Organizations like to believe that culture follows strategy.
In practice, human machine culture is shaped by behavior, not intention. And behavior has already moved on.
Across classrooms, workshops, and client organizations, the same pattern keeps emerging. Teams adapt their ways of working faster than leadership narratives can keep up. New tools are integrated informally. Decisions are taken outside declared processes. As a result, work continues to move forward, often quietly and sometimes invisibly.
This is not a technology problem.
At its core, it is a culture design problem.
When decisions leave the official process
One of the clearest indicators of misalignment in human machine culture is where decisions actually happen.
On paper, organizations rely on defined processes, approval chains, and governance structures. In practice, however, teams often route around them. They test ideas before permission is granted. Instead, decisions emerge in side conversations. Work moves forward because the situation demands it.
This is not resistance. Rather, it is adaptation under constraint.
The real issue appears when leadership continues to manage as if decisions were still happening where the org chart says they should. Over time, culture becomes performative. Processes remain visible, but trust and clarity slowly erode.
What matters most is not that processes are bypassed. More importantly, this shift remains largely unspoken.
The silent use of AI in human machine culture
The same dynamic can be observed with AI.
In both educational and organizational settings, AI is frequently used but not openly acknowledged. In many cases, this is not about carelessness or irresponsibility. Instead, it reflects the fact that leadership is not yet ready to engage with AI in a mature and grounded way.
When AI is framed as a threat, or as a shortcut that replaces thinking, people hide its use.
By contrast, when AI is framed as a tool that supports analysis, reflection, and decision making, people tend to use it more critically and transparently.
As a result, organizations that stigmatize AI lose visibility into how work is actually being done. They also miss the opportunity to establish shared norms around responsible use, ethical boundaries, and human accountability.
AI does not make decisions. People do. Or at least, they should.
If this distinction is not made explicit, human machine culture starts to drift quietly rather than evolve deliberately.
Why this tension surfaces faster in smaller organizations
Large organizations can absorb misalignment for a long time. Layers buffer friction. Turnover masks symptoms.
In SMEs, NGOs, and CSR driven organizations, however, cultural ambiguity surfaces faster and with clearer consequences. When mental load increases, when norms become inconsistent, or when meaning erodes, the impact is immediate. Productivity drops. Energy fades. Mission execution slows.
Research on future work and culture dissonance, including insights from Gartner, highlights mental fitness and cultural coherence as strategic concerns. What is often underestimated, however, is how quickly misalignment emerges when technology adoption outpaces shared sense making.
In these contexts, culture is not a value statement.
Instead, it is operational infrastructure.
Facilitation as cultural design in a human machine culture
This is where facilitation becomes useful. Not as a motivational exercise and not as a soft intervention, but as a practical way to examine how work is actually happening.
Through facilitation, teams create the conditions to surface:
- where decisions are really made
- how AI is actually being used
- which responsibilities still sit with humans rather than tools
which norms no longer reflect reality
When teams and leaders are able to name these patterns together, culture stops being aspirational and starts becoming usable.
Policies do not stabilize culture.
Rather, shared understanding does.
If human machine culture is not designed together, it fragments under pressure. And when teams adapt faster than leadership narratives allow, the real risk is not resistance.
It is silence.
