Culture as Soilwhy values fail without capability consequences

In early 2019, a year before Covid-19 hit hard, the design team I was handed had been assembled the week I arrived: designers moved sideways from marketing, from customer experience, from digital product, a couple from IT infrastructure who had built the company’s internal monitoring dashboards. Some on-site, some off-shore, working together for the first time, with a brief to become one cross-functional team serving the whole company. Many of them were good colleagues, disciplined, conscientious, easy to work with. Several could not yet say why one layout was right and another wrong, or keep an artefact organised enough for someone else to build from. They had brought real character to the team. Whether they also had the design capability the work needed was a separate question, and no one had asked it before moving them.

That gap is not unique to a team assembled by transfer. A team can choose its values deliberately and still never check whether they produce the capability the work needs, and the space between the two is where teams drift without knowing it.

Most design teams, at some point, have run some version of this exercise. Five or six words end up on a wall or in a deck: Curious, Collaborative, Craft-driven, User-centred, Bold. They are ratified in a workshop, reinforced in onboarding, referenced at offsites and in performance reviews. Six quarters later the values stay declared but unused, and the team’s output is no more Curious or Collaborative than before. Nothing observable has changed.