Disagree - I think it's easy to understand if a culture is broken and understand how to change it. It's actually just really hard to actually change it.
That last clause means you don’t understand how to change it, and your idea of how it’s broken is a just-so theory that doesn’t work. What looks like “broken culture” is nearly always referred pain from something else invisible. “Culture” can’t actually break. It’s not a machine.
In smaller orgs, the major issue is the board / C-suite not wanting to make hard choices: ie do a layoff + replace a lot of managers and start performance mgmt on ICs to turn the culture over. That's not an understanding problem, but a power/buy-in problem.
Culture can "break" as in get dysfunctional. The questions are: Are your values / org systems still valid for your current mission/strategy? Are you actually hiring people / running things according to these values? It's pretty straightforward to know these things actually.
You're describing certain problem diagnosis and solving behaviors that work for you in "culture" language, but it doesn't mean that's the "correct" way of thinking about them. It's a conceptual UI that works for you. IME it's a bad one that creates a cognitive tax.
As in believing in miasma theory might still lead you to do effective things like isolating yourself form others to avoid catching a disease etc. It's just inefficient and may not work if things don't coincidentally line up.
Sure, thinking in terms of values is not the only way to align current mission with functional capabilities. There is more than one kind of effective hiring-for-fit approach than looking for "cultural" alignment (eg. "who can get the currently bottlenecked projects unstuck").
Ie the "culture eats strategy" type delusion is a two-step conflation.
1. Step 1: confusing a set of behaviors that seem to work with the ONLY set of behaviors that COULD work
2. Step 2: confusing that set with the preferred abstractions you use to understand it
Like, I often use the OODA/Blitzkrieg model as the basis for consulting. Depending on how you look at it, the "pieces" of that theory could be interpreted in a "culture" way or not, depending on the personal preferred style of the executive.
We agree that the "culture eats strategy" thing isn't right, but strategy must have a sufficient culture to be able to work. However, having culture fit with strategy != good execution, the right team, etc., but it almost always drives those things.