Culture is a rubber band around your organization
In my consultant practice, I have made a lot of attempts to change processes and engineering culture in my client’s companies. Not all attempts were successful. I found that some organizations first started the Agile transformation on a motivated impulse but after a few months was eaten by the Waterfall culture again.
For example, I gave Scrum training to client’s employees. Then together with a client’s team we released 3–4 Sprints. After successful releases, I left developers and the Product Owner to themselves. Eventually, the client’s team reverted to the old style again in a few months and lost the benefits of Agility.
Fortunately, I found out why this happens. Ahmed shows in his video how to change culture and achieve sustainable Agility. You’ll find great thoughts and impressive metaphors in this video.
Big Idea #1: Culture is a rigid rubber band
Here is my favorite slide from the video:
It shows how culture binds any changes. You can’t move just one peace of your organization because rubber band will ultimately bring it back . If you want to change, you have to put all the pieces together in one small step. I love this idea and I’ve used it for a few years with success.
Big Idea #2: Roadmap for changes
As you already know, you have to take one small step for Leadership, Strategy, Structure, Process and People levels simultaneously. Here is a map that will help you understand how this is achieved:
Fill-in this roadmap for your organization. You’ll see a step-by-step plan for your Enterprise’s transformation.
The hardest part is to find necessary habits. Sadly, there is no best practice that guarantees how to do this . I recommend to fill out this form step-by-step and do a Retrospective continuously to track results.
Other Thoughts
- Shuhari — a way of thinking about how you learn Agile. There is no Agility in Shu (follows the teachings of one master precisely) because you know only a few options. Agility is in the Ri because you have the ability to create new techniques as you go. Sadly, you can’t start in Ri.
- Task workers follow a liner process. For instance, you can’t start building a house from the top. You have to follow a step-by-step process, from bottom to top. Knowledge workers do a non-liner job. For instance, you write a book with a rough drafts and rewrite it again and again until your book is finished.
- Knowledge work is characterized by: not knowing the outcome in advance, the low cost of change and a hard to coordinate process. Agile manager has a huge amount of uncertainty.
- There is a big difference between Being Agile and Doing Agile. If you are Doing Agile, it means you get only practices (Scrum, XP) but not thinking according to Agile Manifesto.
- There are two types of mindset — Fixed and Growth. A Fixed Mindset means I can’t be changed. ‘Fixed’ people ask ‘What do I do next?’ Growth Mindset means I have to try to learn and then I have a chance to become better. Teams also have one mindset type like individuals have. Ahmed recommends the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
- Agile Mindset (Growth) helps us manage uncertainty. Fixed Mindset is not fit for Agility.
- Agile is all about learning and discovering.
- Successful transformations come when you take a thousand people and move them one step each, not take one person and move them a thousand steps.
- Organizations have habits — this is how work gets done. If you have a task or a problem you know what to do because you have a habit.
- Change the keystone habit and you will change a few underlying habits also. According to Ahmed’s experience, the keystone habit is a way of communication and collaboration. We have to change it first if we are looking for an efficient way of changing.
The whole video
I strongly recommend watching the entire video and sharing your thoughts and comments: