Creative Studio Berlin

The client

Creative Studio Berlin (CSB) is a Berlin-based studio that designs and delivers immersive experiences, theme parks, attractions, museums, exhibitions, and brand environments, for clients worldwide. Over a short period the studio had roughly doubled in size to around fifteen people, moving from a tight founding group to a larger organization while keeping the close, familial character it was known for.

The challenge

What started as four people around one table grew to fifteen, with six new hires arriving in just eight months. Creative Studio Berlin's culture had been built on close relationships and shared instinct rather than documented structure, and that had served the studio well at a smaller size. As it scaled, the same pattern meant more decisions running through one person, onboarding happening by osmosis rather than by design, and the studio's know-how living in people's heads rather than anywhere written down.

None of this had yet reached clients. The founder recognized the trajectory before it became a visible problem and brought in outside help while the risk was still structural rather than realized, which is the cheaper time to act on it.

The approach

I conducted a culture assessment combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Across the full team I ran the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), a validated tool developed by Cameron and Quinn based on the Competing Values Framework, measuring both the culture as it is experienced today and the culture the team would prefer. Alongside the survey I conducted a series of structured interviews with the team and with the founder to surface the detail behind the numbers.

What the assessment revealed

CSB's culture was strongly relationship-led, a family model the team valued highly and wanted to preserve. The clearest collective wish was to ease away from pure deadline-and-delivery pressure and protect more room for creative experimentation, alongside a modest appetite for greater structure and clarity.

The central tension was one common to studios that scale quickly. The relationship-based operating model that served a small founding team, in which much of the studio effectively ran through its founder, had not scaled with the headcount. A useful distinction emerged: the creative vision, which clients engage CSB for, sits rightly with the founder, while a growing operational and decision-making load could be distributed to a capable team ready to carry more of it. Supporting structures had lagged behind the studio's growth, with onboarding, role definitions, and everyday policies still undocumented, carried in people's heads rather than written down.

What came next

None of this called for an overhaul. It called for writing down what already worked well enough to survive being said out loud, and for building the studio's capacity to run without one person holding all of it in their head.

Near-term

A small number of concrete, achievable fixes, starting with the one every interview raised unprompted: a clear, shared line on how travel time during team events gets logged.

Already underway

• An onboarding guide built with the team's own input, so how the studio works gets handed over on purpose rather than picked up in passing.
• A working session for the team to put their roles on paper as they actually are today, not just as they were first hired.

The longer shift

Underneath the structure is a slower, cultural change: growing the team's own comfort raising a concern early, while it is still small, and their own instinct to carry operational load themselves, across the studio, not only on the projects they own. That part does not install with a document. It is the change that makes the documented systems actually stick once they exist.

How I work

I treat culture as something to be read before it is changed, and changed by degrees rather than by decree. My aim is to give an organization an honest, evidence-based picture of itself rather than to impose a model, to protect what already works, and to hand back a practical path it can own.

A culture assessment is often where the work starts rather than where it ends. It lays the groundwork for what usually follows: organizational and structural change, leadership development as a company scales, and the performance measures that show whether the change is working. My focus throughout stays the same: change an organization can carry on its own, grounded in evidence, and built to last rather than to look good on paper.