Decades before winning his Nobel prize, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman found himself in a room of tough, grizzled Israeli Air Force flight instructors arguing for the benefits of positive reinforcement. He explained how praise for the cadet’s successes would improve their skills development more than punishment for their failures. Predictably, the instructors pushed back. Years of experience had taught them that screaming into a pilot’s earphones did the trick nicely. Praise? Not so much.

After a moment’s reflection, Kahneman saw the error. This was merely regression to the mean. The pilot’s unusually bad performance would naturally drift back to their baseline on the next attempt. It wasn’t the yelling; it was math. What looked like causation to the instructor was just a random process.

That clash between research-backed insight and lived experience plays out in organizations every day. We’ve gathered mountains of well-researched and reproducible evidence about what helps people learn, collaborate and lead more effectively. And over time, those insights have helped push work in a more human-centered direction: one that emphasizes meaning, trust and psychological safety. And while few would question whether these soft skills matter, many do wonder whether they produce tangible business results.

So, who’s right? Kahneman or the flight instructors?

The Shift to a Human-Centered Workplace

The shift toward a more human-centered workplace isn’t new. It’s had a place in executive conversations since at least the 1920s, when Taylorism began to lose its intellectual grip in management circles. Jump to the late 1990s and early 2000s, and ideas like emotional intelligence and strengths-based development went mainstream. By the mid-2010s, Google’s Project Aristotle helped popularize psychological safety, and culture increasingly moved from an HR issue to a CEO-level strategic concern.

Given the many years and dollars invested, we can imagine that this shift to a more human-centered workplace has produced statistically better business outcomes. Unfortunately, that is not the clear case.

For example, between the 1950s and early 1970s, labor productivity in the U.S. grew 2-3% per year. Since then, despite massive investment in leadership development and workplace culture, productivity growth in most advanced economies has slowed to below 1%. While worker satisfaction is difficult to benchmark, a 2024 Gallup report showed U.S. employee engagement to be at a 10-year low.

In theory, empowering, respecting and supporting workers works. In practice, generating evident business outcomes has not yet produced a definitive answer.

What Successful Culture Change Looks Like in Practice

Fortunately, there are places where the shift toward human-centered workplaces has succeeded.

When Google studied what made managers effective, technical skills weren’t the top predictor. The best managers coached, empowered, communicated clearly and showed genuine interest in people’s well-being. When Google scaled those behaviors across the company, they saw significant gains in retention, performance and satisfaction.

At Microsoft, Satya Nadella steered the company culture away from internal competition and toward growth, collaboration and empathy. This cultural shift coincided with smarter, faster innovation, which fueled their $3 trillion market cap turnaround.

These aren’t isolated examples. Many well-known companies have realized tangible, financial gains from inculcating human-centered approaches. So, the real story is not that human-centered culture doesn’t ever work, but that it doesn’t always guarantee success.

Why Culture Change Programs Fail

In the 1990s, Kodak had over 140,000 employees and more than 80% of the film market. They knew the digital future was coming. They tackled it with bold thinking and bottom-up innovation. They even built one of the earliest digital cameras. But the digital shift threatened the company’s core business model and fear shelved innovation. Collaboration happened. Creativity happened. Action didn’t.

This story highlights a common misstep. Kodak treated a culture of innovation more like an isolated marketing campaign. Google and Microsoft, by contrast, treated their culture initiatives like infrastructure.

When Google decided to level up their managers, they didn’t just distribute new guidelines. They embedded those guidelines into the very fabric of the company. Change wasn’t isolated; it was reinforced by data, systems and everyday norms. At Microsoft, Satya Nadella’s “learn-it-all” culture became more than a slogan. He reorganized teams under a unified structure, redesigned incentives to reward collaboration and made empathy a leadership requirement.

The lesson is that human-driven change is far more durable when integrated into the machinery of the business, from strategy to workflows to incentives to decision rights. Integration is critical. But on its own, it still isn’t enough.

Why You Can’t Scale Behavior Change Like a Training Program

In the 1996 movie Multiplicity, Michael Keaton’s character, Doug, clones himself to get more done. The first clone is fine. The second is a little off. By the time the clones start cloning themselves, the result is chaos. The essence of what made Doug, Doug gets lost. That’s exactly what happens when companies try to scale learning and change company culture by copying what worked somewhere else. You can’t clone change because change is not a product. It’s a practice.

In my role as a facilitator and learning specialist, I see people from learning and development (L&D) practitioners to business leaders productize human skills training every day. That approach treats culture and learning like software code — something you can deploy across an organization in perfect uniformity. When you treat culture and learning like software, what you clone is a bunch of recursively worse Dougs. The essence gets lost.

To be clear, I’m not against models or frameworks. A well-crafted model is essential; however, it should serve as a starting point, not the destination. Models are guides, not destiny.

Culture, Complexity and Control

When working with complicated systems, such as Swiss mechanical watches or computers, you can follow a procedure and expect predictable results. Complex systems, however, such as stock markets, the weather or traffic are not so straightforward. They are adaptive, nonlinear and full of feedback loops.

Culture is a complex system. That’s why rollouts are so often disappointing. We assume uniform adoption, predictable effects and linear progression when real change tends to spread in small, unplanned ways. Outcomes are as likely to emerge from local interactions, as top-down control.

A product team, for example, invents a simple, interpersonal rule. When tensions rise, anyone can say “pause,” and everyone takes five silent minutes to reflect and reset. The rule lowers defensiveness and improves decision-making. Word gets out. Other teams adopt it. And what began as a scribbled note on a whiteboard becomes a widespread practice.

In one regional office, a director begins hosting short Friday learning huddles. No slides, just storytelling. “Here’s something I learned this week.” Participation grows. Other departments ask to join. One department spins off a monthly cross-functional version. Another turns the idea into a Slack thread. The concept wasn’t rolled out. It rippled out. Not because it was mandated, but because it felt useful.

How Culture Really Spreads

The first step is to integrate human-centered practices into the company’s strategy, structure, tools, incentives and decision rights. Not as extras, but as part of how the business runs. That’s non-negotiable. Treat cultural initiatives like infrastructure.

The next step is to create the conditions for change. Business leaders and L&D especially should resist the urge to force fit. Empower experimentation and play after the training. Allow change to percolate up from within and over time. Sense what’s working and amplify what spreads.

Conclusion

The effort to put human attributes like morale and motivation at the center of work has been underway for decades. Results from a purely business outcome perspective have, at times, been less than kind. But the pattern is clear: Change takes hold when the behaviors organizations want are reinforced by everyday practices, incentives and leadership actions.

When these elements click, change doesn’t just happen. It sticks. It spreads. And when that happens, we all have ample reason not to give up on this human-centered workplace project just yet.