Great Organizational Culture is Key to Thriving

Deming said that “Survival is Optional”. Organizations can change their mindset and culture or they can become extinct.

Companies are at Risk

Steven Denning  makes a great case for why companies are at risk: Only 21% of employees are fully engaged, Customers are dis-satisfied and bureaucracy is killing innovation. “Deloitte’s Shift Index shows, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years today, and heading towards 5 years if nothing is done.”

We can see new companies creating opportunity by using organizational culture as the competitive advantage. Some examples are: Zappos, Morningstar, Valve.

Choose your Level of Risk

The graph above shows that the risk of extinction for an organization depends on the rate or ability of the organization to change. As discussed about, traditional corporate culture poses a high level of risk as it only tolerates a low rate of change. Organizations that use culture as a competitive advance have a lower risk of extinction. The two lines show that different organizations have differing risk profiles based on industry and markets they are involved in.

We can think of a fitness landscape of organizations: some are very robust to environmental changes and others are brittle. The top reason to change the culture of your organization is not because of this quarter, this financial year, but to create a lasting future and avoid the extinction event that is perhaps a few years out. Sadly, few companies invest time into thinking about how can we be great and how can we go out of business – the status quo is a powerful attractor.

What Culture?

OK, let’s say I want to change my culture. Now what?

There are a number of related and complementary approaches. Stephen Denning argue that the single organizational focus needs to be Customer Delight. Senge advocates the need for a Learning Organization. The Agile mindset is about people with a shared vision collaborating and learning together. A key misunderstood value from Lean is Respect for People. There are also recent movements and ideas converging on what thriving organizations look like: Stoos Network, WorldBlu and Future of Work Manifesto.

What is best? Many are good and share common characteristics. My current investigation is to clarify and refine cultural differences between various approaches. The most important thing to remember is that: Perfection is a direction and not a target. Use KrisMap or another approach to define your ideal culture and then pursue it.

Acknowledgements

This post is inspired by conversations and a session with Saleem Saddiqui at Agile Coach Camp in Minneapolis earlier this month. It was Saleem who shared the quote “Survival is Optional” to start a great conversation. Key ideas in this post are Saleem’s – not sure what he shared and what I imagined.

This is a report-out of a deeply insightful Open Space session at Agile Games 2012.

How do we achieve greatness and great results? This post explores key factors such as fear, risk safety, vulnerability and much more.

Inherent Risk, Personal Baggage and Controls

Imagine you are swimming in the water, going about your business. The shark represents the inherent risk in your endeavour. We all carry a chum bag on our back – this represents the perceived risk that is caused by our fears and baggage from the past. Our accomplishments are limited by our safety and trust issues. To help protect us we add controls (the shark net in this metaphor). But this does not allow us to swim beyond in the wider ocean and achieve great results. We notice that in some situations we are so bound by fear that we imagine a shark and will not even venture into the water. This is how limiting our fears can be. We use the title “Entrepreur” for those who overcome their fears and baggage to focus on the inherent (not perceived) risk.

Perceived Risk and Fear

Fear is the driver for perceived risk. It could be fear of loss: Financial loss, looking fooling, or exclusion from a social group. The list of fears we have is very long. Much of this fear has to do with how we as individuals view the world.

Innovation Requires Safety (No Fear)

This diagram explains the two dynamics that we can operate in.

#1 – “Safe Choice” – if we do not feel safe, we will have fears and therefore make “safe choices”. It could be consider low safety because of intrinsic risk in the environment or it could be because of perceived risk.

People can work together as a community to reduce the inherent risk. This is what we mean by guiding teams to add safety and trust. The perceived risk, however, is part of our psyche and it is a personal journey for those who wish to grow away from it.

#2 – “Take a Risk” – if we feel safe, we will have low or no fear, and then the door is open to taking risks. In the photo, the door is depicted as dark to indicate the unknown. As the ability to take risks is critical for innovation and learning, we can infer that helping people feel safe is of paramount concern.

Success requires Shedding our Fears – Getting Naked

Patrick Lencioni has a wonderful business fable called Getting Naked. It is about the fears that a consultant needs to shed to be effective. Interestingly, it applies to all of those who seek to be personally effective: leaders, managers, change agents, and team members.

The book outlines some tactics to describe what naked or fear-free behaviour looks like. For example, to overcome the fear of being embarressed, it suggests one must be able to ask dumb questions, make dumb suggestions and celebrate your mistakes.

It is a good start for us to identify and own our fears. The book, however, leaves unanswered the question of how free oneself from fears.

Personal Edge as Model for Overcoming Fear

For each of the fears in getting naked, the diagram illustrates the intensity of that fear: from clear to debilitating. For each fear we have our personal edge – the place where we are at the limit of our capability. Personal growth can be seen as moving this edge towards clear (free of that perceived fear).

Surfing our edge through Flow

And the flow model provides a great way to surf our own personal edges. We are in a state of flow when the difficulty is matched to our capability. By placing ourselves in situations with the right level of challenge, we can confront a fear and work through releasing it.

Shame for Root Cause Analysis on Identity Issues

Let us revisit the chum bag carried by the swimmer that hampers us with perceived risk and fear. The most powerful toolkit I have found for getting to the root cause of identity issues (including fear) is Brene Brown’s book on shame research I thought it was just me. More on this in upcoming blog posts.

Video Summary & Elaboration

If you found this post interesting, please consider watching this 5 minute video that goes into even more detail than covered above. It is a really great summary++.

My deep thanks to everyone who participated in this session and to Jade Meskill and Marius Grigoriu in particular.

Here is my Games Landscape Infographic and slides from my Agile Games 2012 keynote presentation.

Overview

Play is a powerful tool for achieving business results. A common question is, how can I do this in my current work environment? The purpose of this talk is to orient you to a variety of different ways that you can introduce play to solve real-world problems. Whether you are a leader, coach, and even individual contributor, there are ways to amplify the workplace with play.

Welcome to a guided tour of the play landscape. This guided tour will help you navigate the different techniques with the space of games and play in order to see how they can help you. We will start our journey with ways to harness the power of play through games to do valuable work. Next stop is about using games for accelerated, deep learning. At the peak of the tour we visit the ways we can develop our play skills. The final stop on our tour is how to embedded play into our work contexts.

At the end of the tour you will have a map for exploring play and perhaps even a burning curiousity about some newly discovered places.

Importance of Play

For the infographic on Stuart Brown’s book on Play, please refer to The Science of Play.

The Games Landscape

Presentation Slides

Siraj Sirajuddin shared a deeply insightful reflection on the nature of Agile/Lean coaching. Lot’s of insights for me.

Below, I have a few notes that just scratch the surface.

A big take-away for me is that every day and every meeting I need to:

1. Learn
2. Make a difference
3. Have fun

Another concept is Clean State Fridays where everyone goes home without emotional baggage so they can start fresh on the following Monday.

He also reminded me that we play a dance with courage and grace to achieve great outcomes.

Strongly suggest you check out the full presentation or find a way to see him in person.