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Methodology

The science of understanding people at work

Built on research. Designed for leadership.

Culture Intelligence is grounded in organisational science, addressing how people, strategy, leadership, and culture interact to influence behaviour, performance, and business results. Every insight traces back to a proven framework – 100 defined values, seven defined mindsets and recognisable culture codes. No assumptions or guesswork. Simply actionable intelligence.

 
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Why values drive everything

Culture is the sum of what people actually value. Not what they say they value.

We are not as rational as we think. Values underpin all relationships and decisions, as much as knowledge and data. Decisions leaders make, actions people take, unspoken agreements teams form, are all driven by a system of underlying values. The challenge is that these are largely unconscious.

Research shows that if you ask people to define their own values, they will have a hit rate less than 50%. Yet that invisible set of values is shaping every choice they make.

Values also create blind spots. The values that we don’t prioritise interest us less, and that also impact our perception of them in others. This is why culture differences create friction, and often are the underlying factor to why change initiatives fail, take too long and eventually cost too much.

The mindsets and values that shape culture

Culture Intelligence is built on a library of 100 precisely defined values, each mapped to one of seven mindsets. Every organisation sits somewhere across this spectrum. The data shows where your people's energy actually goes, and where it needs to go to deliver on the strategy.

 

We don't ask people to describe their culture. Here's why.

Since the 1950s, researchers have identified a series of values that shape human behaviour. Each one of us normally operates on 8 to 10 values at any given time. Research shows that conscious awareness of personal values is less than 50%, meaning the values driving most decisions in individuals and in organisations are largely invisible. 

When people complete our survey, they aren't asked to describe their culture, but instead asked to prioritise what matters most to them. Those priorities, aggregated across an organisation, reveal the culture as it actually exists, and gives each person insight into their own values.

The survey is designed to be bias-free. People aren't asked to describe their culture, but instead identify what matters most for them. Every value is something people can relate to, and there are no right or wrong answers. By asking people to prioritise values rather than evaluate their culture, the data reflects genuine values priorities. The result is a picture of your actual culture you can trust.

 

One framework that reveals how culture shows up differently across every individual, team and function

Individual

Each person's values priorities reveal their preferred mindset — how they make decisions, lead, build relationships and respond to pressure. Because mindsets are largely unconscious, this data surfaces what self-reporting can't.

Team

Values data reveals a team's collective culture — where there's alignment and how the team is likely to behave during change. Teams with misaligned mindsets don't just underperform, they resist change without knowing why.


Organisation

Culture mapping reveals patterns across departments, functions and leadership layers. The gap between the culture leaders believe they have and the culture that is actually driving behaviour becomes visible.


Mindsets can change. Culture can be led.

One of the most important insights in human development research is that mindsets can change — through awareness, feedback, clear actions and intentional development.

When a leader develops a higher mindset, it influences the people around them. When a team shifts its values focus, it changes how the whole organisation operates. This happens continuously and unconsciously in every organisation.

The question is whether it happens by chance or by intent. 

Culture Intelligence makes that development visible and deliberate. Instead of hoping culture evolves in the right direction, leaders can see exactly where their culture is, understand where it needs to go, and take specific, data-driven steps to get there.

 

 

Proven research. Translated into action.

The Culture Intelligence framework doesn't stand alone. It is built on some of the most robust and widely validated theories in organisational psychology, human development and change science — tested across more than 1,000 individual leaders, 50 leadership teams and 20 organisations across industries and geographies.

 
The ADKAR Change Model

Our culture change methodology is structured around the proven ADKAR framework — Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. This ensures culture change is not just measured but actively driven through a structured five-phase process that embeds new behaviours into management systems rather than running as a parallel initiative.

David Rock's neuroscience-based model — Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness — informs how we interpret resistance to change. When these five core human needs are threatened, resistance becomes the default response. CI identifies where these pressure points exist before they become barriers.

Our values framework draws on multiple foundational values researchers — Clare Graves' levels of human existence, Milton Rokeach's values theory, and Don Beck and Christopher Cowan's Spiral Dynamics — creating a multi-layered model that is more comprehensive than any single framework alone.

The hierarchy of human needs forms the developmental foundation for the seven mindset levels — from foundational security and belonging through to visionary purpose. Our model follows the same developmental sequence, recognising that each stage builds on and includes the previous.

 

Culture Intelligence was not built in a lab. It was forged through 25 years of real-world experience — from a values-driven merger integrating two global shipping companies across 72 countries, to building values-led brands, to leading commercial culture transformation projects across industries in the US, UK and Scandinavia. The methodology is grounded in what actually works when culture meets strategy under real business pressure.

Pioneer of values science and creator of the Hall Tonna values system — the original values mapping methodology that CI is directly built upon. Hall's work established that values can be precisely defined, linked to behaviours and measured systematically. CI has built on and extended this foundation since 1999.

Find out what the data and methodology can reveal about your culture.
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