A 5-Why Look At Culture: The Living System Inside The Organization
How organizational systems reinforce non-action.
In most organizations, if a project or initiative is not on a deadline, under pressure from the top, or actively on fire, it often doesn’t make the cut onto the list of top ten priorities.
Culture problems rarely persist because leaders don’t know they exist. They persist because they are consistently pushed aside by something perceived as more pressing. Leadership initiatives, unexpected urgency, operational pressure, political realities, the history of “it’s always been this way,” and unspoken tradeoffs all quietly compete for attention. An entrenched culture often remains until someone – or many someones – decide that the cost has finally become too high.
When leadership attention is consumed by what feels more urgent, cultural patterns can survive and even thrive – for years without meaningful interruption. To be clear, these patterns are rarely driven by the majority of the workforce. More often, they are sustained by a smaller group or a few individuals. Their power lies in their unrelenting dedication and persistence toward a particular agenda.
This isn’t about leaders being careless or disengaged. Cultural systems quietly shape and reinforce themselves while leaders are focused on the momentum and critical demands their roles were designed to manage and execute. Over time, the patterned response becomes familiar: a comment about a difficult personality, a strained team dynamic, or a problematic behavior surfaces in passing – noticed, tolerated, and then deprioritized.
This post isn’t offering another list of best practices that sound good in theory. It focuses instead on a question many people inside organizations ask quietly, often without saying it out loud.
Why does a strained culture appear acceptable, even when leaders say it matters?
Why the “5 Whys”?
To unpack this, I’m using one of my favorite tools to get beneath surface explanations: asking why five times – or known to some as a root cause analysis.
The “5 Whys” technique originated in the 1930’s at Toyota as part of its manufacturing problem-solving process. Developed by Sakichi Toyoda and later popularized by Taiichi Ohno, the method was designed to move beyond treating symptoms and instead identify root causes by repeatedly asking why. Its purpose was prevention, not reaction – a way to stop fixing the same problem over and over.
That intent translates surprisingly well to culture.
Why #1: Why does misaligned or disruptive culture persist?
Because leaders are often responding to incidents instead of stepping back to examine patterns.
At the surface, culture issues tend to show up as complaints, tense exchanges, missed responsibilities, performance problems or difficult personalities. Each of these requires attention, but none automatically produce the full picture.
Senior leaders often respond in real time to the personnel concerns that land on their desk. Without a pause, foresight or intentionally planned space, it’s rare for any leader to step back and examine what concerns might keep repeating. It’s the equivalent of diving under one big wave as it comes to shore, rather than looking up to see the entire set of waves rolling in.
When everything feels situational, patterns remain unseen.
The human impact: People notice that small eruptions get addressed while larger patterns go untouched. They start wondering, are leaders seeing the bigger picture or missing it entirely?
Leaders, ask this: Where are you responding to what just happened rather than examining what keeps happening?
Why #2: Why do leaders examine incidents instead of examining patterns?
Because there is rarely protected time to review culture as a system or formal area of work.
In most organizations, culture is not formally embedded into role design, performance expectations or operational structure. It becomes something leaders are expected to manage alongside strategy and operations, often between meetings and after hours. It is either managed individually or delegated to a direct report.
Without a formal container to hold a larger systemic discussion or focus, challenging culture issues remain unofficial. Unofficial problems don’t receive system-level attention.
When culture is everyone’s responsibility, it often becomes no one’s priority.
The human impact: It is usually the majority of people who want a healthy workplace and notice inefficiencies and stalled progress caused by smaller silos or disruption. It does not need to be big to create dissonance. People feel powerless to influence change. New hires notice silos, tension and inefficiencies and begin questioning why they’re tolerated. The impact is disempowerment early in their employment.
Leaders, ask this: Who is actually responsible for stepping back and evaluating cultural patterns – and what has been cleared off their plate to make that possible?
Why #3: Why isn’t that space or structure protected?
Because current systems reinforce behavior – even when no one names it.
Being “rewarded” doesn’t always look like praise or promotion. More often, it looks like avoiding disruption, keeping the peace, maintaining proximity to power or not initiating complex formal processes.
Silence functions as reinforcement, therefore what isn’t named is implicitly allowed.
What isn’t interrupted becomes conditioned to continue.
Leaders may address smaller, manageable issues while avoiding deeper patterns that feel riskier to surface. Over time, avoidance becomes an unspoken agreement – and that agreement trains behavior.
