What KulturEKG rests on

Written by Henrik Stender · Updated 25 August 2026

The method was not invented for the occasion. Every single mechanism in KulturEKG rests on research that has existed for decades and that you can look up yourself.

What is new is the combination: using the value conflict as a measuring instrument rather than a conversation tool, and turning the distance between the declared and the lived hierarchy into a number.

Both halves are set out below. What is well documented, and what we cannot yet prove.

The five foundations

1. Values only show themselves when they cost something

The split between the values an organisation says it has and the ones it acts on has been described since the 1970s. Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1974) called it espoused theory versus theory-in-use. Edgar Schein (1985) placed it as the difference between culture's stated level and its tacit assumptions. More recent values research, particularly Shalom Schwartz's work (1992), further shows that behaviour is not steered by the single value but by the relative weight between several values competing for the same choice. That is why KulturEKG measures rank order rather than individual values.

2. What one ought to do and what one believes others do are two different things

Robert Cialdini and colleagues distinguished in 1990 between injunctive norms, meaning what is considered appropriate, and descriptive norms, meaning what people actually do. The two do not always pull the same way, and it is the descriptive norm that most often steers behaviour. That is why every dilemma in KulturEKG is posed through three lenses rather than one question.

3. People can misread each other collectively

Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller showed in 1993 that a group can consist of people who each disagree with a norm while all believing they stand alone. The phenomenon is called pluralistic ignorance, and it has since been documented in organisations, including boardrooms, where it produces silence rather than objection. The measure for it is the distance between what you would do yourself and what you believe the majority does. KulturEKG uses that distance to tell a value gap apart from a coordination gap.

4. Pressure moves what we do without moving what we believe

Research into what Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick (2004) called ethical fading describes how time pressure, loss risk, competition and loyalty lead people to act against their own values without noticing. Related research shows that we judge ourselves by what we believe we ought to do but act on what the situation pulls us towards. That is why KulturEKG does not measure at rest but raises the pressure systematically.

5. Forced choice yields information where scales yield politeness

Asking people to choose between two equally respectable options is a known remedy against social desirability and ceiling effects, and it is widely used in psychometrics. The method for converting many pairwise choices into a scale with distances goes back to Louis Thurstone in 1927 and was later formalised as the Bradley-Terry model (1952). KulturEKG uses the same mathematics, but on an organisation's own values instead of on people.

Where we stand on other people's shoulders

The dilemma is not our invention. For more than three decades Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner have worked with culture as the way groups reconcile dilemmas, and have built an extensive collection of value dilemmas. Their work is used to understand and reconcile cultural differences, primarily between countries and between organisations.

We do something else with the same device. Here the dilemma is not a conversation but a measuring instrument, and it is not about general cultural dimensions but about the company's own five value words.

Established tools also exist that measure a distance between current and desired culture. Our distance is a different one: between the hierarchy leadership has signed off on and the one the organisation displays in concrete choices.

What we cannot yet prove

The instrument is under validation. That the individual parts are well documented does not mean the whole is. Those are two different claims, and we should only be allowed to make the first.

Three things are concretely missing, and we are working to obtain them:

• Reliability: does the instrument give stable results when repeated in the same organisation with nothing changed?
• Discrimination: does it separate organisations we already know by other means to be different?
• Predictive power: does the size of the gap relate to something that matters in practice, for example staff turnover or trust in leadership?

Until those questions are answered, every single report states that the instrument is under validation and what therefore cannot be concluded. We prefer that to borrowing credibility from research about something else.

Assumptions kill companies. Evidence scales them. That applies to our own tool as well.

How we protect the measurement from itself

Forced choice gives relative numbers

We can say which value beats which in your organisation, not whether a value is honoured highly in absolute terms. That is why we never compare the content of your numbers with other companies', only the size of the gap.

Differences between two numbers are less certain than the numbers themselves

That is why we always show the parts of the gap alongside the gap: the declared hierarchy, the lived one, and the distance. Never the distance alone.

An average hierarchy can hide that nobody agrees

That is why we calculate how much the house agrees and show it alongside the result. If agreement is low, the conclusion is a different one: you do not have one prioritisation, you have several. That is a finding, not an error.

A dilemma measures what people find appropriate

Not necessarily what they do. That is why we also ask what most people here would actually do, and request one concrete situation from the past month.

Do you want to check it?

We are happy to send the method note with calculation rules and references to anyone who will read it. That also holds if you disagree. Especially if you disagree.

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