A Five engagement

Culture Discovery

Understand the culture you have. Design the culture you need.

Culture shapes every decision, behaviour and performance outcome in your organisation, and most leaders have no clear picture of the one that actually exists – especially across different levels, functions and sites. Culture Discovery is a structured diagnostic that makes the invisible visible, and then shows you how to change it.

Talk to us about a Discovery See the maturity model

Interviews, workshops and observational research, mapped to our Organisational Maturity Model.

Four domains, usually running at four different levels, converging as an organisation matures.

Why it matters

Culture is not the soft stuff

Most organisations jump straight to solutions. Leadership development, a new set of values, a change programme, a new platform – all of it before anyone has understood the cultural dynamics underneath. When culture is not clearly defined and understood, the investment misses the mark.

Culture Discovery helps you see the system as it truly is, so you can act with confidence and precision. We partner with your people to uncover what matters, what is getting in the way, and where you can intervene for the greatest impact.

What it gives you

A true picture of the lived experience of work, across teams, roles and levels
The specific moments of cultural friction, misalignment and intention gap
Culture tied to strategy, so investment follows real need rather than assumption
Hidden performance blockers named and located
Priorities your leaders and teams have co-designed, and will therefore act on

Culture is not something you declare. It is something you design – through the systems you build, the behaviour you enable, and the expectations you reinforce.

Nick Mackeson-Smith, Founder and Chief Curiosity Officer, Five

The framework

Culture cannot be read in isolation

A Discovery works across the five areas we always work across. The systems, structures and leadership around a culture are usually what shaped it, so reading culture on its own tells you what is happening and almost nothing about why.

Strategy and leadership

Whether the direction is understood far enough down, and whether leaders behave like the culture they describe.

Performance

What actually gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, and where accountability goes quiet.

Culture

The lived experience of work: belonging, safety, trust, and the moments that matter most.

People

How people are hired, developed, promoted and supported, and what those systems teach everyone else.

Technology

The tools and platforms people work inside, and whether they enable the culture or fight it.

How it runs

A structured diagnostic, not a survey

A survey gives you a score. A Discovery gives you the system behind the score. It draws on behavioural science, human-centred design and our five pillar framework, and it runs in three moves.

Listen

Interviews, workshops and observational research across employees, managers and the experts who shape your systems. We arrive with curiosity and care, not clipboards and checklists.

Map

Everything we hear is mapped onto the Living Employee Experience Map, so friction, intention gaps and unmet needs are located at specific moments rather than described in general.

Co-design

Your own people set the priorities, against your position on the maturity model. Co-designed priorities get acted on in a way that recommended ones do not.

Three perspectives, deliberately

Employees do the work and experience the culture. Managers enable and translate it. And the subject matter experts shape the systems, tools, policies and platforms everyone else has to live inside. Each group sees a different organisation, and the gaps between those three views are usually where the useful findings are.

The maturity model

Where you are, and what it takes to move

At the close of every Discovery we do not simply summarise what we heard. We map it across six levels of organisational maturity, so you can see both where you stand now and what it will take to deliver the culture and performance you need next. It is not a cultural health check. It is a strategic readiness map.

Ad hoc

Culture is reactive and fragmented, and depends on individuals.

Experimenting

Awareness is emerging and isolated initiatives take shape.

Empowering

New mindsets take root and leaders begin to sponsor change.

Scaling

Systems and behaviours become consistent and embedded.

Embedded

Culture is integrated into strategy, delivery and daily practice.

Relentless reinvention

Continuous adaptation and improvement are simply the norm.

And how it shows up in delivery

Maturity is not only a matter of mindset. In parallel we read the service design and user experience signals, because a culture that has genuinely moved shows it in how work is done, not only in how work is described.

Processing

Service design

Data, information, knowledge

User experience

Visible, findable, functional

Cognition

Service design

Understanding, application

User experience

Useful, efficient

High performing

Service design

Insight, intuition

User experience

Collaborative, effective

The tools

The tools we use

Understanding a culture is about more than observing behaviour. It is about uncovering the values and beliefs that shape it. Every engagement is tailored, but a Discovery typically draws on five frameworks.

Product frameworkJobs to be doneA requirement structure borrowed from product: what your people are really trying to achieve, not the tasks they perform.What it does

The framework breaks needs down into process steps. The resulting job map turns those needs into something you can build against. In jobs theory there are three types: functional, emotional and consumption.

How we use it

We explore what the new experience could look like, aligning process needs with system needs. We identify requirements for different users, understand the impact of the way tasks are done now, uncover the tasks people only think they need to do, and establish which systems they actually use.

Five modelEmployee Experience MapThe Living Employee Experience Map, or LEEM, maps your processes, people, behaviours and requirements in their current state.What it does

It is the most actionable reporting format we have for mapping requirements to reality. It breaks into the areas that correspond to system needs and user needs along the employee journey, which means a discovery can be acted on in pieces rather than all at once.

How we use it

We use it to structure the discovery and to show where intention gaps sit, and where people meet friction in their everyday work. We look at what enables people, where they are held back, and where there is room to do things differently.

Behavioural lensExpectationsWhat people expect of each other is an indicator of power dynamics, friction and miscommunication.What it does

All of those cause misalignment on performance objectives, which shows up as slow or complex processes, errors in processing, and an absence of accountability for improving any of it. In your workshops we apply a behavioural lens to the causes and the symptoms.

How we use it

We seek to understand how your people talk to each other and about each other. What do they think of each other? What do they believe the other should be doing, and achieving? How much empathy do they express?

Paloma MedinaHuman needs (BICEPS)Six core needs people bring to work, drawn from decades of research in neuropsychology, psychology and sociology.What it does

Belonging, improvement and progress, choice, equality and fairness, predictability, and significance. Each of us holds them in a different order, and which one sits at the top changes what we need from work.

How we use it

We ask which need matters most at each moment that matters on the LEEM. During co-design we ask the same question of the future: which need will matter most in the culture you are trying to build.

Behavioural economicsIntention gapsThe difference between what people say they plan to do and what they actually do.What it does

It surfaces gaps at the individual level, like planning to give a colleague feedback and never doing it, and at the organisational level, like committing to bring everyone together once a year and then not.

How we use it

We ask three questions at each moment that matters: what are you told to do, what actually happens, and how does that affect you and your colleagues? Then we gather those moments into themes.

Who you’d work with