When Culture Aligns, the Brain Follows—Key Reflections from Vanaya Fireside Chat: Leading Culture Transformation
- Vera at Vanaya
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 16 minutes ago
Why does culture transformation feel so hard to sustain, despite clear strategies, capable leaders, and good intentions? This question sat quietly beneath the surface of Vanaya Fireside Chat, “Leading Culture Transformation: Aligning Leadership, Systems, and People.” Rather than offering formulas or rigid frameworks, the session brought together senior leaders and practitioners who have lived through transformation, sharing what truly shifts behavior, belief, and performance over time.
The dialogue featured perspectives from Ainul Yaqin, Joni Raini, and a guest appearance from Willy Saelan, each drawing from their leadership experience across large, complex organizations, with facilitation by Lyra Puspa through a coaching-based and neuroscience-informed approach.
Executive Brief
Neural Alignment Matters: Culture is not symbolic. When teams share clear goals and purpose, their focus and decision-making align at a neurological level, reducing friction and increasing collective effectiveness.
Leadership Sets the Signal: Culture transformation accelerates when leaders consistently demonstrate ownership through decisions, behaviors, and systems, rather than relying on statements or campaigns.
Experience Shapes Belief: Bottom-up commitment grows when employees experience fairness, manageable workloads, and processes that enable meaningful work, reinforcing trust in leadership intent.
Psychological Safety Enables Performance: Organizations unlock stronger collaboration and better decisions when people feel safe to speak up, challenge ideas, and contribute with confidence.
Sustained Alignment Drives Change: Culture endures when leadership, systems, and people remain aligned over time, turning desired values into daily habits rather than temporary initiatives.
Why Culture Transformation Is Not Superficial
Lyra Puspa, President of Vanaya & Co., grounded culture transformation in neuroscience. Drawing from her field of expertise, she explained how teams aligned around a shared goal exhibit measurable brain synchrony. Neural patterns begin to align when attention, purpose, and intent are shared.
Culture, then, is not an abstract concept or a values poster on the wall. It shapes how people focus, decide, and act at both a psychological and biological level. Without alignment, organizations experience cognitive friction. With alignment, they unlock clarity, energy, and collective momentum. This perspective set the foundation for why culture transformation matters and why it must be designed intentionally.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Must Move Together
From an organizational perspective, Joni Raini, Human Capital Director at CIMB Niaga, reflected on the importance of balancing leadership direction with employee experience. Culture cannot rely solely on top-down mandates, nor can it be delegated entirely to grassroots enthusiasm.
Leaders play a critical role in setting direction, modeling ownership, and reinforcing priorities through systems and decisions. At the same time, culture only takes root when employees experience fairness, clarity, manageable workloads, and processes that enable their best work. When belief in leadership commitment grows from the bottom up, shared accountability becomes possible.
His reflections highlighted a simple truth. Culture sticks when intention and experience are aligned.
Psychological Safety and the Courage to Speak Up
Ainul Yaqin, former Board of Director at Unilever Indonesia and former Chief Marketing Officer at Gojek, shared reflections on building environments where people feel safe to speak, challenge, and contribute. Drawing from his experience in global organizations, he noted that Indonesian professionals are no less capable or insightful, but are often less confident in voicing perspectives, particularly in international settings.
Culture transformation, in this sense, requires more than encouraging innovation. It demands psychological safety, visible leadership commitment, and systems that consistently reward the right behaviors. When people feel heard and trusted, confidence grows, along with the quality of decisions and collaboration.
(All speakers shared perspectives from personal experience and do not speak on behalf of their respective organizations.)
A Shared Thread
Across neuroscience, leadership systems, and lived executive experience, one theme emerged clearly. Culture transformation succeeds when alignment is felt, not forced. Leaders must align their actions with intent, systems must reinforce desired behaviors, and people must experience meaning and safety in their daily work.
Want to Go Deeper?
These reflections capture only part of the dialogue. The full Fireside Chat features candid exchanges, participant questions, and additional perspectives, including insights from Willy Saelan, Chief Human Capital Officer of PT Telkom Indonesia Tbk, on leading culture and people transformation at scale.
Watch the full video here, or visit our YouTube Channel:
For those seeking grounded perspectives on how culture truly changes—not in theory, but in practice—the conversation continues.
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