As a regulated financial services company, Wonga has a number of clearly-defined policies covering aspects of its operations from marketing to customer services to software engineering. The goal of these is to ensure proper care is taken and that mistakes are avoided.

Other organisations, notably Facebook, rely heavily on culture to avoid issues. Anyone can directly access their servers and make changes, but their culture is such that no one ever does.

Culture is flexible, robust to change and everybody is empowered to make the decisions, but it’s tough to build and maintain. Policies are centralised and inflexible, however they may be easier to scale.

Comparison

	Culture	Policy
Creation	Culture must be created early and grow with the company. This is very hard to get right.	Policies must be developed for a wide range of activities if they’re to be useful.
Ease of change	Changing your organisation’s culture is painful and may be impossible, because it means changing the values of your people.	Policies must be developed for a wide range of activities if they’re to be useful.
Hiring	Hiring is one of the key activities for building and preserving culture. Each new hire must be selected for culture or indoctrinated when they join. Finding candidates with culture fit slows down the hiring process.	New hires are trained on the policies. Wonga uses quick and easy online training to do this for company-wide policies.
Preventing issues	If you have a culture of investigating issues, preventing them before they happen and baking quality in to your ways of working, then you may be able to avoid a wide-range of complex issues. If your culture is gung-ho, you’re in trouble.	A familiar, sensible policy can be a valuable thing: a checklist to make sure you’ve been through the right steps. It can be a band-aid over a poor culture.
Resolving issues	Likewise, cultures are different. Your team may drop everything and fix defects immediately, they may track them and fix them in time or they may ignore them completely.	Policies should describe what issues might occur, how to resolve them, and how quickly they should be resolved.
Enforcement	Culture can be uneven, team X and Y may disagree on what steps to take to announce a new version will be released.	Well-written policies are easy to enforce, by simple tools in some cases, e.g. JIRA for issue-tracking workflows.
Communication	Once embedded, culture is everywhere all the time.	Policies are published, but can be difficult to read and apply.
Flexibility	Cultural values give everyone tools to understand new situations and solve new problems.	Policies are comprehensive but inflexible, attempts to apply them to new situations can result in fear, uncertainty and doubt. Only their authors are really empowered to solve new problems (creating bottlenecks for other people).