# Culture stops you carrying stones across the field

Published 29 January 2026

[Originally posted on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7422633195491454976/)

![Cartoon of a sweating, proud figure beside a pile of stones moved from a now-empty circle, under a banner reading "Project complete! All stones relocated".](https://ovchyn.me/api/media/file/culture-stops-you-carrying-stones-across-the-field-1.jpg?prefix=production)

What does company culture actually do in practice? 🤔

Recently, I wrote about how hard it is to sell culture as a competitive advantage — even though culture is exactly what our long-term clients highlight as our superpower. But that got me thinking further. What does culture actually ***do***? 🤔

There's this image that keeps coming back to me. A worker comes to you and says: "*I worked so hard this week. I carried this whole pile of stones from one end of the field to the other*."

And I want to ask: why did you carry them?

What was wrong with them being there?

He did the work. He got exhausted. But **the work brought zero value**.

This happens with clients all the time. If you don't hear them, if you don't understand what really needs to be done, you can work incredibly hard, burn yourself out completely, and still deliver the wrong thing. Your performance would be zero.

**I know this for sure — I've done it many times myself**. 😅 Listened to the client but didn't really understand, built the wrong thing, and then felt upset that my genius wasn't appreciated.

What the culture I'm trying to build at Speed and Function does — or at least what I think it does — is bridge the gap between what's said and what's actually needed. So that the people who execute actually understand what they're executing and why. First understand why something needs to be done, then do it.

**We do it through constant feedback loops, through those small, uncomfortable conversations that most teams avoid**. Through actually listening instead of defending. 🎯

So yeah, culture is what stops your team from carrying stones across the field and calling it a productive sprint. Took me some years to figure that out. 😅