(This post is part 1 of Agile Culture Series – see Reading Guide for more).

I finally had time to read The Reengineering Alternative: A plan for making your current culture work by William Schneider. If you are at all concerned about successful Agile adoption, then this is a must-read.

Before reading the book, I already had a pretty good idea about it thanks to a private seminar with Michael Spayd and a conference session by Israel Gat – How we do things around here in order to succeed. But when reading the book, I crystallized my thinking about a whole number of disparate experiences and open questions.

In this post, I will cover the key concepts of the book. Analysis and connections to Agile will follow in subsequent posts.

Schneider Culture Model

In the diagram below, there are four cultures depicted – one in each quadrant. Each has a NAME, a “short quote”, a picture, and some words the characterize that quadrant. As you read through this, you may will get a sense of where your company is.

There are also two axis that indicate where the focus or an organization is:

1. Horizontal: People Oriented (Personal) vs. Company Oriented (Impersonal)
2. Vertical: Reality Oriented (Actuality) vs. Possibility Oriented

This provides an a way to see relationships between the cultures. For example, Control culture is more compatible with Collaboration or Competence cultures than with Cultivation culture.

Key points about culture

• Management guru Peter Drucker says “Culture … is singularly persistent … In fact, changing behaviour works only if it is based on the existing ‘culture’”
• No one culture type is better than another. The book details the strengths and weaknesses of each so check it out if you are curious to learn more.
• Depending on the type of work, one type of culture may be a better fit.
• Companies typically have a dominant culture with aspects from other cultures. This is fine as long as those aspects serve the dominant culture.
• Different departments or groups may have different cultures. (e.g. development vs. operations)
• Differences can lead to conflict.

How to make Culture work

The starting point for making culture work is understanding it. The book describes a survey you can give to staff (Example Survey from Book in Survey Monkey – N.B. You can’t see the results). The book suggests using this as a starting point for culture workshops with a diverse group of staff.

There are several suggestions for using cultural information to guide decision-making:

1. Evaluate key problems in the context of culture. Sometimes changes are needed to bring the culture into alignment with the core culture.
2. Sometimes the culture is too extreme (e.g. too much cultivation without any controls – or vice versa!), and elements from other cultures are needed to bring it back into balance.
3. Consider the possibility of creating creating interfaces/adapters/facades to support mismatches between departments or groups.

Well, that’s the book in a nutshell. More to follow on how this relates to Agile.

Agile has crossed the chasm and things are different over here. Really different. And not so good.

It feels like we have landed at Dieppe (Canadian/British Military WW2 Failure). The bad news is that there is significant failure successfully adopting Agile. The good news is that we can recognize it and learn from it.

Technology Adoption and The Chasm

Michael Moore’s crossing the chasm introduces the notion of phases in technology adoption.

Consider the diagram below:

As a community, we have experienced a lot of success working with Innovators, Early Adpoters. Here we are working with visionaries that have a high tolerance for change and provide strong management support.

The problem is that we are now working with the Early Majority. The recent announcement of PMI certification is pretty strong evidence of entering the early majority.

So what’s the problem? “75% or organizations do not get the benefits they expect.” – Ken Schwaber. These are pragmatists. Their goals are to avoid risk and change as little as possible. They want to buy some off-the-shelf Agile so they can get the benefits, with the least effort. They have heard good things about Agile and want the Agile Tooth Fairy to come in wave a magic wand.

Agile is not an out-of-the-box solution. I don’t there will ever be one, but we can build more around Agile to change the world of work.

We all have a pretty good idea (more or less) what Agile is. The problem is that the whole product is only partly defined by our community. For example, tools that do not scale to Enterprise needs. Some level of agreement about when to use Agile and when not to. Sorry, that I can’t paint a clear picture of what the whole product looks – still figuring this out. (If you have one, let me know).

There are for sure many talented coaches who have something that approaches whole product thinking. We need to do better communicating and growing our ideas around this or we will fail as a community.

External Related Blog Posts

• Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)
• Agile is Here to Stay… Now What?
• Agile @ 10 Years – Elephants in the Room

Epilog (Apr. 12, 2011)

I am thinking more and more that Agile is so tightly bundled with modern management culture that this is less about the whole product and more about organization evolution.

A critical predictor of success I have seen in Agile transitions is how people define reality.

Let’s face it, if you are running Scrum well, then there will be all sorts of ugly problems that pop out of the woodwork: decaying technical infrastructure, technical debt, people struggling with new roles, people no longer able to hide behind the fog of waterfall, and conflicts between groups.

