Architect the Culture

If your organization’s culture is characterized by internal competition, then people will not openly voice their true thoughts or share their ideas. If your organization’s culture is one in which people only do things in “the way we do them” and do not feel that original thinking is valued, then people will not innovate or improve how they work over time.

Most of the behaviors of Agile 2 rely on having a healthy organizational culture. The Human Synergistics® culture assessment tool will reveal what your organization’s culture actually is like. The result of the assessment will be a profile on their circumplex, shown at the right.

The four sectors in blue represent a healthy culture. An organization whose culture is dominated by these traits has a Constructive culture. That is the origin of the name we chose for Constructive Agility.

If your culture survey reveals a culture that is not Constructive, then you have cultural work to do. We strongly recommend that you seek assistance from a competent partner who has expertise in cultural change, ideally with a focus on agility. Agile 2 Academy can help you to identify the cultural changes that will block your strategies, and help you to define targeted cultural change strategies.

The table below summarizes ways in which Agile 2 behaviors are contingent on certain cultural traits. Without these traits, the specified agility-promoting behaviors are either not possible or not sustainable.

Establish Cultural and Behavioral Norms

There needs to be a shared view of what the desired culture and behaviors are. Too often this is done in an abstract way in which organizations state their “values” and publish those on posters. That does not work because (1) the values are abstract and people cannot mentally relate them to their own work, and (2) the values are not driven home through techniques such as those listed below under “Some Ways to Steer Behavior and Culture”.

But the first step is to define what the desired culture and behavior are. We cover that in Step 2. But the next step is to educate people so that they have the mental foundation needed. They need to learn about organizational culture: what that means, and the ways it can vary and manifest. And they need to learn about agility-promoting behaviors. That way they can see those as a model and know what is desired and acceptable.

To create a foundation of knowledge, you need to set up an education program that teaches people about culture and agility-promoting behavior. The Agile 2 Foundations training course provides a foundation in agility-promoting behaviors. You might also consider the Multi-Team DevOps training course, which provides a foundation in DevOps methods.

You also need to measure where people are. The Agile 2 Assessment provides that with respect to agility-promoting behaviors. You might also consider the DevOps Assessment, which will tell you where you are with respect to DevOps knowledge.

Some Common Behavioral Scenarios

The following situations arise frequently in product settings.

[In development]

• An Issue Arises That Spans Multiple Teams or Products

• Stakeholders Want to Plan a Year Out

• A Team Fails at Achieving a Goal

• An Individual Contributor Has an Idea

• A Consultant Suggests a New Approach

Some Ways to Steer Behavior and Culture

The following techniques are often helpful for influencing people’s behavior and the organization’s culture.

• Evangelize - doggedly remind people.

• Individual coaching - observe people, and help them to interpret situations.

• Explicitly define new key behaviors - identify specific behaviors for people to embrace. This is best done with their input, and best of all when the ideas are theirs—a dialogic approach.

• Walk the talk - demonstrate the new behaviors through action.

• “Leadership making” (from “LMX Theory”) - build relationships with individuals and mentor them

• Create the right incentives - create structures that incentivize the desired culture and behaviors: make sure that incentives are not unnecessarily competitive, and make sure that that there are counter-balancing incentives that drive cooperation and mutual support.

• Create leadership “detectors” - practices that reveal those who naturally have the desired leadership traits. Participative leadership gives you firsthand visibility into how people behave.

• Affinity and Support groups - Informal groups that share ideas and methods; provide support to these.

The Human Synergistics® Circumplex

The four traits of a Constructive Culture can be individually summarized as follows:

Achievement-oriented: Members are expected to set challenging goals, establish plans to reach those goals, and pursue them with enthusiasm.

Self-actualizing: Members are expected to enjoy their work, develop themselves, and take on new and interesting activities.

Humanistic-encouraging: Members are expected to be supportive, helpful, and open to influence in their dealings with one another.

Affiliative: Members are expected to be friendly, cooperative, and sensitive to the satisfaction of their workgroup.

Related Topics

Define a People Strategy

Article: Changing Culture Is Not as Hard as You Think

Quick Links

Intro

1. Define the high level business+tech concept

2. Identify core team

3. Refine business+tech vision with clear success goals

4. Build the runway

5. Identify the optimal sequence of capabilities to demonstrate or release

6. Identify key intersection points, critical paths, and integration strategies

7. Decompose each capability into a set of features to be concurrently developed

8. Allow teams to start pulling features to create

9. Start evaluating internal releases, and feed results back

10. Start test marketing them as MVPs are produced, and feed results back to adjust visions

Organizations often focus on defining processes in an attempt to become more agile. But it turns out that processes cannot make you agile. Processes are about how to deal with the expected. Agility results from how people respond to the unexpected.

Processes are important, but defining processes is not the way to begin an effort to increase agility. Constructive Agility provides a path, and that path includes addressing cultural obstacles.