Ignite your culture with hotspots

Employees will also understand why the hotspot is so representative of your culture. Ask them, and they will tell you which values, beliefs, and desired behaviours the hotspot expresses – whether it was carefully designed to create that experience or gained significance organically over time.

The ‘noticeability’ of hotspots not only helps us understand our culture – it also makes them particularly influential. Hotspots stand out because they shape behaviours more than other aspects of culture. As such, hotspots serve both as an analytical lens to understand ‘how we do things around here’ and as a lever to shape those behaviours. In short, hotspots are clarity and influence.

Think of cultural hotspots as a magnifying glass: they bring clarity through focus. Direct sunlight through the magnifying glass, and it becomes a burning glass. Leveraging your hotspots means understanding your culture and channelling its energy to ignite change. So, take out your magnifying glass – it is time to identify and fire up your hotspots.

Hotspot impact

So, what makes hotspots powerful cultivation mechanisms rather than just quirky cultural traits? To understand this, we need to turn to both classical anthropology and cutting-edge behavioural science.

All cultures have symbols, rituals, sacred objects, and collective, choreographed events. Some of these directly or indirectly express the values of the culture, while others have lost their original purpose yet continue to shape group behaviour through tradition.

These manifestations are shared across cultures for a reason. Even if culture is the result of human interaction, it is at the same time regulating behaviour in a two-way causality. We create our culture through interaction, and our culture influences us back. What we do often becomes a norm (the ‘normal’ thing to do) that starts regulating our behaviour. Sometimes, we name these norms and call them our values.

Coordinated behaviour is known to increase sympathy and trust among groups. This brings the group together, improving collaboration and the willingness to stand with the group even in adversity. Whether it is cheering for your team with other fans, dancing, marching, or singing together, it neurologically synchronises our breathing and brains, boosting cohesion as one ‘superorganism’. Even in less synchronised forms, cultural hotspots help sustain the norms and beliefs of our in-group.

According to contemporary organisational theory, inspired by biology, cultures are emergent phenomena that arise in complex adaptive systems. These cultures help coordinate processes within the system to maintain its stability. Just as your body coordinates processes across cells, organs, symbiotic bacteria in our gut and on our skin (and even artefacts like pacemakers) to stay alive, any culture coordinates the processes critical for its existence and adapts to changing environments.

For organisational culture, this means shared values, assumptions, and norms that increase predictability and trust among its members, improving coordination and fostering collaboration. It saves us mental energy by enhancing the predictability of our colleagues’ behaviour, allowing us to bypass explicit instructions for coordination by simply mimicking behaviour within ‘our tribe’. In essence, culture preserves the organisation by regulating energy and ensuring ongoing adaptability.

In this understanding, cultural hotspots help us calibrate beliefs, norms, behaviour, and assumptions to improve trust, coordination, and smoothen collaboration – if done right. Like acupuncture, which regulates neural activity and energy flow beyond the pinpoint of the needle.

Hotspot nature and structure

Hotspots share key characteristics that can be summarised in the Cultural Hotspot Equation:

CH = E³

Cultural hotspots are situations, places, and artefacts that express the three ‘E’s:

Event: Cultural hotspots stand out in both time and space. This is in line with their very nature of being noticeable – they don't blend in completely. They can be your founders’ manifesto, your stand-up meetings, or the atmospheric cantina where everyone gathers.

Experience: Hotspots leave a lasting impression, both emotionally and cognitively. They create an emotional connection, reinforce identity, and provide behavioural guidance. Everyone will be able to articulate what the experience reveals about your culture – such as what is important to you, what you believe in, why you exist, and how you are expected to behave.

Exposure: For a hotspot to regulate our beliefs and behaviour, it must be experienced regularly or, if infrequently, with enough duration to leave a lasting impression. At Implement, we have monthly Friday meetings that frequently recalibrate our shared beliefs. Our three-day onboarding experience, though only encountered once, has such a profound impact that it remains unforgettable for everyone.

A hotspot can be either carefully designed or organically evolved. Its strength may vary across the three ‘E’s, but it will always serve as a significant expression of your culture. If it does not, it is simply not a hotspot.

