Launching Our White Paper: Culture as a Performance System

We had the pleasure of launching our White paper titled: ‘Culture as a Performance System’ at the City HR Association roundtable in March 2026, where the discussion focused on a familiar challenge for many leadership teams.

Why do organisations with clear strategy, strong governance, and well-designed controls still produce inconsistent results?

The conversation repeatedly returned to one factor: organisational culture.

Culture influences how people interpret priorities, how confident they feel challenging decisions, and how judgement is exercised under pressure. In practice, culture shapes behaviour — and behaviour shapes results.

This is why we increasingly think about culture not as something “soft”, but as a performance system.

Following those discussions, we have published a new white paper exploring this idea.

The paper introduces the Culture-Performance System (CPS) — a framework that explains how culture translates into behaviour and ultimately into organisational outcomes.  

The framework links three connected layers:

• Culture Drivers – the lived experience of work: trust, purpose, engagement, autonomy and belonging

• Culture Behaviours – leadership and management practices that shape decisions, challenge, accountability and learning

• Culture Outcomes – organisational performance, wellbeing and regulatory outcomes

When these elements align, organisations tend to see stronger execution, earlier surfacing of risk, and more sustainable performance.

When they do not align, strategy stalls and problems surface too late. For us, the practical implication is straightforward:

High-performing cultures create high-performing teams.

And high-performing teams are what ultimately deliver results for customers, organisations, and

regulators.

You can read the full white paper here.  

We have designed a specific question set for UK Financial Services with our culture survey partner Cultiv8tiv.