Cyber Security Isn’t Just Tech — Culture Is the Missing Link
- John R Childress
- Nov 6, 2020
- 3 min read
Organisations invest heavily in cyber security tools, compliance frameworks and incident response, yet breaches keep rising.
The reason isn’t lack of technology — it’s that organisations still treat cyber security as purely a technical or compliance challenge.
What’s missing is culture: the conditions and drivers shaping how people actually interact with technology, policies and risk. When culture is understood and measured properly, leaders can identify hidden risk and strengthen resilience — not by blaming people, but by fixing the underlying system.
Why Technology Alone Isn’t Enough
Modern cyber security solutions — from firewalls and EDR tools to automated detection and monitoring — are essential.
Compliance frameworks help standardise expectations. Yet despite growing investment in both, breaches and attacks continue to escalate globally. This divergence suggests a structural gap: technical controls and compliance processes don’t guarantee secure behaviour.
Part of the reason is cognitive: leaders often think of “culture” as attitudes and behaviours. But behaviours are outcomes, not causes. Understanding culture requires looking at the conditions and drivers that produce those behaviours.
What Culture Really Is — and Why It Matters
Traditional culture assessments tend to focus on observable elements — beliefs, values, behaviours.
But a meaningful culture diagnosis goes deeper, into the system of work practices, policies, processes, leadership actions, peer dynamics and organisational goals that shape how people act.
In this view:
Culture isn’t just “how people think” — it’s a network of influences that make certain behaviours more or less likely.
Security outcomes emerge from the interaction between people, technology and policy, not any single domain in isolation.
Leaders who focus on drivers (conditions) instead of just outcomes (behaviours) gain leverage over hidden risk.
This systemic perspective aligns with wider academic definitions — for example, cyber security culture is described not as a set of attitudes or compliance metrics but as a layered set of knowledge, values, assumptions and norms that manifest in behaviour toward security in everyday work contexts.
Why Traditional Culture Assessments Fall Short
Most culture assessments evaluate what people say or do, such as survey responses or observed behaviours.
But these are outputs, not inputs. They reflect the symptoms, not the causes, of how risk is actually manifesting.
A more powerful approach:
Map how internal factors influence behaviour
Quantify their relative impact
Identify where changes will have the greatest effect
Track outcomes over time
This shifts culture from a vague “people problem” into a measurable system of organisational risk and opportunity.
What Senior Leaders Should Ask
Leaders who want to stop treating culture as a buzzword and start treating it as a business system might consider:
What work processes or policies unintentionally incentivise risky behaviour?
How do tools and compliance frameworks interact with daily tasks?
Where does leadership attention focus — on symptoms (incidents) or causes (conditions)?
What leading indicators (not just lagging ones) tell us when culture is weakening?
As more organisations recognise that culture isn’t an HR initiative but a business condition, the value of culture analysis rises — not just for cyber security teams, but for boards and executive leadership.
Where Culture Meets Action
If culture shapes security outcomes, the question becomes: how do leaders make it visible, measurable, and actionable?
That’s precisely where systemic models — ones that map organisational drivers and root causes across people, policies and technology — help translate insight into impact. When you understand why certain behaviours occur, you can prioritise the highest-impact changes and track progress over time — turning culture from a slogan into a system.
Key Topics Covered in This Article
Cyber security culture and systemic risk
Why technology and compliance alone fail
Cultural drivers of secure and insecure behaviour
Leadership visibility and cyber resilience
Measuring culture beyond behaviours
Turning culture insight into action
About PYXIS Culture Technologies
PYXIS Culture Technologies helps organizations understand and improve the cultural drivers of performance, safety, and cyber resilience.
By combining deep research, operational experience, and advanced culture analytics, we help organizations close the gap between cyber strategy and everyday behavior.
Our approach is effective:
We treat culture as a systemic business issue, not an HR initiative.
We identify key internal business practices that create cyber security risks and provide effective solutions you can immediately implement
We link your cybersecurity culture to business financial metrics, showing a clear ROI for strengthening your cybersecurity culture.
Connecting the dots
See how PYXIS models What-If scenarios to prioritise the fixes that move your numbers.