In my years as a coach, consultant and leadership practitioner, and through my studies at MIT Sloan, I’ve come to see culture as a living expression of leadership. The behaviours leaders choose to display, and the capabilities they cultivate, create the environment from which culture grows.
The MIT ‘4-CAPS+’ model – i.e. the four capabilities of Sensemaking, Relating, Visioning, and Inventing with the central anchor of Building Credibility – offers a powerful lens into how leaders can actively shape culture rather than passively hoping it emerges well (MIT Executive Education).
Below I explore each capability, and how mastering them (and anchoring them in credibility) better enables leaders to build and sustain a culture of energy, learning, alignment, and continuous improvement.
Credibility: The Core of Leadership and Culture
In the 4-CAPS+ model, building credibility isn’t just the added capability, it’s also the hub around which all others turn. Without it, even the most inspiring visions, strong relationships or innovative plans will struggle to take hold. Credibility means that leaders’ words align with their actions, that they keep commitments, listen to others, behave ethically and show integrity.
Culturally, credibility acts as the normative glue. When leaders ‘walk the talk’, they give shape to what is valued, tolerated and rewarded. When they don’t, culture fractures, cynicism seeps in, and informal rules take over, often suiting individuals or siloes rather than the collective good.
As a coach, I often begin by exploring how credible a leader is in the eyes of their teams, and where gaps exist between intent and lived experience.
Sensemaking: Mapping the present & Developing clarity amid complexity
Sensemaking is the cornerstone of leadership in complex, uncertain environments. A leader’s role is to gather insight – internal and external, quantitative and qualitative – and build a clear, constantly evolving map of what’s really going on.
In practice, sensemaking means scanning the landscape, gathering information, inviting diverse perspectives, surfacing hidden assumptions, and being willing to experiment and adjust. In a VUCA world, this capability often separates leaders who thrive from those who cling to the familiar “this is how we’ve always done it” mindset.
From a culture perspective, when a leader role-models sensemaking (listening, surfacing ambiguity, inviting disagreement and being curious), they send a signal to the organisation that uncertainty is acceptable, curiosity is encouraged, and learning is expected. Cultures that punish mistakes or demand immediate answers stifle that sensemaking. Over time, sensemaking capacity can become embedded and teams will begin to interpret the evolving environment themselves, reducing blind spots and accelerating adaptation.
When I work with leaders, I often focus on enhancing their teams’ shared sensemaking practices, including regular probing dialogues, “what are we missing?” forums, or after-action reflection loops.
Visioning: Painting the Aspirational Future
If sensemaking describes where we are now, visioning describes where we might go and why it matters. Visioning is the capacity to craft a compelling picture of the future, rooted in purpose and values, and to communicate it in a way that elevates people’s aspirations.
A strong vision acts as a beacon, aligning decisions and creating shared meaning / something to believe in. Vision helps embed cultures: When people understand what they’re working toward and why it matters, they’re more likely to act with consistency and live out the values.
From a leaders’ standpoint, visioning must be realistically actionable (inventing) and connected to reality (sensemaking). When leaders come up with a disconnected and fanciful vision, they risk backlash, cynicism and lack of engagement.
I often work with leaders to bring vision to life through storytelling, teaching them how to weave that vision into everyday decisions, performance language and team conversations. This is how vision moves off the wall and into the organisation’s rhythm.
Relating: Trust, Influence and Connection
Relating is about how leaders engage others, build trust, tune into emotional dynamics, listen deeply, bridge siloes and enable collaboration.
In the 4-CAPS+ model, relating is essential because you cannot lead alone. When leaders invest in empathy, inclusion and psychological safety, they create the social infrastructure for the culture they want to build.
In contrast, when leaders operate in isolation, hoard information, or avoid conflict and difficult conversations, negative microcultures, distrust and fragmentation grow – which can seriously hamper progress.
A recurring coaching theme is helping leaders move from advocacy (telling, persuading) to a more balanced approach of inquiry and advocacy – listening, questioning and inviting contribution. This balance surfaces hidden dynamics, strengthens relationship capital and builds the connective tissue of culture.
