What Culture Does Performance Need?
Performance and culture are often seen as opposites; as if high performance can only be achieved through control, pressure, and rigid structures. However, reality shows that sustainable success arises in working cultures that foster trust, responsibility, and openness. Performance is not enforced but enabled. Against a backdrop of increasing complexity and uncertainty, organizations must consciously shape their culture to remain effective. It is about attitude, leadership, and collaboration that connect ambition and effectiveness - without losing sight of values. Over 850 people accepted the Otto Group’s invitation to join the digital culture change conference #CDX25 (Culture Development Experience) on June 23 2025 to discuss how organizations can develop a performance-oriented culture and how they can secure performance under uncertain conditions without losing sight of their core values.
How corporate culture can effectively serve as a performance booster was demonstrated right at the beginning of #CDX25 by the new CEO of the Otto Group, Petra Scharner-Wolff, and the new board member for Finance, Controlling, and HR, Katy Roewer, in the Morning Keynote. Together, they critically examined the prevalent, often negatively connoted understanding of performance culture - associated with control, long working hours, and high pressure. They contrasted this with a different perspective: performance culture is not merely about increasing efficiency but about a collective striving for the best - with a passion for performance, genuine responsibility, and a healthy organization as the envisioned goal.
In the eleventh year of the cultural change process, the Otto Group continues to foster discussion spaces to focus on attitudes and behaviors and to drive transformation. "Creating a culture of performance" is one of the five pillars of the new group-wide strategic agenda. This is because cultural change is not a completed project but is rather an ongoing process that continuously reaches new levels - including in terms of collaboration, decision-making capability, and organizational learning. This requires new perspectives, changed attitudes, and the courage to question existing systems and frameworks. A clear insight: in a true performance culture, discussions do not go in endless loops - but decisions are made, progress is achieved, and collaboration is shaped together.
Cultural Change as a Collective Task
The Science Lunch with neuroscientist and bestselling author Maren Urner also provided important impetus for the further strategic development of our working culture. From a neuroscientific perspective, she illustrated how entrenched thought patterns can be dislodged - and how new perspectives can help to navigate complexity rather than facing it helplessly.
In the Deep Dive Talk, Katrin Behrens (Otto Group one.O), Sebastian Pollmer (EOS), and Torben Hansen (bonprix) discussed how the current generational change in leadership is not only linked to personnel changes, but also to cultural transformations. It became clear that performance today is not played off against culture - but can be enabled through it. More than 60 members of the Culture Change Collective took part in over 30 other sessions: they addressed current questions regarding leadership, communication, hybrid work forms, organizational resilience, the use of AI, change processes, as well as international perspectives. The focus was on openness, practical relevance, and the exchange of successes as well as hurdles - driven by the shared commitment to effectively shape transformation.
The Culture Change Collective
The #CDX is a format of the Culture Change Collective, where over 1,600 people from the fields of leadership, cultural change, transformation, communication, people, strategy, organizational development, and project management exchange and learn from each other across organizations about current challenges of cultural transformation. From the attitude of actively shaping change, a growing network has emerged in recent years.
