In the first part of our series we introduced the Tiba 4-Achsenkreuz® (Tiba 4-Axis Cross). Today we look at the two axes that get the least attention in transformation plans. Not because nobody knows they matter, but because they are the hardest to work on: People & Mindset and Organization & Culture. Processes can be described, tools can be bought. Attitudes and culture can be neither described nor bought. They can only be developed. This article shows how to do that systematically.
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Behind the buzzword “mindset” lies something very concrete: the sum of the assumptions with which people approach their work. If a project manager believes that talking openly about risk damages a career, they will paint risks in a better light, whatever the new project management handbook says. If a manager believes that steering means control, they will undermine agile self-organization without meaning any harm. Three levers have proved themselves. First, clarify what is at stake: people rarely resist change as such, but almost always resist loss, of status, of feeling competent, of security. Anyone planning change should be able to name precisely who loses what, and take that seriously rather than talk it away. Second, competence before exhortation: telling people to “think more entrepreneurially” achieves nothing if the skills are missing; qualification is the underestimated half of every change program. Third, early, visible wins: mindset follows experience, not PowerPoint. Anyone who sees that the new way works changes their assumptions faster than any campaign could achieve.
Culture is what happens when nobody is watching. How are mistakes handled? Who gets recognition, the loudest self-promoters or the reliable deliverers? Are decisions made or escalated? These unwritten rules are more powerful than any org chart, because they steer behavior a thousand times a day. The mistake many transformations make is trying to change culture directly, with mission statements, values campaigns and posters in the corridor. But culture does not change through communication about culture. It changes through altered structures that make new behavior possible and old behavior unattractive: decision paths, incentive systems, appointment decisions, meeting formats. Anyone who wants to know what a company really values should look at its last ten promotions, not at its mission statement.
People and organization depend on each other. Individual willingness to change withers in structures that reward old behavior. Conversely, new structures stay empty if people do not meet them with competence and trust. In practice this means thinking of measures in pairs. A training course (people) needs the structural frame to apply what was learned (organization). A new role (organization) needs people who can and want to fill it (people). In the 4-Achsenkreuz we therefore check every measure for its mirror measure on the neighboring axis.
Typical signals on the people axis: high turnover in key roles, water-cooler cynicism about initiatives, silence in meetings on critical topics. On the organization axis: decisions require several levels of escalation, responsibility is diffuse (“we'll have to take that along”), formal processes are routinely bypassed. Such signals are not soft issues, they are early indicators. Ignore them and you pay later on the hard axes.
An anonymized case from practice shows how closely the two axes are intertwined. A company wanted to establish an open culture around mistakes and learning, with workshops, a mission statement and a great deal of communication. After a year nothing measurable had happened: project reviews still named no problems, and risks only surfaced once they had materialized. The cause lay not on the people axis but on the organization axis. The bonus system for department heads depended on green project traffic lights, and the last round of promotions had without exception rewarded managers whose units “caused no problems”. The workforce had simply understood the incentive system better than the authors of the mission statement. The culture only changed once two structural interventions were made: the traffic-light logic was decoupled from bonus relevance, and the management board began pointedly asking in reviews, “what is the biggest risk we have not talked about yet?” — and visibly nothing happened to the people who answered. Within two quarters the character of the reviews changed. No workshop could have achieved that.
Anyone who wants to take the two axes seriously can start small. First, draw the map of losses. For your most important current initiative, write down which groups lose what through the change (influence, routine, status, security), and develop an honest answer for the three biggest losses. Second, run the promotion check. Look at the last ten promotions and key appointments and ask which behavior they actually rewarded, then compare the result with your official values. The gap is your real culture. Third, close one gap in competence. Identify the single skill whose absence slows the change most, and set up a concrete learning format for it instead of another appeal.
People & Mindset and Organization & Culture are not the background music of transformation, they are its core. They become workable when you think about them structurally: take losses seriously, build competence, change structures so that new behavior becomes the rational choice. In the third part of the series we turn to the Processes & Methods and Technologies & Tools axes, the craft that rests on this foundation.
Qualification is one of the most effective levers on the people axis. Would you like TÜV certification for your team or your project managers, or deeper knowledge of our transformation model without certification? Register for our free live webinar and find out in detail why projects fail. The webinar is held in German.
Register for the live webinar on September 18, 2026 at 10:00 CEST here: https://event.webinarjam.com/4o8q9v/register/n5l6y7h5
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