The 9 Lives of Culture – And the One That Never Dies

Dr Leandro Herrero:

Culture has been declared dead more times than we can count. Each decade brings its own assassin — strategy, process, leadership, engagement, agility, purpose, wellbeing, now AI. Yet it survives every attempt, reborn under a new name. Join me for a short journey through the nine lives of culture — and the tenth one that never dies: the informal web of relationships where real life happens.

Culture says: “I refuse to go.”

Every few years, someone announces that culture is passé. It’s been eaten by strategy, replaced by process, buried under technology, or eclipsed by purpose. And yet, here it is again — impossible to kill, impossible to ignore. Culture, it seems, has nine lives. Each time management declares it dead, it reappears in a new disguise, teaching the same lesson: you can’t run an organization on diagrams alone.

1. The Age of Strategy — “Culture is soft; strategy is real.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, the gospel of strategy ruled. Competitive advantage, planning matrices, and the rational mind reigned supreme. Culture was the “soft stuff,” a by-product at best. Then strategy ran out of breath. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” became a cliché because it was true. (However, Drucker never said that.) Strategy, without the oxygen of shared meaning and behaviour, simply couldn’t breathe.

2. The Process Revolution — “Process will save us.”

The 1980s and 1990s brought Six Sigma, TQM, and Quality Circles — engineering perfection through process. If only we could design the perfect system, performance would follow. But process without pride is bureaucracy. Compliance without ownership collapses. Leaders eventually rediscovered that culture sustains process; it is the spirit inside the system.

3. The Reengineering Wave — “Let’s start from a blank page.”

In the 1990s, Business Process Reengineering promised efficiency by wiping the slate clean. The result: immaculate charts and broken communities. Culture had to return to rebuild trust. Efficiency had been bought with emotional bankruptcy — and someone had to repair the human damage.

4. The Leadership Obsession — “Culture follows the leader.”

As strategy and process lost their shine, leadership took the stage. The “Great Man” theory of history became a management creed. Leaders would shape everything; culture was merely their shadow. But heroism cracked under its own mythology. When the megaphone leaders fell silent, something quieter — and truer — began to rise.

5. The Engagement Era — “We don’t need culture; we need engagement.”

By the 2000s, engagement became the fashionable metric. Dashboards and pulse surveys replaced genuine energy. But engagement without shared purpose is choreography without music. People began to ask, “Engaged with what?” and, inevitably, they found the answer in culture — the missing score beneath the performance.

6. The Agile and Self-Management Wave — “Culture is bureaucracy; we’re fluid now.”

The 2010s brought the gospel of Agile, Scrum, Holacracy, and Teal — management without managers, rules without rulers. Bureaucracy was the villain, agility the cure. Soon the cure became another orthodoxy, complete with rituals and jargon. Agile transformations failed wherever mindsets stayed hierarchical. Culture outlived every sprint.

7. The Purpose and Values Renaissance — “Culture is just values written down.”

Purpose and values returned, embossed in posters and PowerPoints. Noble intentions, laminated slogans. Purpose was declared the successor to culture — nobler, higher, more modern. Yet purpose without practice dies laminated. Authentic culture is lived, not declared.

8. The DEI and Wellbeing Era — “Culture is inclusion and wellbeing.”

In recent years, we’ve seen a surge in attention to inclusion, equity, safety, and wellbeing. These are vital, human, essential. But too often they orbit outside the cultural core — initiatives in search of oxygen. The ‘initiatives’ were declared safe with a ‘Head of’ for each, and that was terminal illness.  Culture is the ecosystem where they either flourish or suffocate. Behaviours, not policies, are their gravity.

9. The AI and Digital Transformation Moment — “Culture is obsolete; algorithms rule.”

Today’s managerial faith lies in data, dashboards, and digital twins. Culture, once again, is dismissed as noise — human, messy, irrational. But automation can’t replace judgement, and no algorithm can simulate trust. Technology may accelerate; only culture integrates. The human code proves irreducible, stubbornly alive.

The Tenth Life: The One That Refuses to Die

Perhaps culture doesn’t really have nine lives. Perhaps it has one continuous pulse, expressed through many disguises. Each managerial era thinks it has transcended culture, only to rediscover that culture was the invisible scaffolding all along. If there is a tenth life, it lies beneath all the others — the informal organization. The networks of trust, influence, and peer connection where real life happens. That hidden world of relationships — the corridors, the WhatsApp threads, the quiet peer exchanges — is where culture breathes. At Viral Change™, we’ve lived here for years, in the social fabric beneath the org chart. This is culture’s true habitat: peer-to-peer contagion, not cascade; stories in action, not slogans.

Relationships: The Real Operating System

The deepest truth may be that the real currency of any organization isn’t hierarchy, autonomy, or hybrid working — it’s relationships. The related is not as important as the relationship itself. Iain McGilchrist reminds us that relationships are foundational, existing prior to “the related.” We exist only in relation to others. Paraphrasing, I would say that  “I am myself only in relation to a non-myself.” Culture endures because relationships endure. The formal organization may change shape, but the informal one — the web of human connection — is immortal. Ignore it, and it will quietly resist you. Work with it, and it will outlive you.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. For over 25 years, he and his team have transformed organizational cultures worldwide through his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for his latest updates.

Written by: Editor