In a world where cultural change is too often attempted through metrics, off-the-shelf tools, and superficial symbols, Dr. Josie McLean offers a refreshing and deeply human counterpoint. As the author of Purposeful Cultures and Big Little Shifts: A Practitioner’s Guide to Complexity for Organisational Change and Adaptation, Dr. McLean brings over two decades of hands-on experience shaping leadership and culture across sectors, blue chip companies, government, education, and regenerative businesses alike.
In a recent conversation with guest host Michelle Bloom for the Menzies Leadership Foundation’s Leadership: Cultivating Organisational Cultures for the Greater Good podcast, Dr. McLean opened up about why culture can’t truly be measured and why the effort to do so might be missing the point entirely.
Culture Begins with Context
Dr. McLean’s journey into complexity and culture was sparked by a moment of unexpected insight during a conversation with coaching legend Sir John Whitmore. “There’ll be wars over water one day,” he said offhandedly. In that moment, McLean saw clearly that humanity was veering off course and that leadership held the potential to shift our trajectory. Initially believing the answer lay in transforming the worldview of CEOs, she soon realised the limitations of this top-down approach. “Culture has more influence on leaders than they often have on it,” she said. “We’re working within deep social and environmental systems, not just organisations.”
Measuring Culture: The Wrong Question?
While many organisations turn to culture surveys and diagnostic tools, McLean is deeply sceptical. “We’re often just measuring artifacts,” she says, referencing Edgar Schein’s three levels of culture— artifacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions. “These tools give us surface-level indicators, but culture is what’s invisible. It’s the fabric of unconscious assumptions that influence everything.” She offers a telling anecdote from a recent workshop where an organisation surprised her by returning a detailed spreadsheet of responses to questions intended for open dialogue. “That told me more about their culture than any survey could. It’s just how they do things around here, structured, pre-emptive, and transactional.”
Cultural Archeology Over Cultural Metrics
Rather than relying on metrics, McLean advocates for a method she jokingly calls “cultural archaeology.” That is: exploring context, relationships, language, power dynamics, and history to better understand an organisation’s inner life. “When we join a new organisation, we instinctively look for how to belong,” she explains. “We start asking: How do I fit in here? And the answers come through subtle cues, not written rules.” To better sense culture, McLean suggests talking with newcomers, those still able to see what others have unconsciously absorbed.
The Danger of Measuring the Wrong Things
McLean warns that measurement, when misapplied, can actively distort culture. In one organisation she worked with, a culture survey tool became so performative that teams began “gaming” it to produce the desired results, simply to avoid the arduous “improvement workshops” that followed negative scores. “It wasn’t malicious,” she says. “But people knew what would please the CEO, and over time, that distorted the feedback loop. The measurement tool became performative, not informative.”
An Evolving System, Not a Static Target
To Dr. McLean, culture is not something that can be defined and fixed. It’s a living, evolving system, constantly adapting to its external environment and internal needs. Her approach is to guide organisations into a process of discovery, often through bespoke leadership development programs that invite reflection, conversation, and connection across the system. She describes a typical engagement starting with deep listening at the executive level, followed by codesigned leadership programs tailored to the lived experience of staff. Crucially, her programs attract the “willing”, early adopters ready to engage, rather than volunteers coerced into attendance.
Creating the Conditions for Change
“We’re not looking to define the ideal culture,” McLean explains. “We’re helping people learn how to influence the direction of their culture by building agency, connection, and shared meaning.” She draws on the words of Margaret Wheatley, seeking to “let the system hear itself” through crossboundary dialogue and shared learning. Her workshops emphasise the power of conversation—not content, to catalyse change. And yet, even conversation must be carefully held. “With younger generations, I’m seeing a growing fear of being judged, even among close friends. If we can’t have simple honest conversations about food preferences without fear, how can we talk about real systemic issues like race, climate, or injustice?”
“We’re not looking to define the ideal culture,” McLean explains. “We’re helping people learn how to influence the direction of their culture by building agency, connection, and shared meaning.”
From Alignment to Connection
In closing, Dr. McLean reframes a common corporate mantra: aligning staff behind purpose and values. Instead, she suggests something more nuanced. “What if we asked: How can your personal purpose connect with this organisation’s purpose? How do your values intersect with ours?”
This approach, she believes, is more liberating and effective, inviting genuine commitment rather than performative compliance.
Dr. Josie McLean’s work is a reminder that culture is less about dashboards and more about dialogue. It’s not static, it’s not easily quantified and it certainly doesn’t live on the wall in the values statement. True cultural work invites people to connect, reflect, and evolve together.
As McLean says, “Culture is shaped by everyone in the system. If we want it to be different, we all have to contribute to that change.”
Originally interviewed for:
Podcast Series: Leadership: Cultivating Organisational Cultures for the Greater Good
Episode Guest: Dr. Josie McLean
Host: Michelle Bloom
Presented by: Menzies Leadership Forum
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, we recognise that culture is not a set of values pinned to a wall, nor a number on a dashboard — it is an ever-evolving system shaped by context, conversation, and collective meaning.
In a world quick to quantify and standardise, we champion a slower, more human approach. One that values connection over compliance, reflection over reaction, and depth over display.
Through leaders like Dr. Josie McLean, we are reminded that cultural transformation begins not with control, but with curiosity — and the courage to listen differently.
We invite you to reimagine what it means to lead cultural change — not from the top, but from within.
