€2.4 million spent trying to fix their culture.
How a B2C business of eight thousand people found the one word missing from its own operating system.
The Situation.
Over three years, a B2C business of eight thousand people spent €2.4 million trying to fix its culture. Agencies, diagnostics, new behaviours, organisational psychologists, engagement platforms, leadership programmes, change campaigns.
Customers were leaving. Growth was sliding. Nothing in the market explained it — the products hadn't changed, and no new competitor had suddenly appeared. Whatever was turning customers away was something else, and it was coming from inside.
The Session
One SSC session, one question. The initial question was: how do we change employee behaviour? But once we peeled it back, the actual question was much simpler: how do we return the business to positive growth and stop customers leaving?
Together we mapped twenty-nine possible blockers, from pricing and structure to technology, competitors and market conditions. Of the twenty-nine, one was very obviously missing: the word "customer" did not appear once. A B2C business had quietly, unknowingly written the customer out of its own operating system, and built a coherent story for why that was fine. Once the exclusion was visible, it became optional.
What The Culture Was Actually Saying
To fix things, the business had drawn up nine new behaviours it wanted its people to adopt. Listen. Check you've understood. Be aware of your impact on others. Share what you know. Finish what you start. Resolve customers' problems. Take risks and learn. Start small, keep it simple. Talk openly about success and failure.
Sensible, human, unarguable. But if you have to teach people to do these things, it tells you precisely what the culture had been doing instead. Turn each new behaviour over, and you read the lived experience of eight thousand people:
You do not listen, and you do not care.
You do not understand what colleagues or customers actually want.
You are oblivious to the impact of your behaviour on others.
You hoard information.
You don't do the essential tasks or get the things that matter done.
You don't pick up or resolve customer issues.
You are frightened to take risks, so you never learn from anything.
You get bogged down in work that is endless and complicated.
You never talk about what went well, or what went wrong.
What was happening inside the business was, quite simply, customer-repellent. And these behaviours are exhausting to sustain, because they run against human instinct — you have to work hard not to care, not to share, not to help each other. Morale, unsurprisingly, was on the floor.
Underneath it all sat three currents, quietly setting the temperature of everything: I, not We. Fear, not Safety. Complexity, not Simplicity.
None of this was a people problem. It was a pattern — a repeating habit of exclusion that the organisation couldn't see in itself, now playing out in the one relationship it could least afford to lose: the one with its customers.
The Shift.
Within weeks, customer language was back in leadership meetings, strategy documents and dashboards. The insight moved from one executive to the whole leadership team, and the next CEO address turned on a single word: the customer.
The €2.4 million was not wasted. SSC did not replace the development they had built — it removed the block that was stopping it from working.
What It Shows.
When the same problem keeps recurring no matter how much is spent on it, the cause is rarely effort or budget. It is a pattern no one in the room can see.
Speak to the client directly.