Slide deck with the top 10 things executives need to know about Agile:

Here’s the list with some handy links:

1. Agile Is Mainstream
   
2. Many Benefits from Agile
   
3. Agile is not a Silver Bullet
4. Agile Fails Due to Culture
5. Agile Differs from Most Company Cultures
6. Most Value Comes from Mindset/Culture, not Practices
7. Adopt Agile Practices that fit Culture (Option 1)
8. Change Culture through Organizational Transformation (Option 2)
9. Culture Mismatch will Slow and Ultimately Fail Your Agile Initiative
10. Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

Of course, it is fine to proceed with either option – adoption or transformation – it’s about what is the best fit for the client environment and their wishes.

There are two conversations around transformation that this deck is designed to trigger/encourage:

• What does break-through organizational culture look like?
• What does organizational transformation look like?

My Favourite Slide in the Deck

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the hundreds of people who have attended my workshops and talks over the last two years to help clarify and refine this message.

A simple (and misunderstood) way people think of their change initiative like this:

Their organization is just sitting there, ready to change in wonderful ways. We just have to tell people how great our new initiative is and they will be lining up to learn more and make things happen. Right?

Unfortunately, organizations are complex adaptive systems with their own dynamics and forces at play.

Note: we could be talking about the whole organization, a group, or a team here.

Forces Acting on an Organization

In the following diagram, I will use the word Culture to capture the existing forces at play in an organization. The real situation will be of course much more complex with various attractors influencing the system in different ways, but this will reveal the essence of what I have seen with change initiatives around Agile.

Some remarks on the diagram:

1. It is difficult for a change initiative to make real progress if it runs against the culture of the organizations (as is usually the case with Agile). It’s like trying to roll a giant boulder up hill.
2. When forces pull an object in different directions, the object is under tension. Too much tension and the organization will be damaged (red squiggles). So, when you notice resistance, applying more force will damage your organization. A few weeks ago, this simple explanation helped a client reduce tension by shifting the blue rather than adding more green.
3. The change initiative will eventually fail. Why? Energy is required to keep the change initiative going. Eventually, people will just declare victory or give up and move on to the next initiative. At this point the boulder rolls down the hill, crushing supporters of the initiative on the way.

Rolling Rocks Downhill

A much better way to go about this is to forget about change strategies and work on an organization’s culture so that it moves the organization towards the desired outcome without conflict. This is of course a vastly simplified version of reality, but it helps us stop and consider the root cause of dynamics and forces in an organization.

Acknowledgments

There is a great exercise on force-field analysis called “May the Forces Be With You” that I learned from The big book of humorous training games.

Olivier Lafontan wrote the insightful post Being an Agile transition coach feels like Sisyphus that inspired the boulder in my narrative.

The phrase “Rolling Rocks Downhill” came to mind from Clarke Ching’s new book by that title.

A friend of mine asked me what is going on with all this touchy-feely people and personal growth stuff – “What’s it got to do with Agile?” My answer: everything! So this post ties together: Agile, High-Performance Culture with People skills and Temenos Workshop among others.

Here is my current roadmap of focus areas related to rebooting organizational culture:

The arrows indicate support. For example, People Skills such as communication models lead to Relational Flow where people trust one another and are emotional supportive. This in turn leads to or supports High Performance Culture.

High Performance Culture is the Goal, but Need to Focus Elsewhere

My goal is to help organizations develop high performance culture through the creation of environments where people can bring their best every day. We can see there are a variety of things to focus on that will lead to support this goal.

Let’s take meditation as an example. There is no direct connection to high performance culture – it’s indirect. But in my experience it is 100% relevant and salient for bringing about a sequence of changes that support the goal. So, we need to focus on the things that will lead to a great culture and the ensuing results. Of course, there are many routes and practices – so nothing is mandatory: meditation works for me, but you may have an alternate route to personal growth.

This is not an exhaustive map of all the elements that lead to High Performance Culture – for sure there are lot’s of things we could add. My purpose in creating and sharing this is to create a call to action to focus on these or related elements so that we can really help organizations succeed.

