Kanthi Ford: How to Deliver Culture Change Across Energy, Utilities & Tech
Culture change campaigns in organizations often fizzle out in a predictable pattern. First, workshops take place. Colorful posters go up on the walls. For a few months, the graph of employee sentiment ticks upward. A year and a half later? The organization quietly slips back into its old ways. Kanthi Ford, who advises senior leadership across the energy, utilities, and technology sectors, judges this matter by a very strict standard. She believes that change can only truly be called ‘real’ if it is sustainable. So, well after the consultants have left, the culture continues improving. Today, this benchmark is far more critical than it was five years ago. The reason is clear: the very organizations facing the most intense pressure to transform possess an inherent structure that stands as an obstacle in the path of change. Utilities are expected to adopt AI overnight, cut carbon emissions, and manage workforce transitions. Yet their entire operational framework is built for stability and calm. This gap between what an organization aspires to become and the pace at which it can practically move is, in reality, the biggest risk on its balance sheet. The tragedy is that no one is accounting for it.
What Sustained Change Looks Like
In Kanthi Ford’s view, the measure of success is not abstract. It is tangible human behaviors. She says: “It will look like behaviors have changed. People are interacting differently, and success is when the change is still evident after two years.” The examples she gives are small, everyday, and unpretentious. Like a gas company field engineer putting aside pressure from schedulers to halt work purely out of safety concerns. Or an employee choosing to reporting a near-miss incident so the organization can learn from it, rather than simply filling out a form as a bureaucratic obligation. In the technology sector, as we have seen recently in AI, the equivalent is a company holding back a product launch because the risk-reward trade-off of rushing has not yet been determined.
Across all these examples, there is a common denominator: each carries an immediate cost, while the real payoff remains hidden from view until later. That is precisely what makes them a reliable yardstick. Anyone can adopt good slogans and make grand claims. But no one willingly takes a hit to their pocket or their time unless the organization’s environment supports it. Here, Ford sets another rigorous condition: who is repeating this new behavior? According to her, change is recognized as genuine “when you see supervisors, middle managers, as well as the executive leaders, repeating new behaviors constantly without being prompted.” Senior executives reciting a written script proves nothing. The real shift happens when no seniors are in the room, and frontline supervisors choose of their own accord to practice this new approach.
Why Utilities Are The Hardest Case
When asked where the toughest challenge lies among these three sectors, Ford answered without batting an eye: utilities, without a doubt. The tech sector moves at a rapid pace, with employees constantly coming and going, so the capacity to absorb change is naturally present there. The energy sector, too, has weathered investor crises, new discoveries, and shifting risks, giving it a history of adapting to circumstances. But utilities were founded on the exact opposite principles: assets with decades-long life cycles, historical monopolies, powerful unions, and regulators who, in Ford’s words, are “encouraging stability, not innovation.” The result is a mindset familiar to everyone in the industry: this is the way we have always done things.
Here, the organizational structure complicates the culture problem even further. The old projections of population and demand on which these companies were built have now all been proven wrong. Communities have sprawled, populations have surged, yet corresponding strategies for the future were never conceived. Meanwhile, veteran employees are retiring, taking all their accumulated institutional knowledge of running the systems with them. Ford notes: “So you get an organization that doesn’t have that agility to restructure because there hasn’t been enough thought about the future or enough knowledge about the infrastructure.” There is little hope of resolving the issue through the existing leadership, because many also rose through the ranks of that very same mould. “Classically, they would have been engineers. Engineers don’t like uncertainty. That’s part of the DNA.” Despite all this, Ford has not given up on these organizations. She makes it clear that externally imposed change never lasts. The only effective path is the arrival of a new leader who understands this imperative, takes an honest look at their culture, and then deliberately puts a few fundamental principles into practice.
Making Behavior A Metric, Not A Value
The approach Ford advocates is very narrow in scope. Not exhaustive lists of values that no one practices, but merely three or four clear behaviors visible at every tier, from the C-suite down to the frontline worker. Listening attentively is one such behavior, which means understanding the underlying implications behind what is being said. Another behavior is treating one another with respect. She says: “They sound really aspirational, but it’s not asking a lot. People can be quite disrespectful without considering it.” The real discipline lies in keeping this scope narrow. Four behaviors can be tracked, taught, and practiced. What is anyone supposed to do with twenty behaviors?
Then comes the step that most companies skip. Ford insists that these behaviors must be tied directly to compensation and incentives. Just like other core key performance indicators (KPIs), they should be formally assessed and held accountable in quarterly board meetings. “At the end of the day, people do respond to being paid.” The moment this link is broken, all the effort goes down the drain: “That’s the bit that companies often overlook. They sort of go in and it’s all a little bit wishy-washy.” This same principle explains why the adoption of AI has been so slow. Velocity demands a culture where experimenting, failing fast, and moving forward is openly permitted, rather than merely persevering with a poor decision. Ford wants boards to view failure as an intriguing experiment rather than something to be penalized, but for now, such conversations rarely take place. Her final takeaway captures the true essence of the entire matter: everyone wants AI to speed up operations, but no one is talking about human judgment and the quality of decision-making, even though everything in utilities is ultimately consumed by human beings. The pace of a business is rooted in its output. Gas moves through a pipeline at 25 miles per hour, so decisions can move at that speed. Technology moves at the speed of light, and expectations are set accordingly.
To learn more about culture, leadership, and organizational transformation across the energy, utilities, and tech sectors, follow Kanthi Ford on LinkedIn.
