We’re delighted to share that Dragonfish and two of our clients have been named finalists at this year’s Business Culture Awards, with the winners announced at the ceremony on 25 November.

Most importantly, the nominations recognise the achievements of the leaders and teams at Westminster City Council and the UK Hydrographic Office—two organisations investing in culture as a vital part of how they transform, perform, and deliver for the people they serve.

Westminster City Council has received three nominations: Leading with Purpose, Best Public Sector Organisation for Business Culture; and Best Culture Team.

Together, they recognise the Council’s commitment to making purpose real and tangible—connecting it to how people lead, make decisions, work together, and deliver for Westminster’s communities.

The UK Hydrographic Office has also been nominated for Best Public Sector Organisation for Business Culture. Its nomination reflects the work underway to align people across the organisation behind a new vision: creating greater clarity about where UKHO is going, strengthening shared belief in its future, and helping everyone understand the part they can play in getting there.

We’re especially pleased to see both organisations recognised in the same public sector category. Their contexts and journeys are different, but they share a determination to connect ambition, culture, and people to deliver better outcomes.

Dragonfish has also been shortlisted for Business Consultancy of the Year. We’re proud of that recognition because it reflects the quality of the partnerships behind our work and the meaningful impact we create together.

For us, this year’s nominations reinforce something we have always believed: culture delivers its greatest value when it is connected to the wider organisation.

We call this The Alignment Advantage™ — the performance potential that emerges when business, people, brand, and customer strategies work as one connected system. It means aligning purpose with decisions, vision with everyday action, leadership intent with employee experience, and transformation with the capabilities needed to sustain it.

The work being recognised at Westminster City Council and UKHO demonstrates that alignment in action.

Our role is to bring insight, challenge, and practical support—helping clients see clearly, connect the dots and turn ambition into meaningful, measurable results. Our clients bring deep knowledge of their organisations, the courage to challenge established ways of working, and the commitment to make change happen.

Over the years, we’ve experienced awards from several perspectives: supporting our clients to tell their stories, writing our own submissions, and judging entries. Seeing the work through each of these lenses has taught us that the strongest entries aren’t simply the best written. They show a clear connection between culture, organisational ambition, and meaningful results.

Five things consistently set them apart:

• They start with a real business challenge or untapped opportunity. Culture isn’t presented as a standalone project. The strongest entries are clear about the problem the organisation needed to solve, why it mattered, and how culture enabled better outcomes.
• They listen deeply and involve people in shaping the change. The most compelling submissions combine data with lived experience. They show how insight was gathered, how people influenced the response, and how a vision or purpose became something they genuinely understood and believed in.
• They connect the whole system. Business, people, brand, and customer strategies don’t operate in isolation. The strongest stories demonstrate The Alignment Advantage™ – showing how greater connection between them has strengthened performance and created a more coherent experience for employees and customers.
• They turn ambition into action and build for the future. Strong entries move beyond launches and communications. They show how purpose, vision, and values have changed everyday behaviours and decisions while building the leadership, mindsets and capabilities needed to sustain progress.
• They demonstrate meaningful, measurable impact. Data matters, but the best entries go beyond a dashboard trending in the right direction. They combine measurable results with evidence of what has genuinely changed for employees, customers, and communities.

These are also the principles we bring to our own work and to the submissions we shape with clients. The goal is never simply to write a compelling entry. It is to tell an honest, evidence-backed story about change that has made a meaningful difference. We also know that lasting change is created through partnership—through shared ambition, honest conversations, and a willingness to listen, learn, and adapt together.

Whatever the outcome on 25 November, these nominations are an achievement worth celebrating. They recognise the leaders, teams, and colleagues at Westminster City Council and UKHO who are bringing purpose, vision, and culture to life every day.

Congratulations, too, to everyone else on this year’s shortlist. We’re looking forward to celebrating the organisations and people creating better cultures and stronger outcomes.

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