Stop Trying to Fix Culture—It’s a Wicked Problem
Why leaders seek validation instead of focusing on the never-ending challenge
When consulting organizations, I sometimes feel like a school teacher facing anxious parents at a parent-teacher conference.
CEOs enter our meetings with that familiar nervous energy—a mixture of hope and dread as they await validation. They want me to affirm that their culture is smart, well-behaved, and making them proud. They're seeking a grade, a ranking, or some sort of external confirmation that they're on the right track.
"How good is our culture?" they ask, just as parents inquire about their children’s performance.
But that's entirely the wrong question.
Culture isn't simply good or bad, just as a teenager isn’t merely smart or not. It's complex, contradictory, and dynamic. It has strengths and struggles, moments of brilliance and frustration. Some days it fills you with pride. Other days, it keeps you awake at night, wondering what went wrong.
Yet most leaders treat culture like a report card, checking if they’ve passed or failed. In reality, managing culture it's more like raising a child—messy, unpredictable, and never truly finished. It’s not something you fix and are done with, but a never-ending job. Understanding this changes everything.
Stop Trying to Fix Your Culture
You’re never done working on culture. That’s the first thing I tell my clients, and it’s not what most want to hear. They reach out because they’re looking to move culture from Point A to Point B, expecting a step-by-step plan with a clear endpoint.
Some don’t get it, and they seek out other consultancy companies that promise quick fixes. I respect their choice. Most struggle with the concept at first, but they eventually realize they need to change their approach. They commit to the hard work, acknowledging it will be a never-ending job.
There are two types of problems: tame and wicked. Understanding the difference will change your thinking.
Tame problems are easy to spot and solve. They have a clear endpoint. A tame problem might be complicated to solve, but the issue at hand is often clear. Everyone knows what needs to be fixed and what “done” looks like. Think of them as solving a puzzle—there’s always a solution. You simply apply the proper problem-solving method, and the answer naturally emerges.
Wicked problems, on the other hand, are almost impossible to solve completely. They’re unclear, confusing, and always evolving. They never end. Once you solve one part, another issue requires your attention.
Unlike tame problems, every aspect of wicked problems is unclear, from what causes them to how to solve them. Social planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber introduced the term to highlight the complexities and challenges of social problems. Wicked problems are subject to multiple real-world constraints involving many people and opinions, without a single, universally agreed-upon solution.
Workplace culture shares the same characteristics as larger wicked problems such as global warming, hunger, or poverty. It results from thousands of daily interactions, decisions, and behaviors happening across your organization. It's messy and often contradictory. Everyone’s watching the same movie but interpreting it differently.
Yet, most leaders continue to treat culture like a tame problem. They want to measure it, control it, and fix it for good. When employee surveys show positive metrics, everyone celebrates, but when results decline, leaders avoid the conversation, feel ashamed, and often look for someone to blame. They’re similar to parents embarrassed by their child’s poor report card.
But when you treat culture as a wicked problem, everything changes. Instead of trying to eliminate the messiness, you embrace it. Rather than searching for the perfect answer, you accept the challenge. There’s no perfect culture waiting to be achieved, no final destination where you can declare victory – just an ongoing challenge you work on every day that presents itself in unexpected ways.
Every wicked problem has multiple root causes. That’s what many organizations get wrong about promoting diversity, for example, as I explained here. You need to go beyond addressing biases or promoting psychological safety; it requires reviewing what behaviors are rewarded in practice, norms and rules, and decision-making processes. Most importantly, you must connect the effort to how it will help the overall culture, not treat it as a standalone goal.
Tom Ritchey said it best: "Wicked problems are messy, devious, and reactive—they fight back when you try to resolve them."
But here's the thing about wicked problems: People consistently underestimate the progress made. Ask most people if global poverty is getting better or worse, and 52% will tell you it's rising, when actually, the opposite is true. People think the world is getting more dangerous and chaotic, yet by nearly every objective measure—hunger, disease, violence, literacy—we're living in the safest, healthiest, and most prosperous time in human history.
The same pessimism clouds how we view organizational culture. If you only consume the news or LinkedIn bait-and-switch posts, you’d think most workplaces are dysfunctional or toxic. However, research tells a starkly different story. For example, in the SHRM’s The State of Global Workplace Culture in 2024, 56% reported their culture as good or excellent and, 26% as slightly good—only 8% described their culture as poor or terrible.
Because culture problems are never fully solved, it's easy to focus on what's still broken rather than acknowledging progress.