Your staff sees this. New hires arrive curious and motivated, eager to contribute and ask thoughtful questions. Over time, new hires learn what can’t be questioned. When something doesn’t make sense and they ask why, the answer is familiar: “This is how it’s always been.”
The human impact: People hesitate to speak up, weighing the risk of disapproval or disconnection. High performers quietly redirect their energy toward execution rather than insight.
Leaders, ask this: What behaviors continue in your organization simply because no one has explicitly said no, but that are silently eroding the morale of your workforce?
Why #4: Why does avoidance feel safer than intervention?
Because taking action on a systemic scale carries immediate and unplanned weight and cost.
In the public sector, naming cultural issues can trigger immediate rumors and narratives, documentation requirements, due process, legal review and extended project timelines. In the private sector, intervention often initiates verbal warnings, written warnings and possible termination – all of which require time and targeted resolve. In both sectors it requires sustained leadership attention at all levels.
Leaders learn that waiting feels safer than acting – especially when unhealthy culture or problematic behavior is longstanding, protected by internal politics or embedded in informal alliances.
Over time, systems continue to reinforce themselves, within a deeper level of networking and smaller alliances that aren’t visible. Favors might be granted to keep others silent, overtime might be approved as a reinforcing gesture for people to keep silent. And silos continue to grow with narratives that support their perceptions. There may be multiple reciprocal benefits that are sustaining the system.
The cliques and dynamics in a workplace are human. And because humans are the product of their experiences, those attitudes and social engagement styles now come to work and become one of the drivers behind job performance and collegial relationships. This type of dynamic has inertia and habits are hard to break. This kind of patterned dynamic resists correction.
The human impact: Conversations move underground. Silos strengthen. Silence becomes a survival strategy, not a lack of care. People assume leaders either know and allow it or know more than they’re saying. People are hoping someone will fix it.
Leaders, ask this: What dynamics thrive as a component of your department or teams’ responsibilities rather than being addressed – and what are those dynamics that quietly cost the organization in time, errors, and accumulating financial impact.
More importantly, which dynamics are impacting your leadership credibility?
Why #5: Why has this become the expensive norm?
Taking action forces leaders to engage with the full scope of the issue immediately – and that is rarely a convenient time. So it gets deferred.
Because culture as a project keeps getting deferred, the damage doesn’t explode – it leaks.
Cultural erosion shows up slowly – in morale loss, disengagement, fractured teamwork and disheartened new staff. Turnover, a leader’s common fear, often comes from the high performers you most want to keep. Avoidance, meanwhile, produces short-term relief: fewer conflicts, fewer escalations and fewer uncomfortable conversations.
Over time, organizations normalize the culture system, silos and culture saboteurs.
That moment is deeply disempowering. It teaches people to doubt what they see – and eventually, to stop speaking up altogether.
The human impact: Trust becomes uncertain. People speak less in meetings, protect themselves and quietly disengage. Leaders are often the last ones to feel this erosion, because it now becomes visible across settings in the workplace.
Leaders, ask this: What has your organization learned to tolerate because addressing it now feels too costly – in time, energy or disruption?
A Necessary Truth
Not all leaders prioritize culture. Some focus almost exclusively on productivity, output, and the bottom line they were hired to produce. When leadership continues to defer an unhealthy subculture, the message of indifference carries forward. Your workforce knows. People adapt. Silence grows. Frustration accumulates.
Culture always reflects what leadership consistently values, whether stated or not.
This isn’t judgment. It’s the engine of patterned behavior that exists in most organizations at some level. It is lived experience and observation from which I share this post.
What This Is – and What It Isn’t
This is not a call to try harder or care more. It’s an acknowledgment that culture is shaped by systems, incentives, long-standing avoidance patterns and human dynamics – long before it becomes a people problem.
Meaningful change usually requires protected leadership attention from multiple leaders aligned around shared timing and direction. It requires a larger plan to manage retention risk and make probation decisions early, when warning signs appear. It requires clear ownership, neutral evaluation, consistent standards with visible oversight and a clear message to all staff that it is safe to speak up.
That work takes time.
That work takes resources and planning.
It requires a leadership decision that the cost of an unhealthy culture is worth the cost of a larger system shift.
When you choose not to make change, you are choosing to accept the current conditions.
Tip: Questions worth sitting with
Where are we addressing symptoms instead of patterns?
What behaviors continue because they haven’t been explicitly named?
When did you last plan a team training to address what was actually a deeper cultural problem?
