Customer Impact Story

Building an Adaptive Biotech

From Vision to Culture in Action

The Challenge

Scaling Culture with Intention

A rapidly growing biotech pioneering cutting-edge science was at an inflection point. Despite exceptional talent and a shared mission, the organization faced growing pains common in scaling startups:

  • Gaps in information sharing that led to lack of transparency

  • Unintentional functional silos causing misalignment and unclear ownership

  • A blend of inherited habits and startup pace that lacked a unified way of working

Leadership recognized that sustaining innovation at scale required intentionally designing culture as a system and not leaving it to evolve on its own.  They also wanted to be inclusive and listen to the perspective of each person in the company.

Plumtree partnered with the organization to design a participatory culture journey built around observation, co-creation, and activation.

  • Listen & Diagnose - Uncovered strengths and friction points through interviews and focus groups 

  • Define core principles – Based on interview insights, together with the LT, we co-created three guiding principles to anchor how the company operates: urgency in action, always improving and growing together

  • Activate the system – Brought the principles to life through organization-wide experiments and practical solutions such as establishing shared expectations with reflection practices, mechanisms to solve problems in real-time, shared language and feedback loops to strengthen trust and safety.

Each activation was leader enabled, practical and embedded in the daily work, ensuring culture was lived, not launched.

The Approach

Co-Creating a Culture of Urgency, Learning & Shared Ownership

The Outcome

Making Culture an Operational Reality

In just a few months, the organization moved from diagnosing cultural friction to activating adaptive, energized culture where people are aligned, connected and driving forward as ONE TEAM.

  • Stronger alignment and shared ownership – Across levels- teams began proactively communicating, planning together, and solving problems earlier

  • Greater transparency and trust – shifting from firefighting to proactive collaboration

  • Culture embedded as a growth driver – Connecting how people work to how innovation advances

  • Faster, more focused delivery – as expectations, roles, decision rights, and collaboration norms became explicit