The German Word That Explains Why Your Culture Change Programme Failed

And how to approach cultural change using the latest psychological research

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Recently, a frustrated colleague cornered me after a meeting "We've spent two years on culture change," he said. "New values, leadership training, communication campaigns, engagement surveys. The needle hasn't moved. What are we missing?"

I'd heard variations of this story dozens of times. Organisations pour resources into culture transformation programmes that produce impressive PowerPoint decks and minimal behavioural change. The problem isn't a lack of commitment or poor execution—it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what culture is.

This week, while preparing for a podcast about ecological psychology, I stumbled across a term that linked OD’s Kurt Lewin to the modern-day equivalents in Ecological Psychology and 4E Cognition. This journey provides a startlingly precise answer to why culture change feels so elusive. The journey began with a German term I'd never encountered: Aufforderungscharakter.

The Scientific Evolution of Environmental Influence

Kurt Lewin introduced Aufforderungscharakter in the 1930s—roughly translated as "demand character" or "invitation character" (Lewin, 1936). His insight was revolutionary: environments don't passively contain behaviour. They actively invite specific actions based on our psychological tensions and needs. The hungry person experiences the bakery's warm lighting and the smell of fresh bread as an almost magnetic pull. The same person, having just finished a large meal, barely registers these same environmental features.

James Gibson built on this foundation decades later with his theory of affordances—the stable opportunities for action that environments provide (Gibson, 1979). A staircase affords climbing, a door handle affords grasping, and a meeting room affords gathering. Gibson's crucial insight was that humans and environments form coupled systems. Behaviour emerges from this coupling, not from either the person or environment alone.

The next evolution came recently from Erik Rietveld and his colleagues, who developed what they call the Skilled Intentionality Framework (Rietveld, Denys & Van Westen, 2018). They dissolved the artificial boundary between basic environmental responses and complex organisational behaviour. Planning, reasoning, collaboration, and innovation—all of these emerge from skilled engagement with what they term "higher order affordances" (Stoffregen & Chemero, 2024). This is where we move into understanding culture at work.

Culture as Emergent Property

Here's where it gets interesting for anyone struggling with culture change: these higher order affordances are precisely what we experience as organisational culture. Recent research suggests that many affordances "emerge from non-additive relations among other affordances, such that some affordances are of higher order relative to other affordances" (Stoffregen & Chemero, 2024, p. 3).

Culture isn't a singular, static thing that exists independently in organisations. It's the dynamic, emergent pattern of invitations that arise from the complex relationships between organisational structures, processes, technologies, physical spaces, and social dynamics. These elements combine to create higher order affordances that invite specific ways of being professional, collaborative, innovative, or risk-averse.

Consider two teams in the same company, both claiming to have strong "accountability" cultures. One team has developed what they call constructive accountability—people own outcomes, support each other through challenges, and learn from failures. The other has developed what feels more like defensive accountability—people protect themselves from blame, document everything, and focus on process compliance. The difference isn't in their stated values—it's in the different landscapes of higher order affordances they've created.

The constructive team might have weekly check-ins that afford transparent progress sharing, shared dashboards that afford collective problem-solving, and post-project reviews that afford learning from outcomes. The defensive team might have formal status reports that afford justification of decisions, individual performance tracking that afford competitive behaviour, and failure analysis meetings that afford blame assignment.

Both cultures emerge from the relationship patterns between people and their organisational environment. Neither is inherently better—they afford different capabilities for different contexts. As Rietveld and his colleagues note, skilled intentionality involves "selective engagement with multiple affordances simultaneously in a concrete situation" (Rietveld, Denys & Van Westen, 2018, p. 45).

Why Culture Change Programs Fail

Most culture change efforts fail because they try to change culture directly rather than changing the conditions that give rise to it. They focus on communicating new values rather than creating new affordances. They assume culture is something leaders can install rather than something that emerges from everyday person-environment coupling.

Consider the typical culture change program:

• Leadership defines desired cultural attributes

• Communication campaigns promote new behaviours

• Training programs teach new skills

• Engagement surveys measure progress

This approach treats culture as a collection of individual attitudes and behaviours that can be modified through persuasion and instruction. But if culture is actually an emergent property of higher order affordances, then changing it requires changing the underlying environmental conditions that create those affordances.

The frustrated colleague I mentioned earlier had spent two years promoting an "accountability culture" while leaving unchanged the blame-focused incident reviews, individual performance metrics that penalised failure, and hierarchical approval processes that rewarded risk avoidance. The higher order affordances of their organisational system consistently invited defensive behaviour and blame-shifting rather than ownership and learning, regardless of what the leadership team said they wanted.