Examples of Posts on these Topics

My hope is that you are curious about some of these content areas, so I will share some of my blog posts for further reading.

What is High-Performance Culture?

• Workshop on Characteristics of High-Performance Organizations
• Diverse Paths to High-Performance Organizational Culture
• Lululemon – A Stellar Example of Break-Through Organizational Culture

Relational Flow

• Relatedness trumps Responsibility, Accountability

People Skills

• Anatomy of Peace – A Model for Communication
• How to Express Empathy – Avoid the Traps!

Personal Growth

• The Power of Vulnerability
• Understand Shame to get to Root-Cause in Your Life
• Deep Insights around Fear, Risk, Safety and Vulnerability

Organizational Transformation

• Change your Culture or Die
• Tactics, Strategy, & Culture – A Model for Thinking about Organizational Change
• KrisMap: An Organisation’s Persona
• Ways to Make Progress with Culture Gaps
• An Influencer’s Playbook
• Hierarchy = The Matrix
• Visual Summary of Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide
• Agile Failure and Culture – Agile 2012 Workshop Results

Transformational Leadership

• Transformation? Leaders Go First!
• Personal Transformation is the Heart of Organizational Transformation
• How to Incubate Transformational Leadership

Temenos Workshop

• Temenos – A Workshop for Healing, Connection and Relational Flow
• Create Authentic Connections with Influence Maps
• Temenos: Containers for Growing Relationships

Relatedness is the heart of high-performing teams and organizations. As stated in the Agile Manifesto, focus on “Individuals and Interactions” is essential. How we relate to ourselves and others is central to creating and maintaining effective and valuable systems.

There are many mental frames that are used to discuss organizational culture and performance. In this post, I argue that relatedness trumps responsibility and accountability as a meme for change. All are valuable and necessary, however, focus on human beings and their relations provides the greatest leverage.

The diagram below illustrates this hierarchy.

Relatedness

Relatedness is the connection between human beings in a system.

We can describe a system as the aggregate of all the interpersonal relations. Environments of trust and safety have a high degree of relatedness between people. These are the kinds of systems that we want to create for ourselves. We do this by connecting with others and helping people in groups connect with each other.

There are myriad ways to create relatedness. Simple ones include sharing food or drink. Working together on a shared goal can support this. Simple exercises such as Marketplace or teambuilding with Lego can move us towards greater relatedness. Another is the Check-in protocol where people share emotions. Improv theater has expected behaviours that support relatedness: yes-anding, making everyone else look good, mistakes are invitations to create, etc). Zappos has fun as part of company culture and uses events and activities to create connectedness. e.g. Head shaving for charity.

Approaches exist for dramatic improvements in relatedness. Temenos is a retreat/workshop designed to help people see themselves and other participants as whole and valuable human beings. Other approaches include organization-wide mindfulness practices and mediation to re-wire our brains to focus on the present moment as well as to what is going on at an emotional level with ourselves and with others.

Recently, I have been writing about the work of Brene Brown and how attention to our internal emotions and thoughts helps us connect with other human beings. See related posts on empathy, vulnerability and shame.

Responsibility

Christopher Avery views responsibility as the core to success. We want environments where people feel a sense of ownership and responsiblity for creating successful outcomes. Individuals that feel responsibile are an essential compenent of a high-performing systems: they will notice what needs doing and make it happen.

So why is it often better to focus energy on relatedness versus responsibility?

A system where people have a high degree or relatedness will strong foster responsibilty. People will be motivated to take action because they care and understand about the impact on others. So when we start with relatedness, responsibility will follow. It is also the case that relatedness will increase when people act with responsiblity, but this is not as strong an effect.

Both relatedness and responsibility are valuable. When it is appropriate to cultivate relatedness in a system, then this will set a stronger foundation for system health and growth.

