If your leadership team defines culture by your values statement, engagement scores, or what you wish were true — you don’t know your culture.

You’re describing your aspirations.

In this episode, Bob ’n Joyce challenge leaders and OD practitioners to stop treating culture like a slogan and start treating it like a system.

Using a disciplined lateral thinking methodology, they show how to uncover what really drives behavior — the unwritten rules, the workarounds, the quiet power dynamics, and the habits that get rewarded and repeated. Not the culture on the wall. The culture in motion.

Why does this matter? Because culture determines how decisions actually get made. It shapes who advances, what gets funded, what gets tolerated, and what quietly dies.

Strategy doesn’t fail because it’s flawed.
It fails because culture wins.

Lateral thinking offers an indirect, disruptive way to see your organization as it actually operates — not as you’ve convinced yourself it does. And once you can see it clearly, you can lead it intentionally.

Because whether you define it or not, your culture is defining you.

If you’re in OD or a leadership role, chances are your 2026 priorities already look familiar—and that might be the problem.

In this episode, Bob and Joyce unpack what a group of seasoned OD practitioners believe must be at the center of OD and leadership attention in the year ahead. Some of the themes will feel like the usual suspects. Others—especially the growing influence of AI—push against comfortable assumptions about how OD creates value.

Rather than offering a tidy checklist, this conversation invites a harder look. Where is your organization genuinely making progress—and where are you telling yourselves a reassuring story? As you listen, you’re encouraged to ask a deceptively simple question: What are we actually focused on, and why?

While OD has evolved in tools, language, and scope, its core mission hasn’t changed: sustaining the health of the organization as a living system. The real challenge for OD leaders today isn’t knowing everything that matters—it’s deciding what matters most given the realities you’re facing.

To ground the conversation, Joyce shares how a leadership development program she created at Delhaize—Leadership College—directly addressed all six focus areas discussed in the episode, offering a concrete example of what intentional, system-level OD can look like in practice.

Come on in. Grab a snack. Welcome!