High-performance culture frameworks are among the most valuable tools available to a CEO. But for organisations that need innovation-led growth, they leave a critical dimension unaddressed — and it’s the one CEOs are most urgently asking about.
Atif Sheikh, Salim Earle, and Holly McLeod at Heidrick & Struggles have written one of the most clearly-articulated frameworks I’ve come across on what it genuinely takes to build a lasting performance culture. Their four-element model — purpose, strategy, culture, and structure — is rigorous, commercially grounded, and a significant step beyond the superficial culture initiatives that plague most organisations.
If you haven’t read it, you should!
But I want to add a lens. Because the conversations I’m having with CEOs right now are pointing somewhere slightly different — and if we don’t name it precisely, we risk building performance cultures that are world-class at executing yesterday’s strategy.
The Question CEOs Are Actually Asking
The CEOs I advise don’t use the word “performance” in isolation. They use the word ‘Pace’. They talk about their organisations’ inability to solve problems fast enough, to adapt quickly enough, and to repeatedly generate the kind of solutions that create competitive advantage rather than simply maintaining it.
“Pace is a deceptively simple word. What leaders mean is: we need to identify problems, solve them rapidly, learn from the attempt — and do it again, faster next time.”
Now, I don’t think that’s a performance problem, more than it’s an innovation capability problem. And the culture required to solve it is subtly but significantly different from a high-performance culture as traditionally defined.
Heidrick & Struggles are right that 71% of CEOs globally cite culture as a top-three influence on financial performance.¹ What that statistic doesn’t tell you is what kind of culture those CEOs believe they need.
In my experience, when you sit with them and go beyond the headline, a striking number describes not just a high-performance culture, but an innovation-led one. They want organisations where the capability to solve problems rapidly and repeatedly is embedded in the culture itself — not in a separate innovation team, not in a skunkworks project, but in the DNA of how their people lead and work every single day.
What Heidrick & Struggles Get Absolutely Right — And Where the Gap Appears
The four-element framework Sheikh, Earle, and McLeod describe is exactly the right architecture for organisations that want to accelerate execution. Their insight that purpose, strategy, culture, and structure must operate in tight alignment — not in isolation — is one that too many leadership teams still haven’t genuinely internalised.
Culture delegated to HR, strategy outsourced to consultants, purpose confined to an annual retreat: the gap between intent and reality remains embarrassingly wide in most organisations.
But here is where I’d add a fifth dimension — or more precisely, a different lens through which to examine all four.
For organisations that don’t just want to execute strategy better, but that need to grow through innovation, the culture question isn’t only “what behaviours will help us execute?” It’s “what culture enables us to rapidly and repeatedly solve problems, generate new value, and outpace the competition?” That’s a materially different bar — and it demands a materially different kind of leadership capability.
A high-performance culture, designed primarily around execution, optimises for consistency, accountability, and delivery. Those are vital. But innovation requires something those qualities can quietly work against: the willingness to operate in uncertainty, to test and fail fast, to challenge existing models rather than refine them, and to treat problems as opportunities rather than threats. The cultural conditions for innovation aren’t in opposition to high performance — but they don’t arise automatically from it either. They have to be deliberately built.
Pace Is an Innovation Capability, Not Just a Performance Metric
When a CEO tells me they need their organisation to move at pace, what they’re really describing is the compounding effect of innovation capability embedded in culture. Every time a team can rapidly identify a problem, bring diverse thinking to bear on it, generate a solution, test it quickly, and learn from the result — the organisation moves faster. And crucially, it gets faster over time.
“Execution pace and innovation pace are related but not the same. Execution pace eliminates friction in delivering a known strategy. Innovation pace builds the capability to solve novel problems repeatedly.”
The speed compounds. Problems that once took months get solved in weeks. Opportunities that used to be missed get captured. This is the distinction I’d press the Heidrick & Struggles team on: these are related but not identical capabilities, and confusing them can lead organisations to invest heavily in the wrong development agenda.
The organisations I work with that have built this capability are not just performing well today. They are, in the language Heidrick & Struggles use, “delivering the profitable growth needed for today while driving transformation for tomorrow.”
That dual capacity — perform and transform simultaneously — is what the most ambitious CEOs are asking for. And it requires innovation to sit at the centre of the performance model, not alongside it.
Research consistently shows that while the vast majority of executives cite innovation as critical to their organisation’s future, a vanishingly small proportion are satisfied with the results they’re getting. The gap isn’t a strategy gap. It’s a leadership and culture gap. And closing it requires something more targeted than a performance culture framework built primarily around execution.
The Velocity Engine: Why Continuous Experimentation Is Non-Negotiable
There is a deeper mechanism behind the pace CEOs are describing — one that doesn’t get named often enough. Part of what makes innovation-led cultures move faster isn’t only solving the big problems more quickly. It’s what happens alongside that: the continuous running of small experiments that generate learning, and the way that learning creates velocity.
This isn’t a new idea. It is one of the most consistently validated findings in the literature on high-performing organisations. Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke, in his landmark work Experimentation Works (Harvard Business Press, 2020), documented how the world’s most competitive organisations have built systematic experimentation into their operating model — not into a dedicated innovation team, but into the way the business runs. Booking.com runs over 1,000 simultaneous experiments. A single experiment on Microsoft’s Bing search engine generated hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual revenue. Thomke’s finding, validated across multiple industries and contexts, is that organisations with mature experimentation capabilities dramatically and consistently outperform those without them.²
“Experimentation is how organisations learn at speed. And learning at speed is what creates the velocity that CEOs are actually describing when they talk about pace.”
