I’ve been thinking a lot lately about critical aspects of folks going down an agile transformation. For example, I recently delivered a lightning talk at a local group focused on well-being indicators in agile organizations. I was intentional in not saying the word “metrics” or “maturity” in the talk, as they imply some sort of range or specificity that I didn’t want to imply.
Related to that talk is this post. I wanted to think hard about the most critical leadership patterns (habits, tendencies, attributes) that stand between leaders effectively and personally adopting and supporting an agile mindset. Anf four critical areas came to mind as anti-patterns, horsemen if you will, that need to be avoided…
I read a post by Scott Dunn that inspired this talk. I’ve known Scott for a while. He’s the principal coach/founder of Rocket Nine Solutions, an agile coaching & training firm. He recently moved from Orange County, CA to Nashville.
Since he’s now closer to me, and since Vaco’s headquarters is in Nashville, I’m hoping to collaborate more with Scott in the future.
But I digress…
The title of Scott’s post is – Your Culture is What’s on Your Walls. In it he talks about observing cultures by physical evidence and gleaning the culture by observation. I agree with his perspective and I liked the personal nature of the story. He also inspired me to extend the idea.
I saw a LinkedIn discussion thread that was initiated by Allen Holub. The initial post was:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6503389838526468096
What practices are best at promoting culture? A couple years back, Robert Martin and I had a somewhat public debate about whether culture or practices come first. Bob advocates the shu-ha-ri approach: start doing practices, even by rote, and the culture will naturally arise. He used someone bowing when stepping on the mat as an example. At first, it's just rote. Eventually, respect emerges. I took the opposite approach: start with culture and good practices will emerge. If you have a culture of trust and autonomy, better lead time is a natural outcome.
In the real world of consulting, however, it's very difficult to *start* with culture. The people writing the checks typically want to improve something more hands on. So, my question is: in that world, where you need to start with practices, which practices (if any) lead to a good culture the fastest? If you're introducing practices in order to change culture, which practices would you introduce? I have my own ideas, but I'm interested in your experience.
I’d like to riff off of this a bit. I’m thinking of a couple of things:
Do practices lead to culture OR flip it. I think it’s a flip and Allen seems to agree BUT then backs off because it’s hard.
Is that the right approach? Or is it a business-related copout?
And what about the idea of Culture Hacking. Which I haven’t heard a lot about lately. Could that be part of it.
I like this post because it gets to the root of what a view as a BIG problem. And if everyone ignores it, where does it leave us?
I received an email from Strategic CIO Journal entitled – Top CIOs Become Business Process Czars.
The key focus of the article was raising the bar on CIOs to become more broadly engaged in the overall business and the processes to deliver value.
https://thestrategicciojournal.com/2018/07/23/top-cios-become-business-process-czars-2/
Now, I’m not going to critique the article. Because it was the title alone that inspired this response. It made me think about senior technology leaders – CTOs, CIOs, and any senior technology leader in a larger organization.
It made me think of their Prime Directive. Is it:
Technology Leadership?
Business Process Leadership?
Or is it, Culture Builder?
The article seemed to allude to role moving from a focus on #1 to #2. And that is a relevant and important shift given today’s Digital Transformation strategy focus.
But that being said, in some ways, I think the article set the bar too low or in the wrong direction.
