The Cultural Web: Johnson and Scholes' Model of Organizational Culture

Von Victor Hoang · Aktualisiert am 11. Oktober 2026

The Cultural Web is a framework from Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes for analyzing organizational culture. It places a shared paradigm, the organization's core beliefs and assumptions, at the center and surrounds it with six elements that reinforce it: stories, rituals and routines, symbols, organizational structures, control systems, and power structures. Mapping the web shows why culture resists change.

Most culture models tell you what culture is made of. The Cultural Web tells you something more useful for a leader: what holds it in place. Say a company announces it wants to be "customer-first." If the stories people tell celebrate the engineer who ignored customers to hit a deadline, the bonus plan pays only for internal targets, and the senior people who decide things never speak to a customer, the announcement changes nothing. Every element of the web pulls back toward the old paradigm. That's the insight, and it's why the model is a standard tool for planning culture change.

Where the Cultural Web Came From

The web grew out of strategy research, not HR. Gerry Johnson's 1992 paper "Managing strategic change: strategy, culture and action," published in Long Range Planning, volume 25, issue 1, sits in the literature on why organizations struggle to change direction. The web later appeared in strategy textbooks by Johnson, Scholes, and Richard Whittington. Mindtools points to the 2012 edition of Fundamentals of Strategy as a place the model is described.

Attribution varies a little between sources. Many describe it as a Johnson and Scholes model from 1992, and the 1992 journal paper itself is credited to Johnson alone. For practical purposes the name that sticks is "Johnson and Scholes' Cultural Web," and that's how you'll see it in most textbooks and courses.

The strategy origin explains the model's angle. It's less interested in labeling a culture and more interested in whether the culture will support or block the strategy you've chosen.

The Paradigm at the Center

At the center of the web sits the paradigm. Think Insights describes it as the organization's core beliefs, assumptions, and motivations, which the six surrounding elements support and reinforce.

Think of the paradigm as the answer to a question nobody asks out loud: "What do we really believe makes us successful?" For a founder-led sales company it might be "we win by outworking everyone." For a manufacturer it might be "we never ship a defect." Nobody put these on a wall. They're so taken for granted that people stop noticing them.

The paradigm matters because it's the thing that makes change hard. If you only alter one element, say the structure, the other five keep feeding the old belief and it snaps back.

The Six Elements of the Cultural Web

Each element is a different place where the paradigm shows up in daily work. The descriptions below follow Sheffield Hallam University's guide and Mindtools.

Stories

Stories are the past events and people an organization keeps retelling. Pay attention to who becomes the hero. If the legend is the salesperson who closed a giant deal by bending every rule, the story teaches that results excuse anything. The negative stories matter as much: the project that failed and who got blamed tells people what risk really costs here.

Rituals and Routines

Routines are the repeated ways work gets done: how meetings run, how decisions get escalated, what happens when someone makes a mistake. Rituals are the more symbolic ones, like an all-hands where only executives speak. Routines are famously sticky because nobody decided on them, they just accumulated.

Symbols

Symbols are visible markers: office layout, titles, dress code, who gets the corner window, even the jargon people use. A company that preaches flat collaboration but keeps a reserved executive parking row is sending two messages, and employees believe the parking row.

Organizational Structures

This covers both the org chart and the informal networks behind it. A flat structure on paper can still funnel every decision through one person. Look at how work actually moves, not just at the reporting lines.

Control Systems

Control systems are the measures, budgets, and rewards that tell people what to care about. This is often the highest-leverage element, because people optimize for what they're measured on. If your stated value is quality but your incentive plan pays only on volume, volume is your culture.

Power Structures

Power structures are the groups whose influence shapes decisions and beliefs. They aren't always the senior titles. In a company built by engineers, an engineering lead may carry more weight than a vice president of marketing. Power tends to sit with whoever is closest to the paradigm, and those people have the least reason to challenge it.

How the Cultural Web Compares With Other Culture Models

The web isn't a rival to the other major frameworks. It answers a different question. Where Schein's three levels sort culture into depth layers, and the Denison model and Competing Values Framework score or classify it, the web maps the reinforcing loops that keep a culture stable.

The practical pattern: use a survey-based model to see where you stand, and the web to understand why it's stuck and what to move. If you want to avoid mixing up related terms before you start, organizational culture vs climate vs values is a short primer.

How to Run a Cultural Web Analysis

You can run this in a half-day workshop. The sequence below follows the current-versus-desired approach that Mindtools and Think Insights both describe.

