David James Olney

24 September, 2026

What would change our mind about why some people succeed? What would give us a reason to think differently about the person who leaves a demanding institution, or the person who stays? We might look for grit in one person and a lack of it in the other. But before we judge either of them, we ought to ask what sort of institution they entered, what it asked of them, and what help it made available.

Angela Duckworth has spent much of her career helping us ask the first question well. Her 2016 book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, became a number-one New York Times bestseller and eventually sold more than five million copies. Susan Cain praised its originality, while People commended its account of passion and practice. Its argument resonated because it gave a name to something many teachers, coaches and parents had seen: talent alone does not carry a person through years of difficult work. [1]

I enjoyed that argument. As someone who studies, teaches and applies Strategic Culture, I also thought it told half the story. Ten years later, Duckworth has supplied a compelling second half in Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. She shows how the circumstances around us help determine which version of ourselves turns up. Yet I still want to ask a question that sits beneath both books: who made those circumstances, and what did they believe they were doing?

What grit explains

In Grit, passion means sustained commitment to a long-term aim, rather than a passing burst of enthusiasm. Perseverance means continuing to improve and contribute when progress is slow, setbacks hurt and novelty has worn off. Duckworth argues that effort matters twice: it helps develop skill, and then puts skill to work. The point is not that talent is imaginary; it is that unused talent achieves rather little.

She describes four ways grit can grow: interest in the work, deliberate practice that stretches ability, a sense of purpose beyond oneself, and hope that effort can make a difference. Parents, teachers, teams and their expectations matter too. This is already a more social account than the slogan “just try harder” suggests. [2]

West Point helped give that account its force. Duckworth and her colleagues asked entering cadets about their commitment and perseverance, then followed who completed the academy’s demanding initial summer training, known as Beast Barracks. Their original 2007 research included two West Point cohorts and found that grit predicted retention. A later study of more than 10,000 cadets found that grit was the only one of the three measured entry attributes—grit, academic ability and physical ability—that reliably predicted completing that initial training. It predicted later grades only modestly: academic ability was much more informative about academic performance, and physical ability about physical performance. Grit and physical ability both helped predict graduation. [3]

That distinction matters. The studies establish a relationship between measured traits and outcomes among cadets in a particular institution. They do not establish that grit by itself produces success everywhere, or that changing West Point’s culture caused grit to become predictive.

What a situation explains

Situated asks us to inspect the world around the person. Objects within reach can make a good intention easier to act on or easier to abandon. Peers establish what feels normal and possible. Mentors teach, encourage and open doors. A wider culture tells us what people like us do, admire and expect of one another. Duckworth’s practical invitation is to arrange these influences more deliberately, and, when we lead others, to arrange them with care. [4]

I think this is an excellent bookend to Grit. It is also a welcome corrective to the habit of turning every institutional failure into a diagnosis of somebody’s character. Duckworth acknowledges that people have unequal freedom to change where they live or work. An instruction to “choose a better situation” can ring hollow when money, caring responsibilities or discrimination sharply limit the choice. [4]

But the order in which the book develops its ideas—personal space, peers, mentors, then culture—still bugs me. It is an inviting order for a reader looking for a first practical step. It can also obscure how often a group’s culture has already decided what goes in the room, who becomes a peer, who gets mentored and what counts as success.

Culture writes much of the situation

Strategic Culture began in security studies. In 1977, Jack L. Snyder argued that Soviet approaches to nuclear strategy had to be understood in light of historically and institutionally acquired ways of thinking, feeling and acting. An American planner who assumed that Soviet leaders would make the same calculations as American leaders could make a dangerous mistake. Snyder also warned that doctrine was not destiny: immediate constraints and temptations could still matter. [5]

Colin S. Gray later insisted that culture supplies a context for understanding strategic behaviour, rather than a machine that generates a single inevitable decision. History, habits, shared assumptions and preferred methods shape both how a group interprets a problem and what responses it regards as sensible. Culture also lives in what people do, not just what they say they believe. [6]

I am extending that security studies lens to other organisations here. A hospital or a business does not have a nuclear doctrine. It does have learned assumptions about whom it serves, whose knowledge counts, what people share, what a mistake means, and which results deserve reward. These assumptions are strategic when they guide the group towards its chosen ends. Calling everything “culture” would explain nothing; the useful task is to identify a belief, show how it shapes a routine or relationship, and test whether the result follows.

For my money, culture eats situation, passion and perseverance for breakfast. That is a deliberately impolite way of saying that people with power often design the situations in which everybody else must demonstrate their virtues. The evidence deserves a more careful claim: culture strongly shapes situations, situations and individuals can reshape culture in return, and neither gives us a perfect prediction.

The academy changed the question

West Point makes this relationship tangible. For much of its history, its approach to cadet character was punitive and attritional: construct a demanding gauntlet, then see who survives it. After the 1976 cheating scandal and subsequent reviews, academy leaders increasingly questioned whether filtering people was the same as developing officers. Superintendent Dave Palmer, serving from 1986 to 1991, pressed for a different approach. In 1991 West Point instituted the Cadet Leader Development System, giving each class progressively greater responsibilities and providing development in some cases where a failing cadet would once have faced expulsion. Its later leader development system widened responsibility to faculty and staff. Standards and the possibility of dismissal remained. [7]

This change preceded Duckworth’s early West Point cohorts in 2004 and 2006. It is a vivid example of an institution changing what it thinks it is for: from testing whether a cadet already has the right stuff towards actively developing someone who can meet demanding standards. The mentor’s job, a senior cadet’s relationship with a junior cadet, and the meaning of a setback can all change with that decision.

