Our thinking
A distinct view on performance.
Culture models applied by leaders worldwide.
Our approach rests on 30+ years of research by Fons Trompenaars, Charles Hampden-Turner and Peter Woolliams. A body of thinking, and four models that operationalise it. Leaders worldwide use them to make culture measurable, manageable, and deliverable.
First the thinking. Then one process, one mindset, and two ways to make culture measurable.
foundational views
About Performance, Strategy, Culture & Leadership
How can you, as a leader, lift performance, promote innovation, and embed the behaviours that make this stick?
These views underpin everything we do, starting with what matters most: performance.
Leistung
High performance is the result of reconciling opposites. Is a good parent strict, or warm? Is a Formula 1 car safe, or fast? Two opposing propositions, both with value. We call this a dilemma.
Dilemmas are everywhere: global vs. local, short-term vs. long-term, standardisation vs. autonomy, decisiveness vs. inclusion. Take one value too far and it tips into pathology. A value disconnected from its opposite leads to pathology. Compromise loses the value of both sides.
We propose something different. How can one value reinforce its opposite? In Formula 1, how do you get more safety through speed? Aerodynamics. True innovation. We call this through-through thinking: the move beyond either-or and even both-and.
Innovation is combining values that are not easily joined, therefore scarce, therefore profitable.
Kultur
Culture is the end result of surviving in a challenging environment: the way an organisation has learned to deal with opposites. Successful responses become shared norms.
Think of consensus in the Netherlands. Living with water required cooperation. The value did not emerge by coincidence. It emerged as a response to a strategic challenge.
Industry leaders integrate competing priorities. Followers lean to one side. Culture change, in our view, is not about discarding the old culture. It is about enriching it with its opposite.
Strategy
Culture should serve strategy. Strategy changes the hierarchy of dilemmas. A company moving from recovery to growth does not face the same tensions as one defending margin in a mature market, digitising a legacy operation, or responding to disruption. What was once a strength can become a liability when context shifts.
Work on culture therefore does not start with a values session. It starts with strategy. Which opposites are decisive now? And how will they evolve?
Leiterschaft
A good leader can distinguish a decision from a dilemma. Reconciliation is the leadership competence most consistently associated with sustained performance.
The leader makes sure key dilemmas are recognised, that both sides are respected, that they are reconciled into breakthrough solutions, and that those solutions translate into everyday actions. Recognise, Respect, Reconcile, Realise. Without the last, one-sidedness creeps back in under pressure.
This calls for servant leadership: enabling others to perform, giving direction and listening, deciding and delegating.
"Until you can point to what a value means on a Tuesday morning in a meeting, you do not have a value. You have a slogan."
four models
A process, a mindset and two ways to make culture measurable.
Our four models work together. The 4R Approach is the process for turning dilemmas into behaviour and actions that result in business value. It runs on Dilemma Thinking, the mindset that generates value from competing demands. The 4 Corporate Cultures show the archetypes; the 7 Dimensions of Culture make the differences between people's viewpoints measurable.
- The 4R Approach. The process to follow for long-term integration — Recognise, Respect, Reconcile, Realise. → Find out more
- Dilemma Thinking. The mindset that generates value from competing demands. → Find out more
- The 4 Corporate Cultures. The deep dive into cultural archetypes that foster change. → Find out more
- 7 Dimensions of Culture. The key to understanding cultural differences. → Find out more
Dilemma-Denken
All people face the same dilemmas. Culture decides how we resolve them.
Dilemma Reconciliation is the methodology at the heart of everything we do. It is a switch of mindset — counter-intuitive for those trained on bipolar models — that combines opposites with AND rather than picking between them.
"The dilemma reconciliation is the methodology at the heart of everything we do. It implies a switch of mindset, that can seem a bit counter-intuitive for Western people, typically used to bipolar models."
— Dr. Fons Trompenaars
Our "best of both" approach combines opposites with AND. The benefits are practical: we surface the real performance blockers by asking the right questions, find more accurate problem definitions, and produce solutions that work across cultures rather than only in one.
Either-or is a choice. Both-and is a compromise. Through-through is a reconciliation.
7 Dimensionen der Kultur
Seven dimensions. One way to measure difference.
Developed in the 1980s by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner and refined through decades of continuing research, the 7D model is one of the most widely cited frameworks for understanding cultural differences. The seven dimensions fall into three groups — each one a universal tension every organisation and every society resolves in its own way.
- Human relationships.
Tensions that arise from how we relate to other people — universalism and particularism, individualism and communitarianism, neutral and affective, specific and diffuse, achieved and ascribed status. - Time.
How organisations and societies handle the passage of time — sequential versus synchronic, and the relative weight of past, present and future. - Environment.
How people relate to the world around them — internal versus external control, and where agency is assumed to sit.
If you can't measure something, you can't manage it. The 7D makes culture measurable.
The 4 Corporate Cultures
Four archetypes. All four in your DNA.
Every organisation has a preferred way of operating, shaped by two orienting questions:
- Is the focus of what we do more on tasks or on people?
- Do we operate in a more egalitarian or hierarchical way?
The answers map to four ideal-type corporate cultures — the Family, the Eiffel Tower, the Guided Missile and the Incubator. Each is an archetype rather than a label: no organisation is 100% any one of them. The dominant type reveals how people think and learn, how they change, and how they motivate, reward and resolve conflict.
High performance does not live in any single archetype. It lives in organisations that carry all four in their DNA, reconciling the competing demands between them.
"Organisational culture is the end result of competing values fighting for preference."
— Fons Trompenaars
Näherung
The 4R process — from insight to Integration.
The 4R Approach is the process we follow to take dilemmas from recognition through to lasting integration. Four steps that move leadership teams beyond abstract culture conversations — to the tensions that matter, the reconciliations that resolve them, and the behaviours that make the strategy deliverable.
1 Recognise
Surface the dilemmas that matter.
Data-driven diagnostics make the current culture and desired direction visible and measurable. We map the tensions strategy creates, not the ones leadership assumes are there.
2 Respekt
Map the logic of both sides.
Blended workshops surface why each side is partially right and partially incomplete. Teams see the strengths of the existing culture, and the pathologies that appear when a value is disconnected from its opposite.
3 Abstimmen
Find higher-order solutions where each side strengthens the other.
Our Dilemma Reconciliation Process moves teams from either-or, and from both-and, to through-through — by asking how we can get more of value X through value Y, and more of Y through X.
4 Realise
Embed reconciliations in behaviours, structures and processes.
Without translation, values remain rhetorical. Our Values-to-Behaviour (V2B) process converts each reconciled value into a concise Charter of Behaviour — specific, observable, day-to-day. Structures and processes follow.
"While most organisations focus on recognising cultural differences only — the stereotypes — we help leaders take advantage of those differences."
— Fons Trompenaars
Lassen Sie uns reden
Put the models to work on your Dilemma.
Whether you are aligning culture to a new strategy, integrating after a merger, or turning values into daily behaviour — the models are the starting point. Let's talk about the tension deciding whether your strategy lives or dies.