Following a long period of research, piloting and market validation we have recently launched the Culturlabs brand. Culturlabs is a sister company to Social Machines focusing on helping commercial, public and third sector organisations improve their culture and sub-cultures. See Culturlabs – for more information about our thinking and approach to organisational culture change.

Currently we are focused on cyber security culture change. We have recently designed, built and launched Temperature – our all-in-one organisational security culture measurement, management and change platform. It’s evidence-based, people-centric and provides tangible cyber security culture scores.

“We believe the Temperature platform will provide a step change for us in understanding, measuring and improving our cyber security culture.”

(Cyber culture and human risk senior manager, Global FMCG organisation)

Temperature can help you identify and tackle the wider ‘root causes’ of human error and to reduce critical areas of your human cyber risks. Contact Nick Wilding at nickw@socialmachines.co.uk to find out more.

As Andy Hodgson, the former CISO at MS Amlin, Mundipharma and QinetiQ and VP of Security, Risk & Resilience at the BT Group has said: “As a CISO I’ve been looking for a solution like Temperature for many years. It helps organisations move beyond security awareness to actually understanding and shaping the conditions that drive security behaviours. Making culture measurable in this way could be a real game-changer for managing human cyber risks.”

We have also launched our ‘Culture Matters’ newsletter – (3) Culture Matters – February 26 – Culturlabs’s Substack, providing you with new insights, interviews and articles about organisational culture change and the role behavioural science can play in helping in that transformation. We’d love to hear your thoughts about Culture Matters – drop us a line at hello@culturlabs.com.

We will keep you up to date with our plans to develop and launch new Temperature applications for Health & Safety culture and AI Maturity culture during 2026.

At Culturlabs we’ve been researching, testing & validating our thinking about organisational culture for a long time. It’s clear that culture can often appear intangible. What is it, what can you do to change it, and how can you measure it? But leading organisations understand that a strong culture is their superpower. A force that helps them innovate, stay secure and sustain growth better than their industry peers.

Our goal at Culturlabs, which is being launched soon, is to help organisations and their employees tap into this superpower. Culturlabs is part of Social Machines, and our approach is always evidence-based, people-centric and measurable.

Our initial focus is to deliver a new product that helps organisations understand what makes a positive security culture and how they can improve it to influence stronger employee security behaviours. The product is based on 3 years of extensive research and analysis of what security means to people and how to effectively shape security to fit their needs. It will help you measure your security culture, understand these ‘root causes’ more effectively, what you could do to mitigate them and to track the positive impact of change on your security culture. Contact us to learn more.

Improving the management of cyber risks in organisations is crucial for better cyber security. However, for some time the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has been aware of a ‘skills gap’ in how cyber security risk is overseen at the board level. To explore this more fully, NCSC commissioned Social Machines to obtain a better understanding of this perceived ‘lack of board engagement with cyber security and cyber-related decision-making’.

The research included interviews with board members, CISOs and other cyber security leaders in medium to large organisations. You can read NCSC’s summary here and access the corresponding guidance here.

We are delighted to announce the creation of our Culturlabs advisory board – a diverse, expert and highly experienced group who will advise and guide us on our exciting journey.

Look out for more exciting announcements about the launch of Culturlabs in the coming weeks and months. We’re a small team of applied behavioural scientists, psychologists and industry professionals who are developing new approaches to building positive organisational cultures and influencing behaviour change. We take a holistic, systems view of the human factors in risk. Our approach is culture-first, evidence based, human-centric and measurable.

The members of the Culurlabs Advisory Board are Gaynor R., Jasmine Eskenzi, Rachel Briggs OBE, Vic Djondo, Dave Coplin, and Phillip Morgan. They bring different strategic insights from their extensive experience across industry, government and academia. We’re really looking forward to working closely with them!

Influence makes you think what you think and do as you do. You use it to change the thoughts and behaviours of others – just as others use it to change yours. We have been perfecting our influence for millions of years, but in the last 20 years digital technologies have revolutionised how influence works. We are now connected to old school friends and niche interest groups – but unwittingly also to organised criminals, terrorists and hostile states who infiltrate our societies. The course of history is being shaped: elections have been hijacked, lies spread about pandemics and the rapidly heating climate, and information has become as important as bullets and bombs to winning wars. More than ever, influence has become the crucial currency for commercial and political gain: If you don’t understand it, you will likely become its victim.

Written by Social Machines’ Managing Director, Justin Hempson-Jones, Influence is a groundbreaking guide to the chaotic and murky world we live in. Available on on amazon, in Waterstones and all good bookstores.