Accountability

There are some who argue that accountability is the key to greater performance. One example of this is Change the Culture: Change the Game where Conners and Smith explain how accountabilty can be used to increase organizational performance. There are lot’s of valuable contirbutions from the book discussion culture change, however, the central tenet “The most effective culture is a culture of accountability” is not aligned with more recent notions of organizational design and culture.

Tobias Mayer has a great post where he clarifies the tension between responibility and accountability. Tobies shares this quote : “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” said Pasi Sahlberg, one of the chief architects of Finland’s successful school reforms. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

Although, accountability is required and a direct focus on accountability will get positive results in most dysfunctional systems, this  is not the full story. If we want a high-performance system, however, the best way to get accountabilty is by cultivating relatedness and responsibilty. Direct focus on accountability is hazardous to more evolved human systems.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who have helped me on my journey to understand human relatedness as central to high-functioning systems. In particular, Siraj Sirajuddin, Pascal Pink and Olaf Lewitz have been powerful influences. I would also like to thank the participants of Temenos workshops for cultivating my ability to deeply connect with others.

The hierarchy is at the very center of our lives. We have experienced it in our school years and later when working in organizations. It’s existence and function is tacit in our understanding of reality.

At the Agile Alliance Change Agents workshop in Chicago in November, it became clear to me that the existence of hierarchy was greatly influencing the sessions. I sensed that there were two broad themes that emerged from the sessions.

One theme was around exploring Agile in the Enterprise. In this context, hierarchy was assumed. And much of the attention and energy seemed to be about finding ways to rise above and minimize the constraints it imposed. For example, how to shift focus on end-to-end flow.

Perhaps, the most insidious aspect of this is that our default assumptions around the hierarchy – it’s existence and requirements form the context of our thoughts. Just like how people are constrained to perceive reality in the movie the Matrix: we do not see or question it.

A second theme that emerged was around considering ways to create workplaces of joy – environments that foster an Agile mindset rather than constrict it. Agile provides a clear compelling model for organizing work and people. It does not, however, address the problem of organizational design: how to hire, promote and fire. How responsibility and leadership is enacted and enabled. This is an open problem. Included in this theme are questions such as team self-selection vs. deploying known patterns (e.g. Scrum). We need to find solutions to this so we can escape the Matrix.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank the Agile Alliance for sponsoring this workshop and Diana Larsen for inviting me. I would also like to thank the whole group since these themes were an emergent result of all our combined questions, sharing and curiosity.

As a caveat, I am not trying to summarize all that happened, but rather provide one perspective.

(Joint post with Olaf Lewitz)

Essence of Kris

Imagine your ideal organization.
We may think of the organizational culture as the “personality” of the company.
What is the personality of this organization?

Culture is Aggregate Identity

Organizational Culture is the emergent aggregate identity of all her people.

Some questions to help you think about Her Persona:

• What is the organization like?
• What does she like?
• What does she want?
• What does she feel?
• What does she look like?
• How does she behave?

Kris (Agile Persona) is purposeful, curious and values people

• Values People: listens well, is caring and loyal
• Curious, Open and Playful
• Resilient and Flexible
• Relaxed, Happy
• Purposeful and motivated

See below photo for our very first Agile persona – Kris.

How to run the KrisMap Workshop

• Briefly explain concept of culture and personas.
• In small groups, brainstorm key personality attributes of persona. (Remember to name her).
• After cluster, select key or salient features.
• (Do not prioritise, everything might be essential. Encourage to write more attributes and add them if no one objects.)
• Share with large group. (Keep adding attributes as people get more inspired.)

Debrief

• Would you want to work with Kris?
• Would you want to hire Kris?
• Is Kris attractive to customers?
• Do you find any attribute of Kris that cannot be learned?
• (if an attribute is identified as being hard to achieve, ask if it might be easier if you have a team to help you)
• Is it your organization’s goal to be like Kris?
• Do you aspire to be like Kris?
• What examples for Kris’ attributes do you find in your current org? Share stories.

