Your Transformation Failed by Design
What cultural intelligence and trauma-informed design reveal about why transformations fail
Authors’ Note:
This article emerges from a collaboration between two practitioners working at the intersection of organizational transformation and systems redesign. André brings Cultural Intelligence frameworks to diagnose how organizations encode cultural assumptions into their systems. Jennifer brings trauma-informed HR systems redesign from her work at Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, where she serves as VP, People Operations. Together, we examine why transformation initiatives consistently fail—and what actually needs to change.
Organizations invest millions in transformation initiatives that consistently underperform. As a consultant, you believe in it because the initiative aligns with your values and hate to see it go nowhere. They measure engagement, track burnout, design interventions—all while missing the fundamental problem. The systems themselves are culturally encoded to exclude anyone who doesn’t match an unexamined baseline.
Consider a common scenario. Three weeks before launch, a senior analyst discovers the project timeline has shifted. Priorities changed. Stakeholders need different deliverables. Everyone else knew—information circulated through hallway conversations and Slack exchanges. But she finds out in a formal meeting where decisions have already solidified.
Her manager sees a communication problem. She’s not plugged in enough. She needs to be more proactive and speak up more in meetings.
She experiences betrayal. She’d built relationships, demonstrated commitment, and delivered excellent work. Those relationships should have meant being brought into the conversation privately and respectfully before public announcements. The exclusion signals she’s not actually trusted.
Her manager sees no trust violation. Information flows to people who proactively seek it. She has the same access—she’s just not using it.
Both are applying functional trust architectures. The organization only recognizes one as valid.
The Cultural Architecture of Organizations
Organizations encode culture into every system of how decisions are made, how information flows, how performance is evaluated, and how trust is built or broken. These cultural assumptions get treated as universal professional standards.
In those task-first cultures—dominant across Anglo-American contexts—trust builds through demonstrated competence. You prove yourself through performance and earn credibility. Relationships are outcomes of working well together, not prerequisites.
In relationship-first cultures—common across Southern European, Latin American, Mediterranean, Indigenous, and many Asian contexts—trust builds through personal connection first. (I am not using each region as a monolith, but to give you a better picture.) I can tell you, Jennifer and I have witnessed this. You invest time in getting to know people and earn credibility through relational depth. Performance matters, but it’s understood in the context of relationships.
Neither is superior. Both produce functional workplaces. But the organizations operating on task-first assumptions, as we see here in Canada, code relationship-first approaches as inefficient or unprofessional.
Jennifer observes that what stands out immediately in the scenario above is that this system is behaving exactly as designed. The organization designed trust as something you earn through visible, task-forward behaviours. It works. It reliably rewards people who communicate in those ways. But when information only flows to those who know how to access it, the organization privileges a specific cultural operating style and assumes it’s universal.
From her work, Jennifer notes that organizations externalize trust as a personal trait, telling people to speak up more or to be more proactive. They don’t recognize trust as a structural outcome of system design. They don’t see the harm because the system works for them. Everyone else experiences trust as conditional.
What breaks trust is realizing that relationships don’t actually carry weight in the system, despite what the organization says about collaboration or belonging. Once someone understands that, they disengage because they’ve learned something accurate about how power and recognition really operate.
Why Your Transformation Failed
Organizations invest heavily in transformation through new strategies, restructured teams, digital platforms, and agile methodologies. These initiatives frequently underperform or fail. Leadership diagnoses poor change management, insufficient resources, and resistance to change.
They rarely examine whether the transformation was designed on cultural assumptions that don’t translate across their diverse workforce.
A recent article by Polly Collingridge at the Cultural Intelligence Centre confirms what many organizations experience. Engagement collapse, spreading burnout, and workplace polarization have become defining challenges. She identifies these as cultural problems requiring Cultural Intelligence (CQ). Organizations that develop CQ see measurable improvements in higher engagement, reduced conflict, and better innovation.