A later West Point study reported that only about three in every hundred cadets left during initial summer training across its cohorts, and about 81 in every hundred graduated. Those figures describe the academy during the study, not a controlled before-and-after test of the 1991 reforms. They cannot tell us how much of any improvement came from culture, admissions, training, wider Army changes or something else. What they do tell us is that the grittiness of the cadets was measured inside a deliberately constructed system. [3]

My argument is therefore more interesting, and less absolute, than “West Point manufactured grit.” Its leaders changed the institution’s purpose and relationships before researchers measured which cadets persevered within it. Any account of perseverance that leaves that design in the background is incomplete.

A hospital decides whom it serves

Toby Cosgrove’s work at Cleveland Clinic shows how this operates outside the military. A student asked him in 2006 whether the clinic taught empathy. It excelled at technical treatment, but he recognised that its patients could experience something quite different from excellence. The leadership made patient experience a strategic priority alongside clinical outcomes. [8]

That meant altering the system, not merely asking clinicians to be nicer. Cleveland Clinic created an Office of Patient Experience and a Chief Experience Officer. It reorganised care around patient needs, trained caregivers in empathy and service, reviewed patient feedback across units, made records more accessible, loosened visiting restrictions, and changed spaces and even parking priorities. Cosgrove reported improvement in patient satisfaction, while acknowledging more work remained. [8]

Consider the causal chain. Decide that the patient’s experience is part of quality. Put authority and measurement behind that decision. Give people shared language and training. Bring professions together around the patient and change the physical environment to fit. Peers now observe and reinforce different behaviour; leaders mentor towards different standards. Duckworth rightly sees culture at work here. Strategic Culture helps me describe why these many apparently separate changes fit together. The clinic changed what it was trying to be, and then redesigned everyday conditions to match. That is my interpretation of its transformation, not a claim that one reform alone caused every improvement.

A command learns to share

The military example is Stanley McChrystal’s transformation of the Joint Special Operations Command’s counterterrorism task force in Iraq. By 2004, its highly capable teams confronted an adversary that adapted faster than a compartmentalised hierarchy could respond. Information travelled slowly across organisational boundaries; permissions and professional silos became a strategic liability. [9]

McChrystal made sharing routine through daily operations and intelligence briefings, common information systems and liaison officers embedded with partner organisations. Interagency teams brought different forms of intelligence together. People close to events gained more authority to act on a shared picture. The task force accelerated the cycle of finding, acting on and learning from intelligence. McChrystal later reported a sharp increase in operational tempo, but that self-reported measure by itself cannot settle the larger moral or strategic assessment of the Iraq war. [9]

Here the change in culture was quite specific. Knowledge ceased to be a possession guarded by a unit and became a resource shared across units. Trust had to extend beyond the familiar team. A daily briefing was a physical and digital situation, but its usefulness depended on a prior judgment about what kind of organisation the mission required. That judgment changed the situation and, through repeated practice, the situation reinforced the judgment.

So what comes first?

My answer is culture, if we are asking who designed a situation and what they hoped it would produce. The first question for a leader is not “How do I find grittier people?” It is “What do our habits, incentives and relationships ask people to become?” A team can announce that it values initiative while punishing every mistake, celebrate collaboration while rewarding private control of information, or claim to put customers first while arranging the best parking for its executives. People learn the real answer quickly.

Still, culture is not a magic first cause. Snyder allowed for immediate pressures; Gray warned against treating context as a prediction. A mentor may challenge a norm, a new member may refuse it, and an external shock may make an old habit untenable. Leaders do not simply decree a new culture. They alter decisions, measures, responsibilities and spaces, observe what happens, and keep correcting them until a different way of working becomes credible.

Duckworth’s two books help us see the person and the situation. Strategic Culture asks us to see the institution that connects them. Before we tell somebody to persevere, we should find out whether the group has built a worthy purpose, a demanding path and the help needed to travel it. Then we can ask a better question of ourselves: what culture are we creating for the people whose grit we hope to see?

Sources and further reading

[1] Scribner, Grit publisher page: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Grit/Angela-Duckworth/9781501111105

[2] Angela Duckworth, Grit author notes: https://www.angeladuckworth.com/grit

[3] Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals” (2007): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17547490/ ; Duckworth et al., “Cognitive and noncognitive predictors of success” (2019): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6876246/

[4] Angela Duckworth, Situated preface: https://www.angeladuckworth.com/situated-excerpt ; Scribner publisher page: https://www.simonandschuster.net/books/Situated/Angela-Duckworth/9781668005941

[5] Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture (1977): https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2154.html

[6] Colin S. Gray, “Strategic Culture as Context” (1999): https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210599000492

[7] West Point Center for Oral History, Lance Betros interview: https://www.westpointcoh.org/interviews/character-and-intellect-colonel-lance-betros-and-the-changing-culture-of-leadership-at-usma-part-2 ; “Developing Military Leaders of Character”: https://doi.org/10.1108/JCED-06-2020-0007

[8] Toby Cosgrove, The Cleveland Clinic Way, chapter extract: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/-/scassets/files/org/patient-experience/experience-partners/the-cleveland-clinic-way-culture-change3.pdf ; Cosgrove, “One Question that Changed Our Organization”: https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/one-question-changed-organization-video

[9] McChrystal, “How the Military Can Teach Us to Adapt”: https://time.com/3904177/mcchrystal-team-of-teams/ ; Modern War Institute, “Rapid and Radical Adaptation in Counterinsurgency”: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/rapid-and-radical-adaptation-in-counterinsurgency-task-force-714-in-iraq/