Our Key Observations/Learnings

• Kris is an aspirational model — no one can actually be Kris.
• Everyone can learn. Some attributes are easier than others. Teams help. Coaching helps.
• Diversity in the team/organization allows Kris to emerge. Not every member of an organisation needs to (or should) have all of the map’s attributes…
• Transformation of an organization occurs through the transformation of individuals.
• Transformation needs to start with the leadership team.

Laura is energetic, caring and effective

Mona is purposeful, pragmatic and always learning

How To Use This

Do this exercise with your leadership team, frame the question as “How would you love your organisation to be?”

No organisation can grow, transform or flourish faster than their leadership team and, ultimately, their CEO (given you have a hierarchical structure).

We found in five sessions that all participants agreed that all their wanted attributes can be learned. They all agreed that this learning will be easier and faster in a team. They all ultimately wanted to be that persona that they had created, they identified it as an aspirational model to strive for. A personal vision they can align with and focus on.

To ground the group (which might feel like they entered a dream state of mind during the exercise and ask puzzled questions like “how do we start to make that happen?” ask them for one more step:

Try to remember stories that happened in this very organisation where someone has shown some attempt at the behaviour you now wish you’d see. Find examples of learning, pragmatism, experiments, care, unusual effectiveness, appreciation… (use your own persona’s attributes, of course.) Let them see for themselves that the behaviour they want is already possible in the current state of the organisation, is already present in its DNA.
A Want is a baby Have…
(Michele & Jim McCarthy in Software for your Head)

Acknowledgements

“There is no Organization!” by Ari-Pekka Skarp got Olaf started to rethink his concept of organisation. Bob Marshall pushed him further in “There is no Organization, but…” which in the comments discussion inspired the idea of collaboratively creating an organisation’s persona.

At the Agile Influencers of DC meetup Michael and Olaf ran an experiment out of which this session design emerged with the help of Paul Boos, Andrea Chiou, Ken Furlong and Tucker Croft.

We re-ran the exercise at CultureCon in Philadelphia and AgileCoachCamp in Minneapolis (Laura & Mona), with great feedback (“May I use this?”) and at a first client. Thank you to all who created the context for us to emerge this.

And, yes, you may use this. Please tell us of your results.

I created the painting below almost two years ago to reflect the pain, frustration and disconnection I felt as an Agile consultant when working with a large organization.

At the time I thought of Agile as a coherent system of energy – waves of light – illustrated by the yellow lines in the top left.

Along with other coaches, we thought the organization was chaotic or complex as defined by the Cynefin framework. The organization is illustrated by blue structure. The severe difficulty we had working with it is expressed as a swirling mess of green.

In hindsight it is clear to me that the mess of interactions was the result of the incompatible culture and thought systems between the coaches and the client organization.

I suspect the client may have had the opposite perception: that they had a coherent and understandable structure while we Agile coaches seemed chaotic.

Future success relies on understanding these differences in perspective due to culture and other dimensions.

To help others avoid pain and waste, I wrote An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide: Working with Organizational Culture Consider reading it to learn from my failures and to avoid creating your own.

This painting was one of the candidates for the cover art.

I am very excited that I just published my free book - An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide: Working with Organizational Culture on InfoQ. Agile change agents will find it valuable in helping companies succeed with Agile and avoiding failure.

About the Book

Struggling with Agile? Frustrated that people don’t really get it? Tired of fighting with organizational bureaucracy? Wondering how you could have been more successful? If so, then this book is for you!

The book provides a set of essential thinking tools for understanding Agile adoption and transformation: how they differ and what you need to know to know to avoid being another statistic in the widespread adoption failure. In particular, you will learn how to use culture to work more effectively with your organization.

It is called a survival guide since so many people have found the concepts to be invaluable in understanding their experiences when working with Agile.

