Culture
The shared assumptions, values, norms and practices that shape how an organisation actually behaves: Schein's layered model (artefacts, espoused values, underlying assumptions), competing values frameworks (Quinn and Cameron), and the study of how culture forms, persists and resists change.
Culture is the medium every workplace concept lands in: it determines whether sharing models hold, whether unassigned settings get recolonised, whether presence principles operate or erode. The essential distinction the research supplies — espoused versus enacted culture — is the difference between designing for the values poster and designing for the organisation that exists.
- What is this organisation's enacted culture, beneath what it claims?
- How does culture vary across functions and sites — and does the variance require differentiated design?
- How far can a workplace concept lead the culture before the culture defeats it?
- Which cultural assumptions does a proposed concept silently make?
- Organisational culture research (Schein's framework; Cameron and Quinn's Competing Values Framework)
- Structured culture assessments measuring enacted behaviour
- Ethnographic and observational evidence
- The gap analyses: espoused–enacted, leadership–workforce, enacted–desired
Concepts calibrated to the enacted culture with explicit change investment covering the distance to the desired one; subcultural variance treated as a design variable; territoriality and status expression anticipated in sharing and stacking decisions; culture change sequenced with spatial change, never assumed from it.
Organisational Culture Assessment
A structured assessment of culture, values, behavioural norms and leadership model — as enacted, not as espoused.
Visioning Session
Surface future business ambition, cultural intent and strategic tensions as testable direction — not as an abstract creative exercise.
Spatial and Cultural Needs
The explicit pairing of spatial requirements with the cultural conditions they depend on — establishing which needs are spatial, which are cultural, and which are both.
Hybrid Balance
The translation of presence-value evidence into hybrid work principles, attendance logic, team agreements and their capacity, policy and leadership implications.
The causality inversion: expecting the workplace to produce the culture ('the new office will make us collaborative'). Space can enable and signal cultural intent; the evidence that it independently transforms underlying assumptions is weak. Culture changes through leadership, incentives and practice — space is an accomplice, not an author.
How distributed and hybrid arrangements transmit, dilute or fragment culture is among the most consequential open questions in organisational research; confident answers currently outrun the evidence.