These challenges don't require a global workforce to emerge. Even organizations operating within a municipality or local community organization include cultural diversity, comprising different generations, varied educational backgrounds, immigrants and their children, Indigenous employees, and people from different regional or class backgrounds. The assumption that 'we're all Canadian' or 'we're all from here' masks significant cultural variation that shapes how people build trust, communicate, and engage.
But what organizations struggle to accept is that the burnout and disengagement aren’t always about workload or unclear strategy. They’re about the constant cognitive load of operating in systems designed for one cultural baseline while you operate from another.
Every meeting, project update, and performance conversation requires employees from non-dominant cultures to make real-time calculations. Speak up immediately or wait? State disagreements directly or address privately? Promote contributions or let work speak? Interpret timelines as firm or flexible? Each choice carries risk. Choose wrong, and you’re either not engaged enough, too aggressive, or lacking executive presence.
Consider how engagement gets measured. Surveys ask whether you feel comfortable speaking up in meetings, have clarity about expectations, or feel empowered to challenge the status quo. These questions assume low-context, egalitarian, task-first norms. They measure comfort with specific styles, then label deviation as disengagement. An employee from a high-context, hierarchical, relationship-first culture might be deeply engaged while never speaking up in meetings. They influence through relationship networks and understand expectations through context. The survey codes them as disengaged.
Jennifer observes that HR then designs interventions—more encouragement to speak up, more confidence-building, more training on executive presence (Ask Jenny Vazquez-Newsum about this part). The system itself rarely changes. All effort goes into interventions that place the onus of change on individuals. This reinforces the idea that engagement has a single, correct expression. Over time, employees learn that what the organization says it values isn’t what it actually rewards, and adapting is safer than being understood.
Jennifer sees most often not a lack of capability, but a mismatch between what people are actually good at and what the system values. Take someone whose strength lies in relationship-building, deep listening, and learning through story. In many Indigenous contexts, those aren’t soft skills—they’re core competencies. That person might be exceptional at navigating complexity and holding relationships through change, but place them inside a corporate system that prioritizes speed, documentation, individual visibility, and quantifiable outputs, and suddenly their value becomes hard to reconcile. There’s no clean metric for the time they spend building trust. Their contributions get labelled as intangible or secondary, even when essential to holding the work together.
This is where leaders misread exhaustion. From the outside, it looks like someone is struggling to keep up. In reality, they’re doing two jobs—performing their role and translating their way of knowing into a system that doesn’t recognize it. The burnout isn’t coming from too much work, but from sustained misrecognition—having to constantly prove worth in a language the system understands, while the skills the organization actually benefits from remain unofficial, unrewarded, and invisible.
Psychological Safety Is Culturally Encoded
Most transformation initiatives emphasize psychological safety. Leaders get trained to “create safe spaces” for speaking truth to power. But psychological safety frameworks assume that speaking up in groups demonstrates engagement, direct disagreement strengthens ideas, and individual voice matters more than collective harmony. These aren’t universal truths. They’re culturally-specific preferences.
For employees from hierarchical cultures, speaking up inappropriately feels unsafe—not from intimidation, but because they understand influence flows through different channels. For those from high-context cultures, direct disagreement damages relationships necessary for long-term effectiveness. For those from collectivist cultures, individual voice matters less than group consensus.
Jennifer observes from her practice that organizations adopt the language of psychological safety without doing the trauma-responsive work that safety actually requires. From a trauma-informed perspective, safety isn’t about encouraging expression—the bring your whole self to work rhetoric. It’s about predictability, choice, and protection from harm. Many organizational approaches flip that logic. They tell people to speak up, be vulnerable, or challenge openly without first ensuring the system can handle what emerges without punishment, misinterpretation, or reputational damage.
The gap happens when an employee takes that invitation seriously and then experiences subtle consequences—being labelled difficult, less strategic, overly emotional, or not a team player. From a trauma-responsive lens, this is real harm.
Jennifer notes that trauma-responsive organizations like the Indigenous-led one she works with understand that safety is contextual. It’s shaped by power, history, culture, and prior exposure to harm. A practice that feels empowering to one person can feel destabilizing to another.
