Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast… Unless Generative AI Eats Culture First
There’s a famous saying in business: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s a reminder that no matter how smart your plan is, if your people, processes, and values don’t line up, that plan is going nowhere.
But now there’s a new player at the table….. Generative AI.
And it’s not just disrupting workflows or supercharging productivity—it’s poking holes in the very fabric of how organizations operate, communicate, and make decisions. In other words, GenAI isn’t just another tool. It’s a culture event.
Traditionally, the culture-strategy dynamic is a slow burn. You roll out a new initiative, and culture either carries it or kills it. Leaders get this—often the hard way. That’s why transformation efforts stall not at the whiteboard, but in the meeting rooms where real humans have real feelings about change.
But here’s the twist with GenAI:
It doesn’t wait for your culture to catch up. It moves fast. It enables individuals. It skips process. It rewrites the rules. You might have a beautiful strategy doc. You might have values plastered on walls. But if your culture isn’t prepared for what GenAI unlocks—it will be bypassed, routed around, or quietly eaten from the inside out.
Signals That GenAI is Outpacing Your Culture
GenAI Use Is Happening Quietly: People are experimenting—but they’re doing it in secret. That’s not innovation. That’s fear of saying the wrong thing.
Policy Is a Roadblock, Not a Runway: If your AI governance slows everything to a crawl, people will go around it. Control without enablement breeds resistance.
Curiosity Lives at the Edges, Not the Center: The most interesting work is happening in rogue teams, side projects, or individual hacks—not in formal initiatives.
Middle Managers Are MIA: The layer that should be enabling change is either silent or stuck. If they aren’t actively coaching and supporting AI use, they’re quietly hoping it goes away.
There’s a Culture of "Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission": That might sound scrappy and entrepreneurial, but it’s also a sign that your systems aren’t supporting innovation—they’re suffocating it.
Teams can’t point to the vision: Most employees can’t articulate how AI connects to the firm’s broader strategy—or even what success looks like. That’s not a communication gap, it’s a leadership one. Without a clear, compelling vision for AI, experimentation becomes disjointed, adoption stalls, and the skeptics win by default.
So… What Do You Do About It?
Reward Experiments—Not Just Outcomes: Encourage initiative over perfection. People need to know that trying, learning, and sharing wins or misses is valued more than sticking to safe bets.
Build Fluency—Not Fear: Invest in education at every level, from frontline staff to senior leaders. Confidence comes from understanding, not mandates.
Train Leaders to Ask Better Questions: Equip leaders to spark exploration—not just approve plans. Curiosity is more scalable than control in a GenAI world.
Make the Invisible Visible: Map where GenAI is already being used—quietly or informally. Share stories, not audits. Treat grassroots innovation as a signal, not a problem.
Empower the Edge: Push decision-making and experimentation to the teams closest to the work. Give them tools, light-touch guidelines, and real trust.
Create Safe Containers for Discomfort: Adoption is as emotional as it is operational. Create space to talk about fear, identity, and job disruption. Change sticks when people feel seen.
Culture Still Wins. But It Has to Evolve.
Generative AI doesn’t eliminate the importance of culture. If anything, it raises the stakes.
Because in this new reality, the best strategy still loses to culture… as long as your culture is brave enough to evolve.
Reach out to discuss the impact genAI has on company culture and how to embrace change to achieve the value of genAI.