As design theorist Marty Neumeier observed, "The world's wicked problems crowd us like piranha." Culture is your organization's most persistent piranha—always present, always evolving, always demanding attention.
Five Ways to Tackle Culture as a Wicked Problem
Once you accept that culture is wicked, you can make sustainable progress. Start by shifting from fixing culture to working on it. Here are five ways to get you started:
1. Accept Your Cultural Complexity
Leaders often refer to their culture in one-dimensional terms like “innovative,” “bureaucratic,” “agile,” or “family-like.” However, organizations are complex and multi-faceted, typically combining fearful, tribal, aggressive, and fearless traits. Our Culture Identity Assessment Tool (CIAT) measures exactly this—your cultural mix across all four types. Rather than trying to eliminate certain aspects, we help leaders understand their mix and how to optimize it or evolve it instead of expecting an overnight shift.
It took Satya Nadella nearly a decade to shift Microsoft's culture from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all mentality, turning an aggressive culture into a fearless one. But that doesn’t mean all know-it-all behaviors have disappeared.
2. Map Your Current Messiness
The first step toward understanding wicked problems is to map not just the different elements but also the system. When using the Culture Design Canvas, we don’t just examine each of the ten building blocks but also how they interact, focusing on the ABCs of culture—Alignment, Belonging, and Collaboration.
The goal isn’t to capture the ideal or “official” culture but how people actually experience it. We identify commonalities, surprises, and contradictions across different levels and departments. We show our clients how everyone interprets the same organizational "movie" differently. Confronting this messiness isn’t always easy, especially when it reveals gaps between what leaders think and what employees experience. Yet, it’s a critical starting point for uncovering some of the root causes.
3. Avoid Pre-existing Solutions
Most leaders can't stand ambiguity and rush to find solutions, either adopting shortcuts or trying to replicate what worked elsewhere. Remember, beautified culture decks like Netflix’s don’t represent the whole truth. What worked at Spotify or Patagonia won’t necessarily work in your organization. The media typically reports on success stories, not the messy journeys behind them.
Each workplace culture is unique—your industry, history, size, business model, and mix of personalities combine to create a context that can't be replicated. Focus on understanding your specific constraints and opportunities. Identify which solutions will work best in your environment or how to adapt them to make them feel authentic rather than imposed.
4. Adopt a Trial-and-Error Approach
You can’t approach your culture with a right-or-wrong mindset. Tackling wicked problems requires multiple solutions; you need to test different approaches across different pockets of the organization. The goal isn’t just to see what works best but what’s more appropriate for each team.
Nokia’s push to become more “agile” and “entrepreneurial” failed completely. Its matrix approach and leadership reorganization had devastating cultural consequences. Many vital leaders departed, leading to the deterioration of strategic thinking.
Adopting a trial-and-error approach goes beyond finding the best solution. It’s about continually challenging how your team works. Every solution that improves certain aspects of a wicked problem often creates new challenges. For instance, the shift to remote/hybrid work increased flexibility and autonomy among teams but also increased loneliness.
5. Focus on Continuous Improvement
Culture is not something to fix but to continually nurture. Most leaders treat culture like a project—something with a clear beginning, middle, and end. They launch initiatives, measure results, and expect to move on to other priorities once the "culture problem" is solved.
This project mentality explains why so many culture initiatives fail. Teams celebrate completing a values workshop or finishing a leadership development program, thinking they’re done. But culture isn't an activity—it’s a habit, just like staying healthy. Exercising once is not enough; you need to build a sustainable routine.
Just as physical fitness requires different exercises for different muscle groups, culture development needs attention to multiple interconnected elements simultaneously. You can't focus solely on communication while ignoring decision-making processes.
Like fitness, culture work gets easier with practice, but it never becomes automatic. Amazon's "Day 1" mentality captures this perfectly—never settling into complacency, where you think you've figured things out. Wicked problems have no finish line because they're constantly evolving.
The Never-Ending Work of Culture
Building an agile, collaborative, and innovative culture is a wicked problem. It's complex, never fully solvable, and constantly evolving.
Once leaders stop seeking validation about their culture and start focusing on its development, everything changes. That’s precisely why I love what I do. Instead of fighting the messiness of culture, they approach it with curiosity. Rather than expecting a quick fix or structured plan, they adopt a more experimental approach.
Culture is endlessly wicked. It’s always changing and challenging (in a good way). When you accept this, taking care of it becomes something you enjoy doing, not just another task to complete.
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Great reading, thanks for sharing!