The Systems We Inherit, the Systems We Shape
Culture is a system. Let’s stop treating it like a vibe.
Every organization runs on systems, whether we realize it or not.
Some are visible—onboarding flows, performance cycles, calibration processes. Others are subtle but powerful: the assumptions behind who gets promoted, how we make decisions, who gets looped into what conversations, and how we handle disagreement.
We often call this “culture.” But culture isn’t just how the office feels. It’s how the system actually works.
Culture is:
How decisions get made when no one’s watching
How quickly issues escalate
Whether feedback loops are short and sharp—or slow and political
Whether you reward solo heroics or shared accountability
Whether your systems reinforce burnout or enable momentum
How you disagree
How you learn from failure
And like any system, culture doesn’t just happen. We inherit it, we maintain it, or we shape it.
When the System Isn’t the Problem—Until It Is
In my early working days, systems lived in my head and moved through my hands. If something broke, I fixed it. If someone was confused, I stepped in. I didn’t think of myself as a hero—I thought I was just doing what needed to be done.
That instinct carried into my first few leadership roles. I was proud of being the person who could connect the dots, step in where others hesitated, or hold things together across time zones. I called it commitment. But as I wrote recently, it wasn’t commitment, it was a hero complex dressed up as grit.
I had built the systems, but I didn’t trust them to work without me. I had defaulted to what I now think of as systems thinking theater: designing for scale on paper, while hardwiring myself into every decision loop.
And if I’m honest, the culture reinforced it. High performers were the ones who made themselves indispensable. Responsiveness was mistaken for leadership. Busyness was seen as care.
The Systems Beneath the Symptoms
It took nearly eight years at Palantir, plus leadership roles at Zipline and Merlin Labs, for me to fully understand that systems are not operational infrastructure. They are expressions of belief.
Every system is built on a hypothesis:
That performance should be measured through peer feedback
That equity will retain top talent
That weekly all-hands meetings will increase alignment
That your best ICs make the best managers
Sometimes those hypotheses are right. Often, they’re outdated, borrowed from someone else’s playbook, or optimized for the wrong stage.
The danger comes when we stop testing those assumptions. When we treat the system as static. When we inherit without questioning.
That’s how culture calcifies.
People Systems Are Business Systems
People systems aren’t a support function. They are the operating system of the business.
Your hiring processes, performance feedback loops, leveling frameworks, and compensation philosophy—these don’t sit on the sidelines. They directly shape execution, velocity, quality, and retention. When these systems are built thoughtfully, they reinforce your business model. When they’re inherited or ignored, they create drag you don’t see until it’s too late.
That’s why I’ve come to believe that systems thinking is not a leadership style. It’s a business imperative.
Designing with Intention, Not Inheritance
At Zipline, we were scaling from a single-product engineering team to a global logistics operation. It was tempting to borrow “mature” systems from other companies. But we resisted the urge. Instead, we asked: What do we actually need here? What kinds of managers? What kind of decision speed? What do autonomy and accountability look like in Rwanda versus the US?
At Merlin, building for safety-critical autonomy meant that our systems couldn’t just feel good. They had to hold up under pressure. Clarity wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was essential. That forced us to audit some of the most common defaults on People teams.
For example, we chose not to launch a traditional engagement survey until we had a clear governance model in place for acting on the results. In a high-accountability, low-structure environment, asking for feedback without a concrete response plan would have eroded trust. Instead, we focused on building out team health metrics tied to delivery velocity, psychological safety, and decision-making friction. These were things we could measure and address.
That mindset of putting operational clarity before cosmetic culture work became our compass. It wasn’t about ignoring culture. It was about building systems strong enough to support it, especially under the unique pressures of autonomy, regulation, and scale.
In both cases, what worked was simple: We asked what outcomes we needed. Then we built backward from there.
Culture Is a System
We treat culture like a vibe. But culture is infrastructure.
It’s encoded in your calendar defaults, your promotion criteria, your comms cadence, your DEI metrics (or lack thereof). And like any infrastructure, it either enables or impedes. We often say, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." But here’s the unspoken part:
Culture is a system. And if you don’t shape it with intention, it will eat your best strategies alive.
Final Thought
You’re already living inside a system. The only question is, did you design it or are you just living in someone else’s SimCity?
Was it inherited from a leader who moved on three years ago? Is it being propped up by heroics, masking deeper structural problems? Or is it actively evolving to serve your business goals?
The good news is that systems are always changeable. The tougher news is that they only change when someone decides to stop defaulting and start designing. That someone might be you (if you’re still reading, I think this someone might be you).
And as AI begins to take on more of the busywork—coordinating, calculating, surfacing recommendations and generally acting as ‘agents’, we’re left with a critical question:
If roles are fluid, and execution is handled by AI agents, what kind of leader does the system actually need?
The system needs leaders who can see beyond their function. Leaders who understand how incentives, workflows, values, and tools intersect. Leaders who can spot friction early and design for clarity instead of control. It doesn’t need more people keeping the lights on. It needs operators. People who shape culture not through words, but through the systems they build and the choices they make.
It needs people who:
Prioritize signal over noise
Make decisions in context, not in isolation
Build connective tissue between humans and tools
Design workflows that scale and flex
Know when to step in, when to delegate, and when to let go
AI can handle the tasks. But good judgment? Friction navigation? Pattern recognition across people, power, and product? That’s human. That’s what sustainable leadership looks like now, and it’s where the real leverage lives.
