What Jack Henry Taught Me About Culture and Resilience

August 19, 2025

Many resilience professionals/consultants seem to recycle the same tired advice: “To build resilience, you need to change the culture.”

That sounds inspiring, but let’s be real — it’s not how organizations actually work.

Culture isn’t Play-Doh you can shape with a half-day workshop. It’s concrete that’s been setting for decades. And even if you manage to chip away at it, it’ll harden back the moment leadership turns over or priorities shift.

The smarter approach? Fit resilience to the culture that already exists.

Why Culture Doesn’t Change (At Least, Not How You Think)

History wins. Culture is baked in through leadership styles, incentives, and unwritten rules that outlast org charts and rebrands.

Short bursts fade. You can get a temporary rally when executives preach resilience, but the default behaviors come roaring back once attention drifts.

Resistance is human. Employees don’t want to reinvent how they work just to satisfy another initiative. If resilience feels foreign, it won’t stick.

A Real-World Case: Jack Henry

I lived this firsthand. At Jack Henry, regulators had put the company under an agreement that made resilience a top priority. I had nearly three years to “change the culture.”

And for a while, it worked. Executives were engaged, resilience was in every conversation, and entire teams were built around it.

But the moment the agreement ended, resilience started to slide straight to the sidelines. The culture didn’t hold; it simply reverted to what it had been before.

Today, most of the staff we had in place then aren’t even there anymore — and I don’t think they have been replaced.

The “cultural shift” didn’t stick because it was never really a shift. It was a compliance response.

Fitting Resilience to Culture: How It Actually Works

1. Hierarchical, Command-and-Control Cultures

Think: financial institutions, airlines, government agencies.

Don’t fight it. Decision-making is top-down, so make resilience executive-driven. Build clear escalation paths, defined roles, and formal approval processes. Resilience becomes part of the command structure, not a grassroots movement.

2. Collaborative, Consensus-Driven Cultures

Think: tech companies, nonprofits, creative agencies.

Resilience needs to feel like a team effort. Use working groups, cross-functional committees, and shared ownership. Don’t mandate from the top; facilitate from the middle.

3. Fast-Moving, Innovation-Focused Cultures

Think: startups, SaaS companies, agile-driven organizations.

Resilience can’t slow them down. Make it lightweight, automated, and embedded in existing workflows. Use tools they already have (Slack, Jira, Teams) and keep documentation minimal. If it feels like bureaucracy, it’s dead on arrival.

4. Risk-Averse, Compliance-Heavy Cultures

Think: healthcare, pharmaceuticals, heavily regulated industries.

Resilience fits naturally here because it aligns with existing risk frameworks. Tie it to regulatory requirements, audit readiness, and compliance mandates. Frame it as risk mitigation, not culture change.

The Takeaway

You can’t change culture. But you can work with it.

The organizations that succeed at resilience aren’t the ones trying to transform their culture. They’re the ones smart enough to fit resilience into the culture that already exists.

At Jack Henry, I learned that lesson the hard way. The culture didn’t change. But if I’d built resilience to fit the culture instead of trying to reshape it, maybe it would have lasted.

That’s the approach I take now. And it works.