This book includes:

• Identification of causes of the widespread Agile adoption failure
• A model for understanding Agile, Kanban, and Software Craftsmanship culture
• An outline of key adoption and transformation approaches
• A framework to help guide when to use these these approaches with your organization
• Real-life case studies of what has worked and what hasn’t

Electronic Version is Free

You can get a PDF or ePub version of the book for free on InfoQ. Why free? My primary goal is to change the world of work, and by making it free I can best achieve this goal. Of course, I would be really happy if you bought multiple copies of the print edition to give to your friends and clients to help them succeed as well as support my work.

Thank You

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

I would like to thank Henrik Kniberg who has contributed so much open source material to the Agile community and inspired me to write a free eBook to pay it forward. I also appreciate him taking the time to write one of the forewords.

I would like to thank the attendees of workshops with early incarnations of this material – XPToronto, SoCal Lean Kanban, Agile Tour Toronto, and Agile New England. Your comments, challenges and reflections have helped in immeasurable ways.

Thanks to all the people who read my blog posts throughout 2011 on this topic and provided valuable feedback.

A big thanks to Michael Spayd for first introducing me to the Schneider culture model and for conducting a survey of Agilistas.

For sure this work would not exist but for Mike Cottemeyer’s differentiation of adoption and transformation.

Thank you to the review team for feedback: Chris Williams, Irene Kuhn, Armond Mehrabian, Krishan Mathis, Bernie Jansen, Ed Willis, Eric Willeke, Karl Scotland, Sabine Canditt, Todd Charron, Bob Sarni. Olaf Lewitz in particular deserves distinction by providing an extraordinary quantity of valuable comments, questions and challenges.

I would like to thank those who directly contributed to this work as well as reviewing: Olivier Gourment for contributing a case study; Jeff Anderson, Olaf Lewitz, Jon Stahl, and Karl Scotland and Alexei Zheglov for sharing their challenges and alternate visions in the appendix.

I would also like to thank Alistair McKinnell, Jason Little, Declan Whelan for providing feedback on the Methods & Tools article that formed a chapter in this book and to John McFadyen and Dave Snowden for feedback on the Cynefin section.

I am very appreciative of Jurgen Appelo for taking time out of his busy schedule to write a foreword.

And of course a big shout out for my daughter Scarlett who provided original art with the jigsaw puzzle and butterfly transformation drawings.

Wow! Even a small book such as this benefits from so much help.

- Michael Sahota

Just finished Lean Startup Machine this past weekend and would like to connect the dots between Lean Startup and Agile.

Lean Startup: How to Learn fast about Customers, their Problems and Solutions

Lean Startup is a powerful approach for learning quickly about who your customer is and what problems they have and what solutions they value. The diagram below illustrates how it follows the scientific method: hypothesis, experiment, conclusions. As an entrepreneur or Product Manager, you keep running the cycle until you find out who your customers are (what market demographic), what their burning problem is and what solutions people will pay for.

The whole point is to learn quickly to avoid building more products that no one really cares about.

The biggest challenge with Lean Startup is not that the approach doesn’t work, but that we as human beings are so conditioned to think about products and systems that it is difficult to let go and just explore customers and their problems. Validated learning about customers is not optional.

What about Agile?

Steve Blank’s second commandment in his Manifesto for Customer Development is: “Pair Customer Development with Agile Development”. But how to make sense of this?

Agile Pre-supposes Customers and Problems are known

Agile is mindset and approach that supports building great teams and great products. It pre-supposes that there is someone who knows what needs to be built:

• In Extreme Programming this is the onsite Customer.
• In Scrum this is the Product Owner.

Use Kanban for Most Startups

Consider Scrum for Large Projects

We Won Lean Startup Machine Toronto

My big take-aways from Lean Startup Machine are the learnings, but it was great to be part of the winning team.

I am very grateful to New England Agile (and Ron Verge in particular) for videotaping my presentation. For those of you who haven’t heard me speak about culture and adoption, I believe this is a crucial message for anyone acting as an Agile change agent. Enjoy.

Agile Culture and Adoption Survival Guide from Agile New England on Vimeo.

P.S. I am actively working on an eBook for those who prefer print. Drop me an email if you want to help review it before it comes out.

P.P.S Slides are here.