutions they propose to be implemented. On the other hand, because these conversations often happen spontaneously, which means many people are left out simply because they weren’t present when the opportunity arose. But most importantly:

If the leaders of an organization do not create these spaces of communication, they are the ones who are left out of the conversation.

By now, I don’t think it’s necessary to clarify that this works in exactly the same way for any kind of relationship, beyond the world of business. In any relationship between two or more people, communicating more is better than communicating less. People need clear, precise, and timely information, in order to make better decisions.

What your culture does

One of my go-to heuristics is the one that says: “The purpose of a system is what it does”. In other words, it doesn’t matter what a system says it does, or what it was designed for, or what use its designers and builders projected. A system is defined by what it actually produces.

And we can also think about it from the opposite perspective, echoing the eloquent words of Stafford Beer: “There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”.

Culture is one of the vital systems of any organization. And as such, there is no point in claiming that our culture is or does what it consistently fails to be and do. And I want to be clear on this point: we are not discussing whether it is correct, or ethical, or appropriate. We are saying that it makes no sense. You don’t claim to have a culture of transparency so that your practices then become transparent; exactly the opposite is required: you need to make the organization operate transparently so that its culture is then perceived as evidently transparent.

Where it says “transparency”, of course, you can substitute any of the values you want to build your organization on: empathy, excellence, integrity, teamwork, innovation. It’s not about saying those values, but about living them, about operating day to day in according to those values. And then there is no need to write culture into documents, or on office walls, or on the website.

Because culture, in any case, is always what people do, and not what they say they do.

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Martin Pettinati is a Madrid-based strategic marketer obsessed with bringing clarity to businesses all over the world. He is a Strategic Columnist and a #WeLeadComms honoree.