Core Company DNA
A clear cultural snapshot of how your organisation actually works
Core Company DNA is a concise, diagnostic culture analysis designed to make organisational culture tangible, measurable, and actionable. It captures the patterns in behaviour, collaboration, and decision-making that define “how things are really done here”.
The analysis creates a shared language for culture across leadership and employees, identifies a small number of clear focus areas, and provides a reliable baseline for tracking cultural development over time without turning culture into a checklist of errors.
What Core Company DNA measures
The analysis maps your organisation’s culture across four core domains. Together, they form a balanced picture of how structure, direction, relationships, and adaptability show up in everyday work.
The four cultural domains
Focuses on clarity in roles, decision-making, processes, prioritisation, quality standards, and coordination across functions. Structure culture reflects how predictable and reliable everyday delivery feels, and how well formal structures align with actual behaviour.
Examines how clearly purpose, customer value, strategy, and success criteria guide decisions and priorities. Purpose culture shows whether direction is experienced as a practical compass or as abstract statements detached from daily work.
Measures trust, psychological safety, dialogue, feedback, inclusion, and the ability to handle disagreement constructively. Community culture determines whether collaboration unlocks shared intelligence or whether important perspectives remain unspoken.
Looks at learning loops, improvement practices, experimentation, pace of execution, and the use of insights and data. Adaptive culture reflects how quickly and consistently the organisation turns experience into better ways of working.
How the analysis works
Each domain is measured through a small set of concrete cultural “genes”. For each gene, the analysis distinguishes between shared understanding and lived practice, making it possible to see not just what the organisation says it values, but what actually shows up in behaviour.
The result is a clear, easy-to-interpret cultural profile that supports dialogue, prioritisation, and development at organisational level.
When Core Company DNA is most useful
As a cultural baseline before organisational change
To clarify cultural strengths and tensions across units or leadership levels
As a structured starting point for culture and leadership dialogue
As a pulse measurement to follow development over time
To support strategic, leadership, or organisational development initiatives
