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Understanding and harnessing your cultural hotspots to lead change
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Published
26 March 2025
Organisational culture is difficult to embrace and change. Targeting your efforts at the hotspots of your culture significantly improves your chances of success. It allows you to focus on fewer aspects with greater diligence, gaining better control over the employee experience of what is important, and, by doing so, having a greater impact with your cultural initiatives. In this article, you can find out what cultural hotspots are and how to harness them in your own organisation.
Cutting through complexity
Most leaders agree that having the right culture is crucial to success and their company’s most important competitive asset. Yet, many cultural initiatives fail to create tangible business impact. Even experts disagree on the nature and scope of corporate culture. Its influence on performance can often feel intangible and invisible. Moreover, initiatives aimed at changing culture face deeply ingrained assumptions and norms that are not easily articulated or addressed.
The challenge is clear: as important as organisational culture is to performance; it is equally difficult to change. This leaves many initiatives falling short. But it does not have to be this way. If culture change feels tricky, we can apply strategies of our own to succeed. And you can learn to do the same.
What are cultural hotspots?
Culture exists throughout an organisation, but its presence varies in intensity. Some manifestations of culture are more prominent and noticeable than others. For example, most printing rooms are likely quite similar, but the way CEOs address the organisation or how new colleagues are welcomed can differ significantly.
Every culture has places, events, artefacts, or behaviours that employees unanimously recognise as being ‘truly us’ – things they point to when describing their workplace culture. This could be specific rituals for celebrating wins, the way the reception welcomes visitors, or how bonuses are calculated and paid. The stronger the culture, the more significant these hotspots become.
Take the office coffee machine, often a space for informal bonding. By making it a no-smartphone zone, you transform it into a cultural hotspot, reinforcing the importance of relationships and connection within your organisation.
Hotspot examples
To enter the headquarters of Flying Tiger, employees pass through one of the company’s flagship stores. This daily experience serves as a constant reminder of their customer focus and the impact of their individual contributions.
For many years, Avis was famous for its combined customer promise and company value: We Try Harder. Always second to Hertz, which was larger and had more cars available for rent, Avis chose to compete on attitude rather than size. This customer promise became both an internal and external cultural hotspot, reinforcing a shared commitment to exceptional service.
The leading Danish facility services company, Kemp & Lauritzen, sought to enhance employee development and satisfaction by redesigning several cultural hotspots. They strengthened the annual employee development conversation by introducing structured conversation cards to improve quality and consistency. Additionally, they established a new ritual to celebrate young colleagues upon receiving their journeyman’s certificate, highlighting the value of craftsmanship.
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.
Step A and B
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.
Case
Hotspot-based leadership development for culture change
A global shipping company asked us to help change their culture, focusing on its 3,000 senior leaders. The overall goal was to create a more contemporary culture based on a leadership style that emphasised inclusion, psychological safety, and personal development. We designed a new leadership framework with overall leadership principles and associated expected behaviours for each principle. Using ‘Day-in-the-life-of’ mapping, we mapped leadership hotspots both onboard vessels and onshore to identify the infrastructure for leadership behaviour.
We combined these hotspots with the leadership principles to design a leadership programme that used simulations to apply the principles in the identified hotspots. The impact was twofold: The programme had high engagement and received great feedback for the relevant and realistic simulations among participants. The rest of the organisation benefitted from the rapid impact of the training as they experienced the new principles being enacted in frequent hotspots.
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!
