How do you build an organisation's identity from scratch, during hypergrowth, mid-pandemic, fully remote, when the culture that made the founding team exceptional exists entirely in the muscle memory of the people who built it?
ContextDigital assets trading platform
Scale20 to 200+ employees
Geography200 people across 73 cities, fully remote
The culture was not absent. It was implicit. Making it explicit, and carrying it to every person in the organisation, was the work.
"Wow, so many faces. I didn't realise we were this big."
A founding team of twenty, people who had built together and worked long hours in the same office, had become a department-structured organisation of two hundred almost without noticing.
The culture that made them exceptional had not travelled. Not because it failed. Because it had never been made explicit. It lived in behaviours, in unspoken expectations, in the way the original team moved.
My diagnosis: this was not a culture problem. It was a legibility problem.
Culture Veterans
"The same passion is not there. The urgency we had is not replicating."
New hires
No mission they could name. No values they identified with. No standard for what good looked like.
Founders
A marketing tagline standing in for a mission statement. Beliefs that had never needed to be spoken aloud.
The real problem
The culture was not failing to scale. It had never been made legible to anyone outside the original twenty.
02
The Workshop Arc
The answer was not in a framework. It was in the room.
I went upstream. To the founders, the Culture Veterans, the leaders who had lived this culture before it had a name.
I designed and facilitated an iterative series of workshops on Miro — built the templates, ran the onboarding. Targeted questions. Structured outputs. Multiple rounds.
Round 01
Founders: Mission and Vision
Articulated as organisational truth, not marketing copy. What do we actually believe? What are we building towards?
Round 02
Culture Veterans: Values Excavation
Anecdotes, specific moments, patterns of behaviour that defined the founding culture. What did we actually value, before we had language for it?
Round 03
Leadership and HR: Pressure Testing
Refining what had emerged. Ensuring it was honest rather than aspirational. Values that could not be held were removed.
Round 04
Founders Again: Validation
Confirming that what the collective process had surfaced was true to what they believed and would commit to.
The unexpected output
The behaviours surfaced themselves.
While assimilating the workshop material, sets of behaviours emerged that made the values possible. Not derived from a model. Not imposed from outside. Surfaced from the people themselves. This was the origination of the Common Success Factors.
The four rounds produced six values — not invented, but excavated. What the founding team had always lived, finally named.
01
User Focus
Prioritise the customer. Always.
02
Passionate Ownership
Own it. Drive it to completion.
03
Pursue Excellence
Push the envelope.
04
Integrity
Truth, transparency, ethics.
05
Respect
Welcome diversity of thought.
06
Resilience
Adapt. Emerge stronger.
03
The Common Success Factors
Not a competency library. A behavioural architecture built from the inside out.
Participants had not just named principles. They had named the everyday behaviours that made those values real.
Six Common Success Factors emerged. Each defined with key indicators across three proficiency levels — P1, P2, P3 — so that what accountability required of an individual contributor was not what it required of a senior leader.
01
Accountability
Taking responsibility for one's decisions, actions and outcomes. Following through on commitments.
02
Adaptability
Willingness and ability to adjust to new situations and handle change effectively.
03
Focused Execution
Consistently delivering quality outputs while maintaining urgency and adhering to deadlines.
04
Teamwork
Working collaboratively across functions, bringing others in rather than working alone.
05
Collaborative Communication
Proactively communicating and listening to understand, fostering a culture of collaborative working.
06
Continuous Learning
Actively seeking growth, treating feedback as data, staying curious about the domain and the craft.
Observable. Measurable. Actionable. The framework was designed to be used, not displayed.
04
Embedding
Making it the operating system, not the wallpaper.
Most frameworks die between design and deployment. The CSF survived because it was wired into every system that touched how people were hired, evaluated, recognised and developed.
Recruitment
Re-architected Hiring
Interview frameworks, candidate assessment and hiring manager calibration rebuilt around the same six behaviours. The organisation began selecting for the culture it had articulated.
Performance
360-Degree Reviews
CSF ratings incorporated alongside OKRs. Managers, peers and self-assessment all anchored to the same framework. Performance conversations became consistent across the organisation.
Recognition
Four-Tier Framework
Peer, manager, department and company-level recognition, all anchored to the CSF. Recognising someone meant naming the behaviour, not just the outcome.
Learning
Targeted Development
Behavioural learning modules mapped to CSF gaps identified through performance data. Development became targeted rather than generic.
Succession
Leadership Pipeline
Leadership potential assessment incorporated CSF performance patterns. Who gets developed and promoted reflects what the organisation says it values.
05
The Launch
200 people. Fully remote. No ambient culture transmission.
No office. No all-hands in a room. Nothing happening by osmosis.
Every step had to be designed with deliberate intentionality.
A
Awareness
The launch was owned by founders and senior leadership, not the People function. I insisted on this. Their voices were the activation mechanism. A moment, not a document.
D
Desire
Contests and engagement activities built genuine connection to what had been launched, not passive awareness of it.
K
Knowledge
Curated behavioural learning modules. Targeted workshops with senior leadership and managers on applying the CSF in practice.
A
Ability
Knowledge and ability built as one continuous arc through the modules and workshops.
R
Reinforcement
The CSF embedded into hiring, performance, recognition and succession. Not a campaign. The way the organisation operated.
100%
Participation on rollout across the organisation
06
What It Produced
A shared standard that became structural.
A new hire in their second week had the same standard for what good looked like as a founder who had been there from the start.
The Common Success Factors became the operating architecture of the organisation. Not because they were mandated, but because they were true.
The framework outlasted the hypergrowth phase, the regulatory pressures that followed, and a period of significant organisational upheaval. The identity architecture held because it was designed to be structural, not aspirational.
Consistent
Performance conversations
Specific
Recognition
Intentional
Hiring
Targeted
Development
What this taught me
Culture scales when it is made explicit. Not before. The work of the OD practitioner at this moment is not to design culture. It is to surface what already exists, name it precisely, and build the architecture that carries it to every person who joins after the people who lived it have moved on.