Scrum is designed to make impediments visible. Management’s role is to act on these and remove them to support the team. Usually, these problems have been around for a while.

Consider the Matrix

What does the film The Matrix have to tell us about this situation?

Neo is Seeking

Neo is not satisfied with the status quo. He knows that something is wrong but is not sure what it is.

Morpheus is the Guide

Morpheus acts as a guide. He tells Neo that everything is not as it seems. Neo must decide if how badly he wants to know the truth.

Neo must choose

Morpheus gives Neo a choice:

• Red Pill: Learn the truth about and discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.
• Blue Pill: Remain in his current reality and wake up the next morning believing whatever he wishes.

What does have to do with Agile?

• The Matrix = Organizational Reality
• Neo = Transition Sponsor
• Morpheus = Agile Coach

When a client swallows the red pill, they choose to confront the red flags and problems. Just like the recommendation from one of my favourite management books - Good to Great. In this situation, it is possible to do what Michael Spayd call Strategic Agile. This is represents the fundamental shift in behaviours and values called for by Agile. It leads to a learning organization that is on the road to joy in work and high performance.

When a client swallows the blue pill, the we are in a Tactical Agile situation. In this case, it might be possible to find some local wins with morale, teamwork and productivity. It might also lead to organizational backlash that reverts Agile. Sadly, what frequently happens is that  the Agile champions and advocates who want to create a better company leave to find a place with a future.

My Stories

In every transition, I have seen red pill, blue pill situations. Some of them are minor decisions. Some are major like investment in repaying technical debt and investing in improving productivity.

At one company, the top 10 contributing staff built a value stream showing that a “5 day project” actually took 9 months to complete and the $5k revenue was offset by $25k of costs. More than half of the executives (CEO, CTO, VP Sales, VP Engineering, CFO) discounted the data. It was a blue pill moment.

At another company, we talked about the science of motivation, and they took the red pill. The yearly bonus went bye-bye. On the other hand they later took the blue pill on technical debt. Can’t win ‘em all.

One of the biggest problems I have seen is that the sponsor of the Agile transition is often the author of the problems. For example, the VP Engineering who was on watch when technical debt was piling up – it’s hard for him to get excited about sharing this problem with superiors and asking for patience while he fixes it.

If you are a coach, it’s your job to know where the boundaries are and help clients cross them when they are willing.

Your turn!

Next time you are working with someone, think about their reality and how they see the situation. Then find ways to share yours. At the end of the day, it is their choice.

The Video

Take a few minutes to watch this video clip from the movie. It’s fun and will help your brain remember this post.

Agile failure is a sensitive topic but one that we as a community need to talk about in order to build a brighter future together. In this post, I will share some observations that came out of an informal session that took place over an extended coffee-break session at Play4Agile conference.

Survey Results

I ran a quick fist of five survey with first eight coaches and then with twelve as people. The question was:

“How many (percent) of your Agile transitions have been successful? Zero for none. Five for all.”

The results confirmed what I have suspected and experienced: a single one, lot’s of twos and threes, and one four. No zeros or fives.

It was noted that one problem with the survey is that Agile (Lean?) is a direction (dream of perfection) and not a destination.

Good news, Bad news

Consider the visual note below (start in the top left).

Agile in the small is fine

When probing about what was working and what wasn’t it became clear that agile in the small was working well. With single teams and smaller companies, people were pretty happy with the results. Even isolated teams at large companies seemed to find success when the teams wanted to go Agile. The principle that applies here is: Go where the energy is.

Agile in the large needs attention

Now that Agile has crossed the chasm and many more transitions are initiated by the early majority we are seeing more of “me too” Agile adoption. Some of the support found in earlier transitions are now missing:

1. Strong management support
2. Sense of urgency (Critical for Kotter model)
3. Notion that: failure is not an option

Case studies MIA

One key need of early majority is case studies. We as a community do not do a good job sharing success stories and an even worse job sharing failures. This makes it hard to learn and improve.

Agile in the Large

Craig Larman and Bas Vodde have written a great book - Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum – on how to make Agile work in the large. This is a good start and paints a clear vision for alternatives for making Agile work.

We also have Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising. This is nice, but not nearly enough to get to a playbook for Agile adoption.

I believe that we as a community need focus more attention on models, patterns and guides for Agile transition and adoption. Lot’s of open territory here.

It’s about people. Duh.

