Culture Outruns Code
Rebuilding Trust in a High-Velocity Year
As 2025 comes to a close, one truth has echoed across leadership teams: Leaders made the hard calls this year.
The AI bets.
The restructures.
The relentless demands for speed.
But no one can automate their way out of misalignment.
Culture lagged.
Trust wobbled.
And many teams paid the cost.
From boardrooms to breakout rooms, executives were pushed to their edge, forced to reconcile innovation with integrity, and efficiency with empathy.
For those who coach, consult, or guide organizational transformation, this moment presents both a challenge and an opportunity: to help leaders pause, reflect, and repair.
What 2025 Revealed (and Why It Matters)
Across industries, culture stress fractures emerged, often in the wake of bold shifts in structure, technology, or direction. The gaps became visible and costly.
At SAP, following its sweeping restructuring, the company faced a sharp decline in employee trust. Internal surveys revealed only 59% of staff still trusted leadership, a marked drop that rattled morale and transparency.
CIO
Intel, once revered for its engineering-first ethos, is now battling a fading internal culture. Employees report that, amid leadership changes and performance struggles, the collaborative and purpose-driven DNA of the company has “fallen apart.”
Fortune
At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy made headlines when he said the company’s 14,000 job cuts weren’t due to AI or economics but instead proclaimed,“it’s about culture.” Many interpreted this as a reframing tactic. For employees, it felt like trust was traded for spin.
Economic Times
When speed outpaced communication, trust eroded in the silence. Questions went unanswered. Uncertainty spread. Teams filled in the blanks with fear instead of clarity.
When AI was introduced faster than culture could catch up, people didn’t just feel overwhelmed—they felt devalued. Roles changed without explanation. Contributions lost meaning. Connection was replaced by confusion.
And when restructures landed without narrative alignment, the purpose behind the change got lost. Decisions felt arbitrary. Loyalty gave way to cynicism
In every case, the cost wasn’t just emotional, it was operational. Engagement dropped. Resistance rose. Progress stalled in places where momentum had been promised.
Velocity without values creates a vacuum. And into that vacuum rushes fear, mistrust, and disengagement.
Why Narrative Intelligence Matters Now
Narrative Intelligence is the ability to recognize, shape, and align the stories that drive people, teams, and strategy. It has never been more essential.
2025 made the cost of narrative breakdown painfully clear.
When people don’t understand the “why,” they can’t connect the dots between their work and the mission. Goals feel imposed, not inspired. Strategy becomes something that happens to them, not with them and that disconnection slows everything down.
When they don’t see themselves reflected in the organizational story, they disengage. They hesitate. They quietly pull back. Resistance isn’t always loud. But it’s powerful. And it’s often rooted in exclusion from the narrative.
And when culture is only spoken, not lived, it becomes corporate wallpaper; visible, branded, but hollow. It loses credibility. People stop believing the words and start watching the behaviors.
Because culture, when real, is a series of daily decisions, felt experiences. Employees know it when they feel it.
This is where practitioners can make a lasting impact.
CultureTalk equips leaders and teams with Archetypes—a shared, story-based language to make sense of behavior, values, and motivation. And it scales across all levels:
- Me → Personal insight and self-leadership
- We → Team alignment, empathy, and collaboration
- Us → Cultural cohesion and brand authenticity
With this foundation, organizations don’t just roll out initiatives. They do it in a way that ensures alignment and builds commitment to change.
A 2026 Readiness Checklist (For Brave Leaders)
If your clients or leaders are planning for Q1, here are five powerful questions to bring into conversations:
Where did velocity override values this year?
Be honest about the trade-offs and unspoken impacts.
What are people really feeling?
Beyond surveys, what truths are hiding in ‘story points’ like turnover, silence, or side Slack channels?
Where are stated values not matching lived experience?
Culture is proven in the pressure moments, not the posters.
Are teams creating psychological safety in real-time conversations?
Can people speak truth to power without penalty?
Has the culture narrative been revisited lately?
If not, it’s time to go back to the baseline story.
A Culture Audit Starts With a Story
In this recent guide, we shared why culture so often feels “intangible”—until the right framework and language brings it into focus.
That’s what Archetypes do: they give shape to the unseen dynamics that shape trust, collaboration, and leadership.
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Your job as a leader is to move culture from the heads of executives to the hearts of the team.
For coaches and consultants, the opportunity is to name the tension before it becomes a breakdown and to introduce a narrative framework that builds clarity, accountability, and momentum.
Final Reflections + Next Steps for 2026
Culture isn’t what’s written on the walls.
It’s how people experience decisions, relationships, and leadership every day.
As 2026 approaches, now is the time to shift from reflection to action. For consultants, coaches, and practitioners, that means helping clients:
➀ Initiate honest conversations
Encourage leadership teams to name where culture and decisions have diverged. Use Archetypes to guide discussions around misalignment and missed expectations.
➁ Conduct a baseline culture audit
Before setting new goals, help clients understand where trust stands today—through surveys, focus groups, or guided storytelling workshops.
➂ Revisit and refine the culture narrative
Ensure that the organizational story is relevant, resonant, and real.
➃ Embed psychological safety in leadership rituals
Coach leaders to integrate safety checks into meetings, planning sessions, and performance reviews so teams can speak honestly without risk.
➄ Use the Me–We–Us framework to design alignment strategies
Guide teams to connect individual insights (Me), improve collaboration (We), and reinforce purpose at the organizational level (Us). This turns culture from a concept into a structure for sustainable change.
January Invitation
If you’re working with a client or leader who needs to realign or repair trust in 2026, consider starting with a Culture Audit or Team Storytelling Workshop.
Book a time to talk and we’ll share the proven tools that have helped hundreds of leaders and consultants bring clarity, cohesion, and culture back into focus.
Here’s to a grounded, strategic, and human-centered 2026.