What does silence reward in our system?
Who benefits from keeping things as they are?
What would addressing a true culture shift actually cost – and what is deferring it already costing us?
Possibly the most important question is this:
What step will you take first?
Consider this:
If this misses the mark, or if you think something important is missing, I welcome you to email me directly. I read every message.
Leading forward,
Michelle
Bridging The Gap - where insight leads to impact.
A monthly reminder that thinking requires space.
January 2026
Welcome to Cognitive White Space
I invite you to this new space to consider how you prioritize your think time.
Like many high-achieving leaders, I am skilled at managing multiple projects at once. I know how to pack a calendar, stack responsibilities and keep things moving. What I didn’t always protect was the space required to think – real thinking, without constant cognitive consumption.
Over time, I’ve learned that thinking space, reflective space and incubation space is not an option. It needs to be calendared and protected! It’s where integration happens. It’s where thoughts have room to expand, where decisions improve and where judgment sharpens. The return on that investment has far exceeded what I once imagined.
Cognitive White Space reflects my ongoing commitment to thoughtful, grounded leadership – and a conviction I hold firmly: real think time is not a luxury.
This is a strategic, deliberate practice that expands a leader’s capacity, improves judgment and sharpens clarity.
Each month, I’ll invite you to consider how you are creating and protecting space for your thoughts to integrate and align – not to do less, but to think better before doing more.
Cognitive White Space: It Already Exists – We Just Don’t Protect It
Most leaders don’t have a thinking problem. They have a thinking space problem. Across neuroscience, strategy and elite performance research, there is broad agreement on one thing: the human brain requires protected, low-input space to integrate information, recognize patterns and solve complex problems well. Neuroscience has shown that some of our most important cognitive work happens not when we are actively consuming information, but when the brain shifts into integrative modes that allow ideas to connect beneath conscious effort. In other words, insight doesn’t come from adding more data. It comes from allowing what’s already present to settle.
Harvard Business Review has consistently reinforced this idea in leadership research, noting that effective leaders deliberately create space for reflective thinking rather than operating in constant execution mode (Harvard Business Review, January–February 2014). This kind of thinking isn’t passive. It’s strategic. It’s where judgment sharpens, perspective widens and decisions move beyond reaction into discernment. The pause between inputs is where patterns surface, intuition strengthens and clarity forms. What’s missing isn’t evidence. What’s missing is practice.
Why Leaders Still Don’t Do It
Most organizational cultures quietly reward speed over synthesis and output over insight. Think time that doesn’t visibly look productive is often treated as indulgent. If there’s no meeting, no email and no immediate artifact to show for it, it’s easy to assume it isn’t real work. I know you think this way about yourself also. We are conditioned to in a fast paced modern world.
The absence of Cognitive White Space shows up later as poor decisions, shallow alignment, reactive leadership and burnout disguised as efficiency.
The cost isn’t felt immediately. It appears downstream, when clarity thins, decisions wobble and leaders feel inexplicably exhausted despite constant motion.
A Simple Invitation
Before the week fills up, ask yourself where you have protected your think time – or have you?
Notice what happens when you remove input instead of adding more. Consider which decisions might improve if you slowed down just enough to let insight catch up. This is Cognitive White Space. Not optional. Not fluffy. Foundational.
My suggestion is that you pause – right now – and open your calendar. Add a “Block”, “Private” or other notation in that spot. Do it now! Carve out time to make your own Cognitive White Space a priority.
Because The Heart Of Every Great Organization Still Beats Human.™
-Michelle Ogle, Bridge Executive Coaching
ADVANCED COACHING PROGRAM
Leadership Under Pressure
• Managing conflict with composure
•Think clearly and effectively under pressure
• Create meaningful impact with any message
• Respond with calm in complex environments.
Reduce the Noise. Restore Internal Authority.
A facilitated conversation leaders can offer their teams to help them cut through distraction, trust their judgment, and collaborate more effectively under pressure.
No culture slogans.
No fixing people.
No selling.
Just a grounded, human conversation that makes work feel lighter and clearer again.
Curious if this would help your team right now?
Michelle C. Ogle, M.A., Executive Coach, Organizational Consultant
Michelle brings a fresh perspective to human-centered focus, behavioral insights for leadership, and deep expertise in business relationships to help leaders build trust, align teams and create cultures that thrive.
Because The Heart Of Every Great Organization Still Beats Human.™
-Michelle Ogle, Bridge Executive Coaching