Culture Isn’t a Vibe in the Room—It is the Room

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: culture isn’t just the vibe in the room—it is the room. 

If you’re designing a game, exercise, or even planning a simple meeting—especially for a multinational or even just a multi-departmental group—culture isn’t a side note. It’s the headline. 

Whether you’re in Detroit or Dubai, culture shapes how people show up, speak up, or silently plot their escape during your exercise. Ignore it, and you’ll get a room full of polite stares and players quietly wondering when the “fun” is supposed to start. 

So, what is culture in the context of games and exercises? It’s the invisible operating system:

The shared values, behaviors, norms, communication styles, power dynamics, and unwritten rules that shape how people interact, make decisions, and respond to challenges. 

Culture includes both the visible structures (hierarchy, language, formal processes) and the invisible expectations (what’s considered respectful, who’s allowed to speak, how risk or failure is perceived). It governs what feels safe, what feels awkward, and what players believe they’re “allowed” to do—even in a fictional game environment. 

When we say “design with culture in mind,” we’re really saying: design for how people actually behave, not how your cleverest mechanic hopes they’ll behave.

Let’s talk root causes. If your stakeholders hint—or flat-out say—that people may not be comfortable with improvisation or open-ended “free play,” listen. That’s not a red flag. That’s a blinking neon sign reading: “Warning: Culture mismatch ahead.” 

And that discomfort? It’s rarely isolated. It’s often a symptom of deeper issues in the POETE cycle—Planning, Organizing, Equipping, Training, and Exercising. These elements are usually analyzed after the fact in an After-Action Report, but they’re just as critical before the game begins. If planning is rigid, hierarchy rules the room, the tools are clunky, or training is just box-checking theater—then, of course, people freeze when you say “let’s play.” Culture is the invisible thread running through every POETE element. And that reflexive “we’ve always done it this way”? That’s not tradition. That’s organizational inertia. 

The solution? Don’t fight culture—design with it. Understand how it shows up in each POETE element. Use it to meet people where they are and build a bridge toward where you want them to go. Ignore it, and you’ll end up diagnosing the same root causes after the game, while your participants quietly wonder if they just sat through a live-action PowerPoint.

Here are some common cultural friction points—and ways to turn them into design features, not bugs:

Challenge: Hierarchical culture where junior staff won’t speak up

• Fix: Assign junior players as the spokesperson. Now they’re expected to speak—no need to challenge the real-world chain of command

Challenge: Discomfort with ambiguity or improvisation

• Fix: Use structured decision points or scenario cards with clear “if-then” options. You still allow for agency—but within a cultural comfort zone

Challenge: Reluctance to break consensus

• Fix: Build in anonymous input tools such as on-screen polling tools. Dissent surfaces safely, and the group avoids groupthink in a face-saving way

Challenge: Fear of public failure

• Fix: Start with warm-up rounds framed around curiosity, not critique. Normalize trial and error, and add a dash of humor if you can!

Challenge: “We’ve always done it this way” inertia

• Fix: Start by asking players to design their ideal future system. Then reverse-engineer how to get there through gameplay

Here’s the hard truth:

An uncomfortable player is a non-player. And in a game, a non-player is basically a broken joystick. 

The action stalls. The insight fades. The learning evaporates. And no facilitator—no matter how charming or caffeinated—can salvage a design that ignored cultural dynamics from the start. 

Design is empathy. And empathy means meeting people where they are—not where your brilliant mechanics wish they’d be. Culture isn’t a soft skill. It’s a structural one. Treat it like a design constraint, and you’ll end up with a far stronger, more human-centered game.