Most strategy conversations today sprint toward technology. AI adoption. Automation. Data platforms. New tools get names, timelines, budgets, and dashboards. Culture, by contrast, gets a vague sentence near the end. Something like “we will manage change.”
That imbalance is dangerous.
A 1960s film about the “office of the future” predicted fax machines and early computers. It got the technology mostly right. What it missed was just as important. There were no women in the office.
This mistake keeps repeating. We get better at predicting tools than people. Leaders imagine AI transforming operations while assuming employees, customers, and managers will behave much as they do today. They will not.
Technology changes what is possible. Culture determines what actually happens.
History shows this pattern clearly. The washing machine could have sparked a revolution in gender roles. Instead, it reinforced the 1950s household model. New tools rarely reshape society on their own. They are absorbed into existing habits, power structures, and norms unless those norms change as well.
Strategy fails when leaders plan for new capabilities while assuming old behaviors.
Most strategies quietly rely on cultural stability. Customer preferences are treated as durable. Employee expectations are assumed to adjust. Leadership behavior is taken as a given. Markets and technologies are allowed to move. People are not.
That is an untested assumption, and often a fatal one.
Culture is not soft. It is patterned behavior over time. It shapes speed, quality, risk tolerance, and follow through. When technology accelerates, culture often lags, fractures, or reasserts itself in unexpected ways.
Roger Martin’s What Would Have to Be True discipline is designed to surface the conditions a strategy depends on. In practice, most teams apply it narrowly. They test market size, cost curves, competitive response, and technology readiness. Far fewer ask the harder questions.
- What would have to be true about how leaders actually make decisions?
- What would have to be true about how work gets done under pressure?
- What would have to be true about customer habits, trust, and tolerance for change?
These are not soft questions. Culture is patterned behavior over time. It shapes speed, quality, risk tolerance, and follow through. When technology accelerates, culture often lags, fractures, or reasserts itself in unexpected ways.
In HSS Strategy Build work, teams surface assumptions across four categories: market, capability, economic, and cultural. Cultural assumptions include leadership behaviors, operating norms, decision rights, and customer practices that must hold for the strategy to work.
In the HSS Strategy System, those assumptions are tracked over time. Each quarter, leaders revisit not just market signals but people signals. Are behaviors drifting? Are incentives undermining strategic intent?
Strategy fails when leaders design for the technology they expect while assuming the culture they have. The future will bring new tools and different people. Serious strategy accounts for both.
See an interesting perspective about how this plays out in the world of Futurists.