Inventing: bringing structure, process and innovation to life
As Thomas Edison is attributed with saying, “Vision without execution remains an hallucination.” Relating without structure leads to chaos. The inventing capability is about designing the structures, processes, metrics, governance, learning systems and innovations that convert or transform vision into reality.
Inventing often involved rethinking how work gets done – leaders strong in inventing are more willing to prototype, pilot, iterate, and test.
Inventing sends a clear message to the audience: culture is not just slogans and nice words; it must be embedded in how we do things around here. When leaders create structures that reward collaboration, learning and innovation, those structures help build the desired cultural norms. When processes are rigid or punitive, they suppress energy and progress.
In practice, small adjustments – changing meeting rhythms, decision forums or feedback rituals – can catalyse major cultural shifts. At Culture Consultancy, we help leaders identify and sequence these levers to lead change more effectively and move faster to value.
The dance among capabilities and understanding tensions
One of the key insights of the MIT model is that these four capabilities are complementary and dynamic. Effective leaders move among them; they don’t treat them as static roles (Prof John van Maanen, sociologist).
This cycling can surface tensions. For example:
- Visioning requires holding a future ideal, while sensemaking requires leaders to be grounded in the present.
- Inventing may push rapid change, while relating ensures inclusion and slower consensus building.
- Over-emphasising inventing without vision may lead to busy or unnecessary work.
- Too much relating without pushing boundaries can slow momentum.
In our experience, these tensions can often show up as subcultural tugs of war, e.g. fast vs safe, innovation vs compliance, central control vs autonomy. Good leaders should be able to move fluidly between these modes, adjusting to context. At Culture Consultancy, we help leaders understand their change signature, such as how they typically lean across these capabilities, and strengthen the less natural ones. We also help design mechanisms such as governance, forums and feedback systems that enable culture to flourish from within.
How the MIT 4-CAPS+ model helps leaders accelerate value through culture
To summarise how the 4-CAPS+ framework helps leaders accelerate value:
- It clarifies the roles leaders must play, and the centrality of credibility in anchoring influence.
- It frames culture not as background or purely HR territory, but as behaviour driven by leadership choices.
- It encourages leaders to navigate tensions deliberately rather than defaulting to comfort zones.
- It provides a shared language for developing collective capability and culture.
- It grounds culture in visible practices, structures, decision rights, feedback and storytelling.
Final thought
A desired culture doesn’t emerge by default, it is shaped daily by how leaders act, what they attend to and what they reward.
The MIT 4-CAPS+ model offers a disciplined, research-based roadmap for leading with intention, coherence and integrity, enabling leaders to build cultures that sustain change, rather than resisting it.
At Culture Consultancy, we work with leaders and teams to identify behavioural gaps, and design the shifts that build trust, agility and alignment, enabling organisations to move faster to value in any transformation.
How Culture Consultancy Can Help
At Culture Consultancy, we help organisations align strategy, culture and leadership so that change isn’t just a top-down directive but a shared and lived reality. We offer tailored leadership development programmes, working with individuals and teams to identify behavioural gaps, and design the shifts that build trust, agility and alignment, enabling organisations to move faster to value in any transformation. Built on insights from diagnostic data and grounded in real-world challenges, our workshops are practical, engaging and directly aligned with your business strategy and culture.
To find out more, book a call with one of our expert consultants.
About PJ Stevens
PJ is our expert in leading purposeful business change, working with business leaders using industry-leading change management methodologies to deliver outstanding commercial outcomes. He does this by harvesting the talent and knowledge that exists in people and teams, but too often lays dormant in businesses.
PJ has worked for clients such as Rolls Royce, Bunzl, EDF Energy, Clifford Chance and Shell, and has created programmes such as the Champions Programme for potential and new-to-role leaders in an international hotel group. He has also more recently run an accelerator coaching programme for middle and senior leaders and managers who want to make a faster and better impact in their teams and projects.