Step 1: Start with the strategy

The web only makes sense against a goal. Write one or two sentences on where the organization is trying to go. "Culture" in the abstract has no right answer. Culture that helps or hurts a specific strategy does.

Step 2: Gather a mixed group

Bring in people from different levels, functions, and tenures. Long-serving staff know the stories. Recent hires notice the routines and symbols the veterans no longer see. Leaders alone will describe the culture they intend, not the one that exists.

Step 3: Map the current web

Take each of the six elements in turn and have the group list what's true today. Use the questions in the table above. Capture observable facts and examples, not judgments. Then step back and write the paradigm in the middle: the belief that all six elements seem to point toward.

Step 4: Map the desired web

Now ask what each element would look like if the culture fully supported the strategy. Start from the strategy again, not from wishes. Write a new paradigm for the center.

Step 5: Compare the two webs

Lay them side by side. For each element, mark three things: what already supports the strategy and should be kept, what conflicts with it and must change, and what's missing. The Mindtools guide also suggests looking for factors that conflict with each other and factors that harm productivity.

Step 6: Prioritize and plan

You can't change six elements at once, so choose. Control systems and power structures usually move behavior fastest. Stories and symbols follow once people see the new reality is real. For the mechanics of making the shift stick, see how to change organizational culture and culture and change management.

Cultural Web Template (Copy and Use)

Copy this table into a doc or spreadsheet. Fill the "Today" column first, then "Desired," then the last two.

A good test of a filled-in template: each cell in the "Today" column should name something a new hire could observe in their first month. If a cell reads "collaborative" or "innovative," it's a label, not a fact. Rewrite it as what people actually do.

Examples by Business Function

These are illustrative composites, not real customer stories. They show how the same six elements look different across functions, and why the paradigm can differ from team to team.

Take the sales row. If you want salespeople to care about customers staying, you don't fix it with a values poster. You change the control system (pay some commission on renewals), retell the stories (celebrate the rep who saved an account), and shift routines (add a retention review to the weekly pipeline meeting). The paradigm moves when the web moves.

The finance row runs the other way. A "protect the downside" paradigm isn't wrong, it's what finance is for. The goal is to make sure its power structures and controls don't accidentally veto every experiment the rest of the company needs. This is also where managing subcultures becomes relevant: a company can run several webs at once.

Key Facts

• The Cultural Web was developed by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes in 1992 for analyzing and changing organizational culture. Source: Sheffield Hallam University
• The model places a paradigm at the center, supported by six elements: stories, rituals and routines, symbols, power structures, organizational structures, and control systems. Source: Think Insights
• It's used to map both the current culture and the desired future culture, then compare the two to decide what to keep, change, and add. Source: Mindtools
• Gerry Johnson's 1992 paper on strategy, culture, and action appeared in Long Range Planning, volume 25, issue 1, pages 28 to 36. Source: Crossref record via DOI

Cultural Web Do's and Don'ts

Do

• Tie the analysis to a specific strategy. Without a target, you'll collect observations with no way to judge them.
• Describe behavior, not adjectives. "Managers approve every expense over a small amount" beats "bureaucratic."
• Include people who disagree. The most useful cell is often the one that makes leadership uncomfortable.
• Change several elements together. The web holds because the elements reinforce each other, so a lone fix gets absorbed.
• Revisit the web. Redraw it after a year to see whether the paradigm actually moved.

Don't

• Don't treat the web as a survey. It's a structured conversation and a mapping tool, not a scored instrument.
• Don't let leadership fill it in alone. You'll get the intended culture, not the lived one.
• Don't confuse a symbol fix with culture change. A new office layout without new incentives is decoration.
• Don't assume the old paradigm was wrong. Often it was a good fit for an earlier stage and just needs to evolve.
• Don't skip the power structures. If the people who hold influence aren't on board, the plan stalls quietly.

Where to Go Next

If you're starting a culture project, pair the web with a diagnostic from how to run a culture audit, then plan the shift using how to change organizational culture. If you want the deeper layers behind the visible elements, read Schein's three levels of culture. And if the stories your team tells are mostly about who got blamed, Westrum's typology gives you a quick way to measure how freely bad news travels.

The Cultural Web works because it takes culture out of the clouds and puts it into things you can point at: a story, a meeting, a bonus plan, a parking space. Map what's there, decide what the strategy needs, and move the elements together. The paradigm follows.