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety — the conditions under which people are willing to speak up, take risks, and try new approaches — adds another critical layer. The organisations where people will surface a hypothesis, test it, and share what they learned regardless of outcome are the same organisations where psychological safety is strongest.³
Experimentation and learning are inseparable. And learning, compounded consistently over time, is what creates the velocity that CEOs are actually describing when they talk about pace.
Microsoft’s transformation under Satya Nadella offers one of the most compelling large-scale examples. The deliberate shift from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all” culture — with experimentation explicitly built into how leaders operate, not just how engineers ship code — is widely cited as a defining factor in one of the most significant corporate turnarounds of the last decade. The culture didn’t change because of a values programme. It changed because leadership behaviour changed, and experimentation became a visible, normalised part of how the organisation solved problems at every level.
The leadership behaviour that unlocks this is difficult to model consistently, even if it’s simple to describe: leaders must be visibly curious, openly uncertain, and actively involved in running small experiments themselves. Not delegating experimentation to an innovation function. Not approving a pilot from a safe distance. Actually participating in the process of testing, learning, and iterating — and making that behaviour visible to their teams.
When leaders do this, two things happen. First, it signals that the organisation learns by doing, not by planning. Second, it creates permission for everyone else to do the same. That permission, extended consistently across an organisation, is what builds a culture of continuous experimentation — and it’s that culture, more than any single innovation initiative, that generates the compounding learning velocity CEOs are asking for.
The practical implication is significant: building innovation-led, high-performing cultures isn’t only about solving the big systemic problems, though that work is essential. It’s about simultaneously developing leaders who are continuously running small experiments, building the habit of hypothesis-testing and rapid learning into how the organisation operates every day. The big problems and the small experiments aren’t separate workstreams. They’re the same capability, operating at different scales.
Why This Cannot Be Built in a Workshop
Here is where I will be direct, because I think the broader leadership development industry has a great deal to answer for.
Building the leadership capability to lead an innovation-led, high-performing culture cannot be done in a workshop. It cannot be achieved in a two-day offsite. It cannot be accomplished through a well-designed learning programme, however thoughtfully constructed, built around hypothetical scenarios.
I’ve spent two decades helping CEOs build leadership teams capable of shaping the future through high-performing, fast-paced, innovation-led cultures. And the single most consistent observation I can make is this: the leaders who develop genuine innovation capability do so by solving real problems, in real business environments, under real conditions — with sustained, expert coaching throughout.
“The learning that changes leadership behaviour happens in the work itself — not in a simulation of it.”
The reason is not complicated. Leading for innovation is a behavioural capability. It’s about how you show up in the moment when a team brings you a problem you’ve never seen before. It’s about whether you create the conditions for people to take intelligent risks, or whether your unconscious default is to eliminate uncertainty. It’s about whether your team learns from failure as a matter of routine, or whether failure still carries consequences that discourage the behaviour you need.
No hypothetical case study builds that capability. No workshop simulation creates the emotional experience of having to make a genuine call on a real problem with real stakes at risk. The learning that changes leadership behaviour happens in the work itself — not in a simulation of it.
Heidrick & Struggles’ own case study of ADI is instructive here. Engaging more than 5,000 leaders in development initiatives designed around practical steps signals something important: sustained, embedded development is what actually moves the needle.
The challenge is ensuring that the problems leaders are developing against are real, the conditions are live, and the coaching is expert and ongoing. Without those conditions, even the most well-designed initiative risks becoming what I’d describe as Innovation Theatre — organisations performing the activities of development without building the underlying capability.
Two Decades of a Different Approach
For over twenty years, I’ve worked alongside CEOs and senior leadership teams across sectors and geographies, using an approach that is fundamentally different from conventional leadership development. Rather than working with leaders on abstracted leadership challenges in controlled environments, I work alongside them on their actual strategic and commercial priorities.
The leadership capability develops as a direct consequence of solving real problems in real environments, with sustained coaching that can surface what’s happening in real time, challenge the default response, and help leaders build new instincts through genuine repetition.
The results are consistent and observable: organisations where the pace of problem-solving increases quarter by quarter, where leadership teams develop a repeatable ability to generate innovative solutions, and where the culture shifts — not because of a communications campaign or a values programme, but because leaders have genuinely changed how they lead, in conditions that demanded it.
The CEOs I work with are not looking for an inspiring offsite. They’re looking for a sustained intervention that builds the leadership capability their organisations genuinely need to grow. That’s innovation leadership capability. And it only develops through doing — in the real environment, against real challenges, over time.
What This Means for Your Culture Agenda
If Heidrick & Struggles’ framework gives you the architecture — purpose, strategy, culture, structure — then the question I’d add is: does your culture explicitly build the innovation capability your growth agenda requires?
For some organisations, a high-performance culture focused on execution alignment will be exactly what’s needed. Sheikh, Earle, and McLeod’s framework will serve them well, and I’d encourage any CEO to engage seriously with their thinking.
But for the organisations whose CEOs are using the language of pace, of innovation-led growth, of needing to build the future while running the present — the framework needs an additional dimension. Innovation capability isn’t a separate workstream. It belongs at the centre of your performance model: embedded in your purpose, expressed in your strategy, modelled in your leadership behaviours, and hardwired into the structures that govern how decisions get made and how problems get solved.
And building it will take more than a set of defined behaviours and a culture campaign. It will require sustained coaching, in the real environment, against real challenges. Over time. With people who have done it before.
That’s the work. It isn’t fast, and it isn’t easy. But for the organisations that commit to it, the compounding effect on pace, growth, and competitive advantage is profound. And that’s precisely the performance CEOs are asking for.