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Why Your Million-Dollar Culture Change Failed
(And Your Behavioural Immune System Won)

August 18, 2025 · Work/Shift Insights Issue #13 · Topic: Workplace Culture · Audience: Exec

By Frederic Libet Descorne

Walk through enough corporate headquarters and you will start to see a pattern. The million-dollar “collaboration hub” that echoes like an empty train station. The innovation lab where the most innovative thing happening is the weekly biscuit roster. The wellness rooms that became stationery cupboards before the paint had dried. The “town hall” space no one uses, except for the annual flu shot program.

It is not that your people are ungrateful. It is that your shiny new workplace just triggered something you did not budget for: your organisation’s behavioural immune system.

The invisible system that kills change

Every organisation has an immune system, invisible on floor plans but highly effective at rejecting anything “foreign,” including your culture change initiatives. It is not malicious. It is natural. People defend familiar ways of working because it is how they succeed and get rewarded.

This is why the fitout that was meant to “revolutionise collaboration” ends up reinforcing the old culture. If it rewards the same behaviours you were trying to shift, it will fail. Most immunity failures become obvious within three to four months of moving in.

“Most immunity failures become obvious within three to four months of moving in.”

The three stages of expensive failure

1. The Seduction Phase
Glossy renders. Benchmark tours to the offices of companies you secretly envy. Design thinking workshops that feel like progress. Leaders fall in love with how it could look, not how it will actually work.

2. The Investment Phase
Budgets approved. Contractors mobilised. Internal comms in overdrive. Excitement builds. Everyone is talking about “when the new space opens…” as if a change in postal code will rewire the organisation.

3. The Reality Phase
The ribbon gets cut. The immune system kicks in. People gravitate back to old behaviours because those behaviours are still what the system rewards. Collaboration zones sit empty. Private offices remain booked solid. Leadership starts muttering about “change fatigue” and blaming furniture — and this is where most organisations make their second mistake. They reach for more design tweaks instead of fixing the system that is resisting change.

If you have been here before, you know the signs. The new space still smells of fresh paint, but the old habits are already back. Without understanding what is driving those patterns, every redesign is just a very expensive reset button. That is why, before changing anything physical, we start by diagnosing what is happening in the behavioural immune system.

Stop treating symptoms, start rewiring systems

At Work/Shift, we start by diagnosing the behavioural immune system before touching a single wall. We use CultureFit360™ to map how work actually happens, pinpoint the “reward loops” that lock in old habits, and surface the friction points that quietly drain performance.

In one recent diagnostic, CultureFit360™ revealed a decision architecture problem: significant project approvals were perceived to bottleneck with a small leadership group, slowing delivery and constraining autonomy. Heatmap analysis also showed that while informal, cross-team collaboration was strong, it often failed to carry into formal projects due to unclear ownership handovers.

With those insights, the client introduced clearer decision thresholds for team-level autonomy and a simple co-owner model for multi-team projects.

“The result: approval turnaround times improved by 27 per cent, multi-team projects were 40 per cent more likely to move from planning into delivery within eight weeks, and collaboration space use tripled in three months.”

What a healthy immune system feels like

In a workplace where the behavioural immune system is aligned with the culture you want, the space does not have to work against the people. It works with them.
You see meetings happening in open zones without them being mandated.
You hear decisions made in hours, not weeks.
You feel the energy of a system where recognition, promotion, and influence flow toward the behaviours that create value, not the ones that protect turf.

Healthy organisations still have immune systems. The difference? They defend the right things.

The immunity audit

Before you sign that next fitout budget, run this in your very next leadership meeting:

• Expose your slowest “yes” – trace a recent decision from request to approval and count every handoff and delay.
• Spot where effort beats results – identify where people are rewarded for looking busy rather than delivering impact.
• Spot the silent vetoes – identify where the system rejected the very behaviours leadership claims to value.

“Your people are not the problem. Your reward system is.”

The real question

Your people are not the problem. Your reward system is.
Ready to stop fighting your organisation’s immune system and start rewiring it? Work/Shift can show you exactly where to begin.