Summary
This website is for leaders—whether guiding a small research team or steering an entire organization—who recognize that culture is the unseen force shaping behavior, engagement, and productivity. It is for those who understand that leadership is less about directing and more about creating conditions where people feel seen, valued, and inspired to contribute their best. At its core is the belief that a thriving culture emerges from the collaborative efforts of every team member, not from mandates or top-down directives.
Central to this vision is Culture Quest, a transformative tool paired with the Team Values Playbook. Together, they guide individual teams to define their values, align them with actionable steps, and cultivate a cohesive culture that reflects their collective spirit. The tool is elegantly simple, deeply practical, and intuitively designed—because building a meaningful culture shouldn't be complicated.
Workshops
Cultures in Action holds 90-minute workshops in cities to introduce and demonstrate Culture Quest and it’s Team Values Playbook. Meeting attendees are asked to bring their laptop to set up an actual Culture Quest session with values, actions, success metrics and leadership. From this they will generate a Teams Value Playbook.
Would you like to attend a workshop near to you? Let us know with the city name and we’ll let you know when we’re in the area.
Company Founder
Cultures in Action is a software company with a legend of creating easy to use meaningful business software.
The founder is Dr. Gerald Wagner. As a PhD from Iowa State, his career started as head of the research statistics department for a Fortune 100 company in Chicago.
That was soon followed as a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, where he was head of the Operations Research/Industrial Engineering group at the College of Engineering. While there he started his first software company that in 7 years became one of the top 25 software companies (Execucom Systems Corporation).
That was followed by Collaborative Technologies Corporation, WebIQ, and VisionQuest software company's before leaving Austin for Omaha, NE.
In Omaha, he was a Senior Scientist at the College of Information Sciences, University of Nebraska where he started the BSc degree in IT Innovation. While there, he was also a senior scientist at the Gallup Organization and was the Nebraska Technology Professor of the year.
During that time, Gallup published their book Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements. He loved the content so much that he changed careers and went to Bellevue University to start the Institute for Employee Wellbeing. What started there developed evolved into what is now Cultures In Action.