What makes these systems feel traumatic isn’t just the expectation to speak up. It’s the lack of repair when harm occurs, the absence of choice in what participation looks like, and the pressure to perform openness on command. When organizations skip those questions, they create environments that look safe on paper but feel threatening in practice.
Transformation Readiness = Cultural Assimilation
Organizations assess transformation readiness through capability frameworks that typically include comfort with ambiguity and rapid change, direct communication of concerns, willingness to experiment and fail fast, individual accountability for outcomes, and speaking up when you disagree. These aren’t culturally neutral. They’re specific to cultures with low power distance, low-context communication, and individualist orientation.
Employees from cultures with different orientations bring equally valuable capabilities, including building consensus through relationship work, preserving stability while navigating change, learning through observation before action, strengthening collective accountability to build bonds, and influencing through appropriate channels. The first set gets coded as transformation-ready. The second is change resistance.
Organizations invest in training to shift people from the second set to the first. They’re not building transformation capability. They’re requiring cultural assimilation. This is the hidden cost leadership never sees. The employee looks engaged, performs well, and adopts new systems successfully. But the cognitive and emotional load accumulates invisibly.
Jennifer observes that this exhaustion shows up most visibly in high turnover. When organizations mistake cultural performance for genuine integration, they reward fluency with dominant norms rather than substance. People who can adapt their communication style to match the organizational baseline are deemed ready for advancement. Those who don’t are framed as needing development or not being team players, even when their contributions are strong. The system selects for conformity instead of expanding the range of thinking the organization can access.
Where Cultural Intelligence Meets Systems Redesign
Jennifer notes from her practice that what she sees repeatedly is that dysfunction isn’t just interpersonal—it’s architectural. Cultural assumptions get baked into systems, which then shape behaviour, power, and outcomes while everyone argues about mindset. The work is building systems that don’t require constant self-erasure from anyone.
This architectural dysfunction manifests across every dimension of organizational transformation. Cultural Intelligence adds cultural architecture to systems analysis. Organizations replicate culturally specific dynamics and then export them as universal transformation requirements. They build change processes for task-first cultures, communication cascades for low-context cultures, and decision-making forums for egalitarian cultures. Then they pathologize everyone who doesn’t match those baselines.
Where our work converges is recognizing that cultural assumptions and systemic dysfunction aren’t separate problems—they’re the same problem from different angles.
Transformation fails through design, not execution. Organizations design change initiatives on unexamined cultural assumptions, then treat those assumptions as universal best practices. The failure is structural. Developing individuals won’t solve systemic design flaws. When employees struggle with transformation initiatives not designed for their cultural operating patterns, the solution isn’t coaching—it’s redesigning approaches to support multiple patterns. Awareness without redesign is performative. Trust, safety, and engagement aren’t culturally neutral. The exhaustion is real and costly.
The Work Ahead for Leaders Who Are Mobilized
If, after you got this far, you’re thinking “yes, but we can’t possibly redesign everything,” this article isn’t for you. Most organizations aren’t ready. They’ll implement training, add it to diversity initiatives, and make no structural changes.
But if you’re recognizing the patterns—transformation stalled despite flawless execution, engagement scores dropped after psychological safety training, best performers burning out for unexplained reasons—then you’re seeing what Cultural Intelligence reveals.
Organizations that have done this work don’t announce it—they’re outperforming competitors. But they started by acknowledging three uncomfortable truths. First, their professional standards were cultural preferences. Second, their transformation failures were design failures. Third, training wouldn’t solve structural problems.
What redesign actually requires. Design information systems for multiple cultural patterns. If information only reaches people who proactively seek it, you’ve built a task-first system. One public sector organization redesigned how project information flows—task-first employees receive standing agenda items and documentation; relationship-first employees receive pre-briefings through trusted colleagues. Small shifts in information flow can dramatically improve how transformation messages land across the organization.
