Beyond Technical Due Diligence
Keynote by Professor of Practice Ia Adlercreutz at The Human Factor in M&As Seminar, 25 Nov 2025, Helsinki, Hanken School of Economics
Good afternoon everyone. It’s so nice to be here, and I’m genuinely happy to see so many familiar faces in the audience.
And a warm thank-you to all the business leaders who joined us today – collaboration between business and academia truly matters.
Let me start with why this topic matters to me.
I’ve spent much of my career on both sides of M&As – first as a leader inside Nordic companies going through acquisitions, and later as a consultant helping organisations integrate. And over the years, one thing has become very clear: the human side always decides the outcome of a deal.
During the last decade, my work has focused almost entirely on human creativity, culture, leadership and the psychology of change. At Co-founders, the company I lead, we’ve also studied company culture systematically – including through our report on cultural integration in M&As.
So, this blend of leadership experience, advisory work and research shapes how I look at what lies beyond technical due diligence.
The Human Factor
Most of us in this room know what a merger looks like on paper. Some of us have learned what it really means in practice – often through trial and error.
We know the financial logic. We know the synergy expectations. We know the integration plans. We also know how the big consultancies approach the process.
And yes, cultural due diligence appears on the slide – the term is there – but we can still ask whether it is done with the depth it actually requires. Because time after time, even technically excellent deals fail.
Not because the spreadsheets were wrong. Not because the strategy was flawed. But because people don’t merge at the same speed as systems do.
There’s a well-known joke in leadership circles: “Everything would be so much easier… if we didn’t have all these people messing up the plans.”
We laugh because it’s true. Systems behave predictably. Excel behaves perfectly.
It is us, people, who bring our identities, fears, habits and pride with us – all of that enters the room before any integration plan.
What does data say?
The data makes the picture very clear. Around 70% of deals fail to create shareholder value. Roughly 83% of mergers fail to deliver expected results. And one in four executives points to cultural misalignment as the primary reason.
This isn’t a soft issue. It’s a value creation issue.
In our CEO study, leaders said it in many different ways, but the message was the same: ‘Strategy doesn’t do anything. People do.”
The gap between strategic ambition and cultural reality is where execution breaks down. In M&As, this gap becomes even sharper.
Technical due diligence tells you what you’re buying. It does not tell you who you’re merging with. It doesn’t reveal how people interpret change. What they fear losing. Which routines they will defend. Or what defines their identity.
As one CEO expressed his learnings: “You can replace a management team in months… but a culture takes ten years to build.”
And here is the paradox. Leaders know this is a problem. According to KPMG survey eighty-one percent say they would put more focus on cultural integration next time. Yet when we look at what Aon Hewitt’s study says, only forty-four percent actually track culture during integration.
So yes, leaders recognise the risk. But in our experience, culture is something they feel more than something they know how to work with.
Three key themes in managing M&As
When we talk with seasoned executives, three themes keep coming up.
First: successful integrations start cultural work early.
Long before ”Day 1”, they explore leadership styles, decision-making norms and the non-negotiables.
And this mirrors what Satu Teerikangas’ research also shows: early cultural work correlates strongly with success.
In our work, this early phase begins already in screening – not after signing.
At that point, we do a light-touch cultural scan using only public information: websites, job posts, Glassdoor, employer branding – and we combine that with a few targeted interviews and whatever initial data the acquirer can share.
It’s not deep, but it’s enough to surface signals: how people talk about leadership, what they reward, what they avoid, what they hope for.
That alone often prevents major surprises later.
Second: integration speed is determined by mindsets, not mechanics.
Structures merge fast. Minds don’t.
That’s why the actual Culture Due Diligence – the deeper phase – happens only once there is access to real material: engagement surveys, HR practices, exit interviews, retention data, demographics, management interviews.
It’s the moment when you can finally see the unwritten rules: how people make decisions, how they react to pressure, what their relationship to authority looks like.
