The Intangibility Excuse

The Missing Domain, Part 3

You have been in that room.

The conversation has reached the point where someone names the cultural dimension of the problem. Perhaps it is a programme manager who has noticed that the steering committee says one thing and does another. Perhaps it is a change manager who has spotted the gap between what the communications strategy describes and what is actually happening on the floor. Perhaps it is you.

And then someone — usually senior, usually with budget authority, usually with a great deal invested in the current way of things — says a version of the following: “Culture is important, of course. But it is very difficult to measure. It is not really something we can put in a model.”

The conversation moves on. The capability map gets updated. The risk log gets a new entry. And the cultural dimension of the problem, the one that will determine whether any of this actually lands, disappears from the room.

The intangibility defence. I have heard it more times than I can count, from more senior people than I care to remember. And it is wrong. Not subtly wrong. Not wrong in a way that requires careful qualification. Wrong in the specific sense that the evidence to refute it has existed for decades, and the people making the argument simply have not looked.

What the defence actually claims

Before dismantling an argument, it is worth stating it fairly.

The intangibility defence has two versions, and they are often conflated.

The first version is epistemological: culture cannot be observed, quantified, or modelled with sufficient rigour to be useful. It is too diffuse, too contextual, too subjective to sit alongside a capability map or a value stream model without contaminating them with noise.

The second version is practical: even if culture can be partially characterised, the cost of doing so accurately — the time, the organisational sensitivity, the political risk of naming what you find — is too high relative to the benefit. It is not worth the trouble.

The first version is factually incorrect. The second version is worth taking seriously, and the discipline almost never does.

This article is about the first version. The second version has its own article. It is called Article 4.

 The empirical record

Edgar Schein did not think culture was too intangible to model. He spent thirty years at MIT Sloan School of Management developing a framework for doing exactly that, and the result has been widely adopted in management education and applied in organisations across the world with sufficient consistency that practitioners in virtually every serious transformation discipline have encountered it — except, it appears, business architecture.

His model has three layers, and they are worth understanding in sequence.

The first layer is artefacts: the visible, tangible expressions of an organisation’s culture. The physical environment, the dress code, the way meetings are run, the language people use, the stories that circulate in corridors, the rituals around performance and reward. Artefacts are observable. You can walk into an organisation and begin cataloguing them within an hour.

The second layer is espoused beliefs and values: what the organisation says it stands for. Mission statements, strategy documents, behavioural frameworks, the things leaders say when asked to describe the culture. These are usually accessible through documentation and structured conversation. They are not always accurate - Schein was clear on this - but they are knowable.

The third layer is basic underlying assumptions: the deepest and most powerful level. These are the unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs that actually drive behaviour. They include beliefs about human nature, about the relationship between the organisation and its environment, about what constitutes success, about who is trusted and why. They are harder to surface, but not inaccessible. Schein’s methodology for reaching them involves observation over time, structured interview, and careful pattern analysis.

Notice what this gives us. Three layers of culture, each progressively deeper and more powerful than the last. The first observable directly. The second accessible through conversation and documentation. The third reachable through disciplined inquiry and sustained observation. None of these is outside the competence of a senior business architect. All of them are currently missing from the discipline’s standard reference models.

The mapping you will recognise

If you read Article 2 in this series, Schein’s three layers will look familiar.

The Desired Culture maps most naturally to Schein’s espoused beliefs and values: what the organisation says it wants to become. The Espoused Culture also sits in this layer: what the organisation claims to practise right now.

But Schein’s framework is, in one important respect, more precise than the typology I proposed in Article 2. He distinguishes between what is espoused and what is assumed. His underlying assumptions layer sits below both, and it is the layer that most change programmes never reach. It is the layer where the Director who commissioned a capability rationalisation and then buried it when it pointed at his own headcount was actually operating. Not at the level of what he espoused. At the level of what he assumed: that headcount equals authority, that authority equals safety, that safety is worth more than the programme outcomes he had publicly committed to deliver.

The three cultures framework from Article 2 identifies the gap between Espoused and Enacted culture as the place where most programmes fail. Schein’s framework tells you why. The Enacted culture is not simply what people do instead of what they say. It is the surface expression of the assumptions underneath — assumptions that are, in most organisations, completely unexamined.

You cannot close the gap between Espoused and Enacted without understanding what is driving the Enacted. And you cannot understand what is driving the Enacted without going to the level of basic assumptions. That requires a methodology. A methodology exists. The discipline has not adopted it.

The argument the profession has not made

Here is what I want to be precise about, because imprecision lets the intangibility defence survive longer than it deserves.

The most sophisticated version of the objection is not about measurability at all. It is about cost. Schein’s methodology for surfacing basic underlying assumptions requires embedded observation over time — months in complex organisations, not days. Most client engagements do not fund that, and no sensible architect will pretend otherwise. But that is not the argument being made here. The question is not whether the full methodology is feasible in every engagement. The question is whether the discipline has ever tried to adapt any of it.

That question has a clear answer. To my knowledge, the BIZBOK does not reference Schein. The major operating model canvases do not include a culture component. The standard BA methodology does not include a culture discovery phase, a culture risk assessment, or a cultural alignment review. This is not because someone looked at Schein and found him inadequate for the context. It is because the discipline looked away before it got that far.

That is a choice. It is dressed up as a technical limitation — culture is too soft — but it is a choice. And like all choices made under the cover of technical limitation, it has consequences that the discipline continues to pay without ever quite naming them.

The consequences are the unmapped capability maps and the untouched organisation charts and the transformation programmes that end with a technically correct deliverable sitting in a presentation, connected to nothing. They are the programmes designed at the Espoused/Cognitive intersection while the resistance forms, silently and effectively, at the Enacted/Emotional level below.

What it would actually require

Adopting a culture mapping capability within business architecture practice does not require turning architects into organisational psychologists. What it requires is more modest, and more achievable, than the intangibility defence implies.

It requires a structured discovery phase in every engagement that specifically surfaces cultural artefacts: how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, what gets rewarded and what gets quietly tolerated, how the organisation behaves when the stakes are high. This is observation. Architects already do this informally. The discipline simply has not built it into the standard methodology or included its outputs in the artefact set.

It requires structured conversation about espoused values — not the values on the wall, but the values people articulate when asked directly what this organisation actually rewards and why. And it requires enough sustained presence in an engagement to begin observing the patterns that reveal something about the underlying assumptions: the things that go unsaid, the decisions that appear irrational until you understand the belief system beneath them, the moments when the rational case for change runs into something it cannot explain and cannot shift.

None of this replaces the capability map. None of it replaces the value stream model or the operating model design. It precedes them. A culture discovery phase does not lengthen an engagement by months. It redirects the first few weeks of one. And it makes the deliverables that follow implementable rather than merely correct.

The defence, restated

Let me return to the room at the beginning of this article.

Someone says: “Culture is important, of course. But it is very difficult to measure.”

Here is what that sentence actually means, once the intangibility excuse has been examined: there are empirical frameworks for characterising organisational culture, developed by serious researchers over decades, applied widely across industries, and I am not aware of them — or I am aware of them and have judged that applying them is not worth the professional risk.

The first case is ignorance. The second case is the subject of the next article.

Either way, the defence does not hold. And the capability maps that emerge from engagements that accept it without challenge are telling you so, quietly, from their folders, where they remain unchallenged and unimplemented.

Article 4 examines the second version of the intangibility defence: the one that is not about measurement at all, but about what happens to the architect who names what they find. The Political Architect.