Build multiple influence pathways into governance. If the only way to shape transformation is through vocal participation in steering committees, you’ve limited influence to low-context, egalitarian communicators. Design governance where influence flows through relationship networks, private conversations, written proposals, and indirect communication.
Measure engagement differently. If assessments only recognize low-context, egalitarian, task-first patterns, you’re measuring cultural alignment, not engagement. Stop diagnosing cultural differences as resistance to change.
For organizational leaders. If your transformations consistently underperform despite investment, Cultural Intelligence diagnostics can reveal what conventional change management misses. Your transformation approach was designed for one cultural operating system and deployed across multiple. Organizations that recognize and address this cultural mismatch in the next 3-5 years will outperform competitors still burning out talent.
For HR leaders. If your engagement initiatives produce awareness but not change, systems redesign can address what training never will. The employees you’re trying to develop aren’t the problem—the systems requiring their constant adaptation are. You don’t need a comprehensive overhaul. Start by choosing one system you own. Identify who it works for without effort, then redesign to support multiple pathways.
Jennifer advises starting by letting go of the idea that this is a singular culture project you can roll out. Treat this as diagnostic, not intervention. Before adding anything new, slow down what’s actually happening. Where do people consistently get labelled as disengaged, resistant, or not ready? What does their actual performance indicate? Those patterns are your design clues.
Then choose one system you already own—performance reviews, promotion criteria—and ask this question. What kind of person does this system work best for, without effort? Whoever comes to mind is your baseline. Everyone else is adapting.
You fix this by relaxing the system just enough to allow multiple ways of participating without penalty. Small shifts, done intentionally, have an outsized impact. Jennifer emphasizes that your job isn’t to make people more resilient inside flawed systems. It’s to notice where resilience is being unnecessarily demanded.
The burnout you’re measuring through workload metrics isn’t the burnout you’re creating through transformation requiring cultural code-switching. The resistance you’re measuring through engagement surveys isn’t capturing employees who participate in different ways. The lack of psychological safety you’re addressing through training won’t shift until you recognize that safety itself isn’t culturally universal.
Cultural Intelligence shows you what your transformation approaches actually do. The question is whether you’re willing to redesign them.
Transformation doesn’t fail because people resist change. It fails because organizations design change initiatives systematically, exhausting anyone who doesn’t match their unexamined cultural baseline—then measure the resulting burnout and disengagement as individual failure.
Organizational change initiatives often fail, not because people inherently resist transformation, but because of a flawed design process. Organizations systematically exhaust those who don’t conform to the unspoken cultural norms. The resulting disengagement and burnout are then mistakenly measured and labelled as individual shortcomings, rather than the predictable outcome of a poorly executed systemic design.
Whether you’re from Canada, the UK, or the Netherlands, that’s the transformation work CQ demands—and most organizations will avoid.
If you’re ready for that work, let’s talk.
André Darmanin explores organizational transformation through cultural intelligence with his organization, Cultural Nexus Group. Jennifer Houle is VP, People Operations at Raven Indigenous Capital Partners and writes Uncompliant (uncompliant.substack.com), examining broken HR systems and imagining what better could look like.
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Thank you, Andre and Jennifer, for writing this excellent post. I see many hallmarks of failures of organisational change in previous companies that I've worked for. I was wondering if one of the biggest issues that institutes may face is if they have a new leader who has their own opinion of what organisational change should look like. That may or may not align with the cultural intelligence that already exists versus what was in place at their previous place of employment.
I completely relate to this article. Organisations are often built from a monocultural point of view, and that can quickly become a major issue.
I’ve seen this, for example, in companies with strong internal mobility, when people move from Engineering or Contract Management into an O&M department. The company is the same, but the codes change. What follows is often a real loss of reference points that isn’t addressed.
The same dynamic applies when someone from abroad joins a national company in another country.
Culture is multilayered, and we could gain so much from it if we actually leveraged diversity instead of treating it as a problem to manage.
And when the only person expected to adapt is the newcomer, with assimilation as the only “solution”, the outcome is often burnout.
Very good work, thank you for sparking reflection on this topic.