Culture Has a Topology. Are You Mapping It?

The truth is: culture has structure. It has form. It has topology.

And when it comes to cybersecurity, culture is one of the most important—and most overlooked—systems in the enterprise.

Culture Isn’t Vibes. It’s Infrastructure.

Security behavior doesn’t live in isolation. It travels across team dynamics, departmental norms, communication flows, values, beliefs, and power structures. Culture is what makes people decide whether to speak up, report an incident, follow a protocol—or ignore it.

In our blog Security Culture Is a System, Not a Vibe, we argue that culture should be treated like infrastructure: structured, observable, and ultimately manageable.

It’s not a feeling. It’s a system. And like any system, it can be mapped.

Culture Has Topography. Let’s Chart It.

Every organization has a unique cultural terrain. Some areas are resilient and aligned. Others are eroded by fatigue, friction, or distrust.

Our approach to mapping culture includes:

• Dimensions: such as trust in leadership, responsiveness to risk, transparency, and collective accountability. In anthropology and systems science, a dimension is a defining characteristic that helps describe a culture’s behavioral structure. These are not abstract values but measurable aspects of how culture is expressed and enacted. Dimensions give us lenses to assess where people align or misalign with policy, communication, or behavior expectations. Alongside dimensions, we also use attributes—observable markers that indicate the strength or weakness of those dimensions. Attributes help us see not only what a team values, but how those values show up in action under real-world pressures. Combined, dimensions and attributes create a map of your organization’s cultural terrain—one that you can navigate and improve with intention.

• Topological Features: peaks of resilience, valleys of silence, cultural dead zones, and cross-functional friction points. Friction, clash, change resistance, and cultural distance are not just cultural quirks—they are risks in themselves. These invisible tensions can slow down adoption, weaken engagement, and destabilize response under pressure. They take time and effort to measure, unpack, and develop strategies around. But this is exactly where real change and accelerated progress begin—by identifying where the tension lives, understanding why it exists, and designing tailored interventions that help people move forward with clarity and alignment.

• Signals: informal norms, workaround behaviors, disengagement, and misalignment between stated policies and real-world actions. In a modern human risk and resilience program, listening for these signals isn't a one-off effort—it must be ongoing. Organizations need to establish a strong baseline of cultural signals and then track shifts continuously over time. Annual culture assessments aren’t enough. Real progress requires regular check-ins, monitoring patterns, and layering in diagnostics to detect changes, breakdowns, or emerging friction. This programmatic approach to cultural insight is the only way to keep pace with evolving threats and adapt strategy to meet people where they truly are—not where we assume them to be.

When you map culture this way, you gain a powerful, data-driven view of where to intervene—and why certain behaviors persist despite training or policy.

Strategic Intervention Starts with Measurement

Imagine having a heatmap of risk acknowledgment across departments. Or a trust index showing where people feel psychologically safe to report issues. Or a communication signal map showing how risk messages are received (or ignored).

These are not just culture “nice-to-haves”—they’re operational risk insights.

• Identify high-risk zones of cultural breakdown
• Tailor messaging to audience perception
• Allocate training budget where it will actually shift behavior
• Report cultural progress to the board alongside technical KPIs

This is where culture becomes a performance asset, not a rhetorical one.

If You’re Not Mapping It, You’re Guessing

Without a map, every intervention is a shot in the dark. Every campaign is a hope, not a plan.

The organizations that lead in human risk resilience are already treating culture as a system. They’re layering cultural diagnostics into their security programs. They’re connecting culture metrics with outcome metrics. And they’re gaining the power to move the needle in measurable, meaningful ways.

Want to improve your culture? Start by charting the terrain.