One of the challenges with Agile in the large is that many people really don’t care about Agile and don’t want to change. Yeah, this happens with small teams too, but I find it is manageable there. When dealing with hundreds and thousands of people the problem gets amplified.

I thank Christine Neidhardt for reminding me that organizational change is about people. The way to change an organization is one person at a time.

Addendum

Subsequent to publishing this, I found this great post that I strongly recommend: Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)

I attended Israel Gat‘s session with this title at Agile 2010. I was already familiar with some of the concepts based on a private seminar given to my coaching circle by Michael Spayd.

For me organizational change is a hot topic since I keep running into it when adopting Agile practices.

Schneider Model for understanding Culture

Israel introduced the Schneider model for understanding company culture. The idea is to use survey questions to categorize the dominant culture into one of four categories (see below).

Many companies we work with are a control culture while Agile is all about Collaboration and Cultivation and (sadly) to a lesser extent about Competence.

You Can’t Change Culture

“Culture is singularly persistent” – Drucker. It is estimated that it can take 10 years for the culture to change in a large company.

Consider the chart in the middle of the diagram below. If we want to be successful in adopting Agile (or anything else) it is essential to focus on harmony with the existing culture. Pushing for different culture will lead to conflict.

Agile adoption leads to conflict

This is an observation rather than a pejorative. With the best intentions Agile will accidentally lead to conflict within the organization. The example given was of different cultural biases within different departments.

For example, Competence in Engineering and Control in Operations. In addition to differing departmental objectives, us vs. them thinking will also create tension. Israel talked about the Outmodel that describes perceptual bias that we create when we have limited information about a situation. The idea being that by design of our organization, there will be conflict between the groups and Agile adoption only makes this worse by perturbing the system.

One idea proposed by Israel is to create a boundary object between different groups. In the case of Development (Engineering) and Operations, one could use Technical debt as a way of measuring the quality of the code to satisfy ops that the code was production worthy. So a  boundary object that has a quantitative measure is very helpful. IMHO, there is much more than this required to ensure that code is production-worthy, but that’s another story.

What I learned about myself

In one exercise we broke into the four groups to explore the different cultures. I went to Control because I have struggled with a few organizations with this culture. What I discovered is that I personally have strong control tendencies. I also discovered that control can save a lot of time by decisive action. The trick is knowing when to apply it. I experimented with my workshop later in the conference and was happy to see that very strong direction around group logistics and exercise structure can make a session more coherent and valuable.

And now for something completely different

Clarke Ching shared a great 6 min animated video on organizational change by Eli Goldratt. It is related so, I’ll throw it in here…

Here is a very short (2 min)video where Selena Delesie and I reported back on a session at Agile Coach Camp Canada. This is what a group of 10+ of us came up with.

I’ll link to the writeup when it is posted.

Thanks to everyone who was there – it was a fun, intense and valuable session for me.

Mary Poppendieck gave her usual well-researched and convincing tour-de-force presenation at LSSC10 on several approaches to organizational change with a talk titled “What’s wrong with targets?”

The purpose of the whole talk is to trash Management by Objectives. See my related blog noting the damaging effects: SMART goals may not be that smart. As an alternative, Mary shares 4 effective models for organizational change.

I have heard a lot recently about the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It uses the metaphor of the Rider and the Elephant. I like it a lot since it lines up well with my NLP tools and understanding of the unconscious mind. Anyway the change model is very clear:

1. Direct the rider – provide clear direction and objectives.
2. Motivate the Elephant – appeal to emotions to provide energy for change.
3. Shape the path – create a supportive environment that will keep things on track.

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother is a second approach for driving change. Check out the above description in the mind map. It reminds me of the A3 technique that I have been using for the last year with great success. I’ll blog on my experiments later.

Strategy and Deming’s systems analysis + PDCA + People were the two final models to round out organizational change approaches that involve people rather than measure them. Caveat: SMART is OK for projects; not people.

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.

I first read Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising when it first came out many years ago as part of Scrum Toronto book reading club. It has been an important source of ideas that have allowed me to successfully adopt Agile at many companies. This is an essential part of any change agent’s toolkit.

Mihai Iancu has a wonderful mindmap to show the patterns in a visual an approachable manner. Thanks to Mihai for allowing me to share this with you.

Here are some of my favourite patterns:

• Do food – Create a relaxed setting and leverage cultural bonding that happens when people eat together
• Tailor made – Find the right solution for the people you are working with; every situation is unique
• Step by step – Take things one step at a time and build on successes

Please comment on yours.