When Culture and Technology Collide
Culture has been with us forever — Aboriginal, Roman, Catholic, military, corporate, football. Each has left its mark on how people organise, communicate and behave. Technology has been with us just as long: fire, the wheel, the printing press, the light bulb, the PC. We know how technology takes hold — early adopters experiment, fast followers jump in once the good news spreads, the mass market follows when it becomes either fashionable or unavoidable.
What's different today is the speed and intimacy of the relationship between the two. Culture is creating technology. Technology is creating culture. And the collision between them is now the defining challenge of organisational leadership.
Technology creating culture
ChatGPT acquired one hundred million users in two months — faster than any technology in history. It didn't just change how people work; it sparked an entirely new global conversation about intelligence, creativity, authorship and trust. That is culture-formation at a scale and pace we have genuinely never seen before.
It's been happening in smaller ways for years. TikTok didn't just launch a platform — it rewired how an entire generation understands narrative, attention and performance. Discord built tight-knit communities of gamers, creators and developers that are more cohesive than most corporate cultures I've encountered. Duolingo turned language learning into a daily habit for hundreds of millions of people by understanding that behaviour change is a design problem. Airbnb, still going strong, has strangers staying in each other's homes and forming genuine connections across the world.
In every case, the technology didn't just serve an existing culture. It created a new one.
Culture creating technology
Silicon Valley, London's Tech City, Sydney's startup scene, Atlassian's team in Sydney that became a fifty-billion-dollar company — these are proof that culture is a potent breeding ground for technology innovation. The ingredient that matters most in every case isn't money or infrastructure. It's the network of human connections, and the attitude of the talented people investing themselves in those environments.
The same principle holds inside large organisations. Leaders who genuinely understand the value of their people — who create the conditions for curiosity, experimentation and psychological safety — consistently produce better technology outcomes than those who simply mandate adoption from above. Culture doesn't follow technology investment. It precedes it.
What this means for business
The late Marshall McLuhan observed that "the medium is the message" — the technology through which we communicate shapes the communication itself, and by extension, the culture around it. Carolyn Taylor, one of the best culture thinkers I know, describes organisational culture as created by messages about what is valued. Technology transmits those messages through three channels:
Behaviour — how leaders visibly use (or avoid) new tools sends a signal that travels further than any policy document. When a CEO is visibly experimenting with AI, their organisation takes note.
Symbols — the tools an organisation chooses to deploy, and those it bans or ignores, communicate volumes about its values and risk appetite.
Systems — the workflows, platforms and processes that govern daily work ultimately determine what behaviour is even possible, regardless of what the strategy presentation says.
Apply this framework to AI and the implications are immediate. Organisations whose systems reward caution and whose symbols signal scepticism will produce cultures that resist AI adoption — not because their people are obstinate, but because the environment is giving them entirely rational signals to do so.
Four things I believe to be true
1. You cannot do technology change successfully without understanding the cultural context. Technology that is culturally incompatible will be defeated by the organisation's immune system, every time. I have watched this happen repeatedly, and I am watching it happen with AI right now.
2. You cannot do cultural change successfully while leaving people to fight with systems that force them to do the opposite.
3. You can accelerate desired cultural change by intelligently harnessing technology — using it to attune behaviour, symbols and systems to your chosen direction.
4. And you can leverage culture as a powerful driver of technology innovation, by role-modelling the open-minded, inquiring, tinkering attitude that gives new ideas a genuine chance.
The tools have changed. The challenge hasn't.
When I wrote the first version of this argument in 2014, I wasn't thinking about artificial intelligence. The cultural technology tools I wrote about more than a decade ago — storytelling, prototyping, behavioural nudging, closed-loop feedback — are all still relevant. But every one of them now has an AI-native version that is substantially more powerful. Scenarios and simulations that once took weeks to build take hours. Prototyping is now AI-assisted from day one. Behavioural feedback can be gathered and reflected back in near real-time at a scale Thaler and Sunstein — whose nudge theory earned a Nobel Prize in 2017 — never imagined possible.
The question isn't whether to use these tools. It's whether your organisation has the cultural capacity to absorb them.
Harvard's John Kotter called culture the most powerful lever for driving performance. I'd add: it's also the most reliable predictor of whether your technology investment will deliver or disappear. On its own, technology advancement is an expensive and pointless sideshow.
