Impact Forum - June (in-person): Values on the Wall, But Not in the Halls

An Impact Forum on Lived Culture vs. Named Culture 

Every organization knows it needs a set of values. We traditionally display them beautifully on a website, naming things like collaboration, transparency, impact or innovation.  

Employee research tells us only 1 in 5 organizations are actually living out their stated values. The other 4? Running on aspiration and hoping for healthy culture.

And here's the uncomfortable truth: the gap doesn't announce itself. It hides in what gets tolerated at the deadline, who gets protected when things go sideways, and which meetings never make it onto the calendar. Our loyalties to getting things done, tend to cause us to ignore our values under pressure.

You already know what your organization says it values. This session is about what your organization actually does and whether those two things are the same.

This isn't a problem unique to any one sector. In the private sector, it shows up when "people first" companies quietly reward whoever hits the number, no matter how. In the public sector, it surfaces when "community-centered" agencies make decisions without the community in the room. In the nonprofit world, it lives in the gap between the mission statement on the website and the budget allocation that follows.

The gap between named and lived culture isn't a values problem. It's a systems problem and it costs every sector something different: companies lose talent, agencies lose trust, and mission-driven organizations lose impact.

And it's not just organizations. Individuals do it too. We say we value family, presence, and honesty and then live our days in ways that tell a different story. The frameworks in this session apply just as much to how you show up at home, in your neighborhood, and in your community as they do to the organization you lead.

This session isn't about building better values statements, it's about getting honest about what's actually running us and the systems we’re a part of. And, coming up with experiments to close the gap between our named culture and lived culture.

The Format: 

• Connection (30 min): Name the gap. Where is your named culture loudest; and your lived culture loudest? Leaders from across sectors surface real tensions together, because the patterns are more shared than we think. 

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• Deepening (30 min): Examine the four drivers of lived norms: power signals, decision moments, rituals, and status modeling. We'll look at how each play out differently, and similarly, across public, private, and nonprofit contexts.

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• Practice (30 min): Pick one norm. Run it through the lived culture diagnostic. Walk out with one system or ritual you can change this quarter to start closing the gap.