These things don’t appear in a data room unless you go looking for them.
Third: leaders model the behaviours that become the new culture.
People don’t follow integration slides – they follow leadership signals.
So when the indicative offer is on the table, we move together with the client into integration planning.
This is not PowerPoint work – it’s joint workshops with both sides, creating shared understanding around the desired culture and translating that into a concrete ”1000-day culture plan” that sits inside the broader integration plan.
And that is critical: because culture doesn’t change because leaders say it should change – it changes because leaders make time for it, prioritise it, and act in line with it day after day.
And finally, when integration begins, the work becomes lived reality:
facilitation, leadership development, team support, people engagement, and simply being present in the everyday.
And we measure progress – not to control people, but to learn with them.
Pay Attention to Diversity of Thinking
Across all the cases we’ve worked on, one dimension is consistently underestimated: cognitive diversity – the real differences in how people think.
Let me give you an example. An industrial company acquired a tech firm. Engineers complained the tech people improvised too much. The tech people said engineers killed every idea with bureaucracy.
A deadlock – until the CEO asked people to really analytically ponder: “What each side could learn from the other?”
This is where the diversity of thinking becomes visible. In every company, there are layers of thinking: artistic creativity, analytical creativity, social creativity, mathematical creativity and technical creativity – to mention some dimensions of creativity.
These ways of thinking exist side by side – but in a merger, they suddenly collide. Mixed teams and reverse mentoring allowed this company to create a hybrid product line neither side would have developed alone.
This leads to one of the most important insights we’ve observed:
Cultural integration happens most effectively through real work – not workshops. Not one-off team days. Not isolated interventions. But when people actually solve something meaningful together – a customer case, a market challenge, a product problem. And when that collaboration is guided not only operationally but psychologically.
Because nothing builds trust faster than shared success. In the end, culture is not what we say – culture is what we’ve lived, and achieved, together.
Culture is a Worldview in Action
Before I continue, I want to acknowledge the scholars who will speak after me. My contribution today comes from practice. They bring a depth of theoretical insight that I deeply value. Their research shows that integration never happens in isolation. It unfolds in a web of routines, expectations, pressures and intentions – what Professors Audrey Rouzies from Toulouse School of Management and Duncan Angwin from University College London, who we have here today with us, call “co-evolving processes”.
Underneath all of this lies the psychology of mergers. People in the acquired company did not choose their new employer. That creates vulnerability.
It threatens autonomy, identity and dignity.
If integration is done to people rather than with them, resistance is inevitable. A wise M&A begins with understanding each other’s worldviews. Because culture is a worldview we act on every single day.
Most organisations focus on the visible parts of the iceberg: structures, processes, titles, strategy. But integration succeeds or fails in the invisible layers: assumptions, feelings, humour, fears, blind spots, interpretations and worldviews.
And this is the moment when leaders need a little bit of what we in Finland call “keittiöpsykologia” – kitchen psychology. To simply to notice what sits beneath the surface.
So why go beyond technical due diligence? Because the real question in an M&A is not: “What value can we create together?” The real question is: “How do we become capable of creating value together?”
Moving Beyond Technical Due Diligence
When we apply the same rigour to cultural and human due diligence as we apply to financial and legal due diligence, M&As stop being transactions and start becoming transformations.
If I try to summarise everything I’ve learned, it is this:
Numbers and plans tell us what is possible, but people determine what becomes real.
And the moment a merger moves from a spreadsheet into the lives of human beings, the work changes. It becomes a question of identity, meaning, trust and imagination.
When those dimensions are taken seriously, integrations don’t just succeed – they become a place where something new can grow.
And that, to me, is what truly lies beyond technical due diligence.
“Thank you. And I want to extend a warm thank-you to Satu Teerikangas for inviting me to share these reflections today.
It’s truly a privilege to be here – and to learn from all of you.
Because if there is one field where we can never be ‘done learning’, it is this one.”