A Different Approach to Culture Change

Understanding culture as emergent affordances suggests a radically different approach to transformation, one that aligns with ecological psychology's emphasis on person-environment coupling (Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017):

Audit your affordance landscape: Instead of asking "what are our values," ask "what behaviours does our environment actually invite?" Look at your meeting structures, decision-making processes, performance systems, physical spaces, and technology platforms. What higher order affordances emerge from the relationships between these elements?

Design for different coupling: Rather than trying to change people's mindsets, change the conditions that shape person-environment coupling. If you want more collaboration, create affordances that make collaboration easier and more rewarding than territorial behaviour.

Focus on emergent properties: Recognise that culture emerges from the relationships between organisational elements in ways that can't be predicted from analysing components separately. A new collaboration tool won't create a collaborative culture if it's embedded in competitive performance systems.

Support skilled engagement: People develop skilled ways of engaging with their organisational environment over time. Culture change means helping people develop new skills for engaging with new affordances, not just communicating different expectations.

Practical Applications

This framework makes culture change much more concrete. Instead of vague initiatives about "mindset transformation," focus on specific environmental changes:

Temporal affordances: Change meeting rhythms, project cycles, and planning horizons to invite different accountability patterns. Constructive accountability requires temporal structures that afford regular check-ins and learning reviews rather than quarterly blame sessions.

Structural affordances: Modify reporting relationships, decision-making processes, and communication flows to invite different responsibility patterns. Shared outcome ownership affords different accountability behaviours than individual performance tracking.

Digital affordances: Choose technology platforms and communication tools that invite desired accountability behaviours. Shared dashboards afford collective problem-solving, while individual performance systems afford defensive documentation.

Physical affordances: Design spaces that invite the accountability interactions you want to see. Open layouts where progress is visible afford different accountability patterns than private offices where problems can be hidden.

Social affordances: Create formal and informal opportunities for the kinds of accountability relationships you want. Peer review processes, cross-team collaboration, and mentoring programs create different affordances for ownership and support than hierarchical oversight.

The Measurement Challenge

Traditional culture surveys often measure stated preferences rather than actual affordances. Instead of asking people what they value, observe what your environment actually invites:

• When problems arise, what does your environment afford? Collective problem-solving or individual blame assignment?

• When deadlines are missed, what does your environment invite? Learning and process improvement or justification and finger-pointing?

• When outcomes fall short, what does your environment afford? Transparent review and adjustment or defensive documentation and excuse-making?

The answers reveal your actual culture—the emergent pattern of higher order affordances that shape daily behaviour.

Beyond Culture Change

This scientific understanding of culture as emergent affordances extends beyond traditional culture change programs. It explains why:

• Mergers often struggle with "cultural integration"—they're actually trying to blend different affordance landscapes that invite fundamentally different behaviours

• Digital transformation fails when new technologies are embedded in old organisational structures that invite old patterns of behaviour

• Agile adoption succeeds or fails based on whether organisational affordances support the rapid iteration and customer focus that agile methods require

  

The Precision Revolution

The progression from Lewin's basic insight about environmental demand to contemporary understanding of higher order affordances provides a new precision for culture change efforts. We no longer need to treat culture as a mysterious, intangible force that changes through inspiration and communication!

Culture is the emergent pattern of invitations that arise from organisational person-environment coupling. Change the affordances, and culture changes naturally. Focus on environmental design rather than mindset modification. Create conditions that invite desired behaviours rather than programs that promote them.

If the colleague who cornered me at the conference redesigned her organisation's affordance landscape around accountability. If they changed review processes to afford learning rather than blame, modified metrics to afford shared outcome ownership, and created feedback structures that afforded peer support rather than hierarchical oversight. The constructive accountability culture they’d been pursuing for two years would start to emerge naturally within six months.

They shouldn’t focus on changing her people's values or mindsets. They should focus on changing what her organisational environment invites, and new patterns of behaviour will emerge from that coupling. The science of affordances can provide what inspirational leadership and communication campaigns couldn't: a precise mechanism for culture transformation.

Next time someone tells you culture change is about changing hearts and minds, remember the German psychologist who noticed that environments make demands. Culture isn't something people have—it's something that emerges from the dance between people and the systems they inhabit. Change the environment, and you change the culture.

References

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Lewin, K. (1936). Principles of Topological Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Rietveld, E., Denys, D., & Van Westen, M. (2018). Ecological-Enactive Cognition as Engaging with a Field of Relevant Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF). In A. Newen, L. L. de Bruin & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (pp. 41-70). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stoffregen, T. A., & Wagman, J, B. (2024). Higher order affordances. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02535-y

Van Dijk, L., & Rietveld, E. (2017). Foregrounding sociomaterial practice in our understanding of affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1969. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01969