The impact of a hotspot depends on all three ‘E’s. The clearer the event, the more powerful the experience. With repeated or immersive exposure, the experience effectively shapes our mindset. The more deliberately staged the hotspot, the more its participants will recognise it as the official culture of the organisation, which amplifies its influence.

Broken hotspots

Sometimes the hotspot itself becomes the problem: A legacy hotspot that no longer reflects our values but persists because management fails to recognise its critical role. For example, we might broadcast carefully crafted messages about our inclusion goals or new values, but fail to embody these values in practices like how senior management is selected, how we reward toxic yet commercially effective behaviour, or the commercial partners we choose.

If hotspots are clearly staged, their symbolic value becomes even more significant. For instance, if a new strategy is launched in a carefully designed manner but still overlooks inclusion or your stated values, employees will quickly realise that the ‘real’ culture is not aligned with the culture being communicated. When you invite the organisation to calibrate values, behaviour, and assumptions, you must ensure that you stay true to what you are claiming. Otherwise, employees will respond like children: doing what you do, not what you say.

Ok, but how do I get going?

Working with cultural hotspots means approaching the process analytically, with a clear plan and attention to detail. You must work backwards from the desired impact of your culture to the design of hotspots, ensuring they align with and deliver on the relevant goals in a causally plausible way. Depending on the clarity, analytical foundation, and scope of your current cultural efforts, you may need to complete steps A and B before starting the hotspot design process.

Once the foundation is in place, you can move forward with the hotspot strategy.

1. Map your hotspots. Start by identifying potential hotspots to work with. Candidates must represent the three ‘E’s’: Event, Experience, and Exposure. Which hotspots do you currently have? Which are most critical? Which are easiest to influence? Which are most frequent or well-timed for your change process?

These are all important questions to answer in order to identify the hotspots with the greatest potential. Focus on those that you can enhance by boosting one or more of their ‘E’s. You might need to make them clearer, increase their impact on participants, or increase their frequency or duration.

Choose hotspots that strike the right balance between what you can influence and the potential impact. You may also identify hotspots that are currently working against your goals and need to be redesigned or removed altogether. If you are unsure about the potential or detrimental effects of specific hotspots, ask your colleagues how they experience them.

2. Design your cultural hotspots. To design impactful hotspots, consider how you want your colleagues to leave the experience. What are the feelings, messages, and behavioural guidance that participants should be imprinted with? Ask yourself:

a. Participants. Who is the target audience? Is it all employees, middle managers, or a specific division? What is most important to this group? And where are they least aligned with the desired culture – what should be stressed in the hotspot?

b. Protagonist. Is the hotspot centred around a person doing something? For example, your executive leadership presenting the new strategy next quarter, all leaders having employee engagement talks, or a representative from the mostly invisible part of your organisation being brought to centre stage? Make sure that the protagonists in your hotspot are properly onboarded, understand their roles, are aware of the desired outcome of the hotspot, and recognise the importance of their engagement.

c. Exposure: Do you need adjust the frequency or duration of the hotspot to create impact? Does the hotspot need a structural underpinning and perhaps become part of workflows, your annual wheel, or your office layout to ensure its sustainability?

d. Event: Do you need to single out the event to make it more impactful? Can you apply before-during-after design to build anticipation before and reinforce learning after the event? And what about during the hotspot – how should the message be delivered to maximise its impact? This brings us to:

e. Experience. How will you create emotional connection – by bringing people together, using music, or fostering intimacy in small groups? Make sure that key messages are delivered in a way that 1. are understood (I get it), 2. resonate (I like it), and 3. provide behavioural guidance (I can do it) for the audience. This can be done through storytelling, asking questions, and building takeaways based on the participants' own experiences.

Get to work

Culture change is no small task, and the hotspot strategy does not make cultivating your organisation any easier. However, focusing on the 'joints' of your organisation helps direct and amplify your efforts. By systematically aligning your hotspots to your cultural cornerstones, you can more efficiently calibrate beliefs, behaviours, and values. Clear hotspots also spark conversations about your culture, raising awareness of hidden assumptions, cultural biases, and norms as part of an ongoing, dynamic cultivation. This fosters a deeper appreciation for the valuable aspects of your culture and encourages employees to speak up when confronted with breaches to your values.

Good luck igniting your culture!