Adaptable Enough Corporate Culture: You May Be Surprised

Organizational Agility — Do You Have an Adaptable Enough Corporate Culture?
A company with a well-defined purpose and direction is easy to admire, yet purpose alone rarely guarantees longevity. In environments where markets shift quickly and competitive cycles shorten, organizations without cultural adaptability can find themselves boxed in by their own past success. The real test is whether your corporate culture can stretch, adjust, and rethink fast enough to stay relevant when conditions change.

Kodak Offers a Cautionary Tale
Its fall wasn’t due to a lack of intelligence or work ethic.  If we had assessed their organizational culture at the time, our hunch is that the company’s demise stemmed from a cultural overreliance on historical wins and groupthink. Research by Tripsas & Gavetti on organizational inertia shows that success breeds cognitive rigidity, making leaders less likely to detect threats or embrace emerging paradigms.

That dynamic played out inside Kodak. Deep alignment around a familiar narrative created powerful blind spots. Challenging the prevailing logic felt unnecessary, even risky.  With a more adaptive culture — one that encouraged dissent, experimentation, and proactive scenario testing — the company might have recognized digital disruption as an opportunity rather than a threat.

What Constitutes an Adaptable Enough Corporate Culture?
Our organizational alignment research found that corporate culture — how work truly gets done — accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of:

• Growing revenue.
• Being profitable.
• Retaining and satisfying customers.
• Leading teams.
• Engaging and retaining employees.

How people think, behave, and work shapes everything that follows. No matter how compelling a transformation strategy looks on paper, it will fail if it doesn’t address the underlying mindsets, beliefs, and everyday business practices that drive organizational behavior. Sustainable culture change begins with shifting how people interpret their environment, make decisions, and interact with one another — the core levers that determine whether new ways of working actually take root.

Adaptable vs. Unadaptable Cultures
An adaptable organizational culture is one that stays open to reexamining assumptions, experimenting with improved approaches, and adjusting behaviors as conditions evolve. It’s a culture where people are willing to stretch beyond familiar patterns in service of better outcomes. By contrast, an unadaptable culture is marked by rigidity — leaders and employees who resist new ideas, default to old habits, and protect the status quo even when it no longer serves the organization. Such environments struggle to evolve because the very people responsible for progress are closed off to it.

Three Factors to Create an Adaptable Enough Corporate Culture
When you are thinking about whether or not your culture is adaptable enough, consider three factors that determine levels of cultural flexibility from our change management consulting experts:

1. A Readiness to Create Change
   Our change management simulation data shows a clear pattern: high-performing organizations don’t wait for disruption to force their hand. They continuously search for better methods, welcome unconventional ideas, and treat experimentation as part of the daily workflow. For them, creating change isn’t a special initiative — it’s embedded in how they operate.
   
   Building a more flexible corporate culture starts with reframing how your workforce interprets change. Instead of viewing it as a threat to stability, you want leaders and teams who approach proposed shifts with curiosity, informed judgment, and a clear understanding of why the change matters. When people grasp the logic behind new directions, their resistance decreases and their willingness to contribute increases.
   
   Leadership plays a decisive role here. Those impacted by change must be genuinely involved in shaping the change vision, stress-testing the strategy, and designing a plan that aligns with their realities. Skipping this step almost guarantees shallow buy-in. Without meaningful engagement, even well-intentioned efforts stall because the people responsible for executing the change never fully owned it.
   
   So ask yourself: how ready is your organization to create the change it says it wants?
   
   
2. An Intense Focus on the Customer
   Customer focus is one of the most powerful levers for driving meaningful culture change. When employees truly understand the importance of serving both internal and external customers, they naturally seek new ways to enhance experiences, solve problems, and exceed expectations. A culture rooted in customer awareness aligns effort, innovation, and accountability around what ultimately matters: delivering value.
   
   Practical steps to deepen a customer-centric culture include:
   
   
   • • Developing customer personas to give employees insight into both known and latent customer needs.
     • Showcasing customer stories and testimonials to make the impact of your products or services tangible and memorable.
     • Creating immersive experiences where employees “walk a mile in the customer’s shoes” and gather stories that are shared across teams.
     • Recognizing exceptional customer-centric behavior through formal recognition programs, tying reward to genuine impact on customer satisfaction.
     • Starting meetings with a customer story or insight, reinforcing that every decision ultimately affects someone else.
     • Engaging leadership with key accounts, including annual CEO visits to discuss relationships, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.
     • Tracking satisfaction rigorously and ensuring teams take visible corrective actions when performance falls below expectations.

   A workplace that consistently reinforces these behaviors builds employees’ empathy, accountability, and commitment to the customer experience. When customer focus becomes a natural part of decision-making, innovation and service improvements follow organically.
   
   How deeply customer-focused is your culture?

3. Continuous Learning
   A culture of continuous learning thrives on curiosity, reflection, and thoughtful risk-taking. In such organizations, mistakes are not immediately framed as failures to punish but as opportunities to gain insight. The guiding question is not “Who is to blame?” but “What can we learn from this?” This mindset creates the foundation for adaptability, innovation, and sustained performance.
   
   To be truly adaptable, organizations must embrace diverse ways of thinking, actively share knowledge, and deliberately set aside time for learning and experimentation. Companies that prioritize continuous learning consistently take deliberate actions, including:
   
   
   • • Hiring for diversity of experience, bringing in talent whose perspectives challenge existing assumptions and broaden organizational thinking.
     • Sending employees into the field to observe products and services in real-world use, feeding insights back to sales, marketing, product, and engineering teams.
     • Encouraging cross-functional knowledge sharing and recognizing employees who contribute valuable insights.
     • Conducting project postmortems to capture lessons learned and translate them into actionable improvements.
     • Investing in Action Learning Leadership Development programs to equip both front-line and executive leaders with the skills, confidence, and mindset to learn, pivot, and adapt.
     • Allocating protected time for learning and innovation, embedding continuous development as a core expectation of every role rather than an optional activity.

   Organizations that embed continuous learning into their DNA not only respond more effectively to change but also anticipate it, creating a culture where employees are engaged, curious, and empowered to drive progress.
   
   Are you a continuous learning organization?

The Bottom Line
Kodak’s story is a cautionary reminder: clinging too tightly to a single direction can quietly erode your relevance. To thrive amid constant disruption, your organization must weave adaptability into its culture. Embrace flexibility, encourage experimentation, and foster a mindset that views change not as a threat but as a catalyst for growth.

To learn more about have an adaptable enough corporate culture, download The 3 Levels of Culture that Leaders Must Get Right to Adapt