Josh Anderson and I recorded a shared podcast with Jeff Bubolz & Jeff Maleski of the AgileWire podcast.
While we rambled a bit (mostly caused by me) across a variety of topics, it was a lot of fun.
One of the tangents we went on was understanding the agile maturity (readiness, culture) of an organization by the presence of certain words in the overall culture. This would cross everyone…teams to senior leaders.
There would be words or phrases that would indicate a less mature/ready culture and other words that would indicate more maturity. It would be the overall usage and trending of all of the words that would be most interesting and indicative of overall maturity.
(and please don’t get hung up by the word maturity, you could just as easily say readiness or receptiveness or fertility)
What would be words indicative of more “maturity”?
We, Our, and Us
What did you discover?
How will you avoid failing that way again?
How can I help?
Do you need help?
What can I do to help us achieve our goals?
Always referencing…the team
Let’s explore this together
Help me to understand your perspective
What would be words indicative of less “maturity”?
Me, My, and I
Fixed scope & fixed dates
Get it done, now!
I need you to do this for me
Who’s to blame for it being late?
Who’s to blame…
Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.
I just need it to be done.
You don’t understand
Listen to me
You get the idea. The thought we had was to measure both sides of the conversations within a culture and then come up with some sort of agile maturity (behavior, walking your talk) metric or indicator based on the reality that was exposed.
I’m interested in whether you like the idea?
Next, what would be some easy ways to measure it? And lastly, do you think it would be a helpful way to instigate positive culture change? Anyway, it might be an interesting experiment to run.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.