LeadingAgile’s Post

Transcript

You know, safety is an interesting thing. We create safety when we're able to make a meet commitments, we create safety when everybody knows the rules. We create safety when we get to be connected to each other and we create safety when we when we get to have fun together. You know, this idea of psychological safety is big in the agile community. So like what are the conditions that have to be created so everybody gets the psychological safety that they need, all four of the different quadrants. How are you guys doing today? OK, so why did you guys come to a culture talk? What do you want to hear about? Culture. Ohh I guess that makes sense. OK, I walked myself into that one. Anybody have any thoughts? Like what's the what? Like what challenges are you guys experiencing with culture? Now. OK, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, kind of the backdrop to this talk is I've been playing around the agile world for about 20 years. My first, my first job, I grew up in like a project management PMO, right? So that was kind of on my background. Had a degree in computer science, but like never really used it professionally. So I've just worked in IT fields and did infrastructure and, you know, B2B2CE, commerce, large scale financial systems and stuff like that. And when I first started getting into agile, it was like all the books. Think like 2003, 2004, all the books are like on small team scrum and all. And they we really kind of hadn't hit the culture thing yet. But then like everything started being about creating a culture of agility and like I'm doing like big mainframe systems and Oracle databases and online banking and bill pay. And I just had this like nagging thing in my head is like, how is culture going to lead to this project that I have to deliver? Or how is Scrum going to lead to this project that I had to deliver? And so back in those days, this was before the books on Safe. Most everything at that point was XP or Scrum, I guess, like Feature Driven Development and DSDM. Anybody remember that one? Yeah, it's been a minute. DSM, right? So those are like the things that were around, right? So we were all trying to sort it out and read David Anderson's first book on I think it was called. It was basically his first book on combat was like lean theory of constraints applied to Agile. And so develop some really strong points of view about how to do agile at scale and really just kind of hit everything hard from like a process and like an organizational structure. Leading Agile, my company, which I started about 14 years ago, basically do like transformation work. So like getting into really large complicated companies trying to figure how to untangle them. And then it was like through my last 20 years kind of circled back to the culture side. And so with this talk is going to be is a little bit around like what I think is important in order to be able to kind of establish the kind of culture that you might want in an organization. OK. And so the way that I structure this talk, I'll go through a couple of introductory. Slide. So if anybody wants the deck, you can text culture to that little thing and my team will send you a link to it and you can download it. I'll put that back up at the end as well. So if you miss it, that's my contact information if anybody ever wants to reach out or connect with me on LinkedIn or Facebook or probably not Facebook, but I guess. Now you find me on LinkedIn. It's fine. That's cool, right? Yeah. So, But anyway, So what we're going to do during this talk is I'm going to kind of start with the the end of the story and then I'm going to tell you the story. And then we're going to go back to the first couple slides and kind of reiterate why I thought those first couple slides were important. So long title for a talk, but basically my general point of view is that you kind of have to get the organization right and an alignment if you want to create the kind of culture you want. So it's like the fundamental structure, systems, things like that are necessary to create a culture that you want. And so I'm going to unpack that a little bit with you. And so we talk a lot. About, I talk a lot about the idea that there's like three different ways to kind of think about agile and agile transformation. And the first one, like I said that I encountered was this idea of practices. And so we're all, I'm sure familiar Scrum, maybe some of us are familiar with like XP and all the engineering practices that are associated with it. Now we have Safe, we have Spotify model, we have large scale Scrum, things like that. What I find most of the time. We go in to talk to people, we'll get comments that say something like scrums working really well for us. But like we can't produce any software. Like we're not sure quite kind of what's wrong, right? Anybody experienced that? Yeah, well, it was. So I have to be careful as I get in the story, especially if you guys laugh at my jokes. It's like I'm gonna, I'm gonna like everything in my being is going to want to talk for an hour and a half. So I'm going to try to keep it short. But but it was almost as if like the daily stand up meeting was like the reason we couldn't figure out how to build software, right. And so there's a lot of value in the practices of Scrum and XP and safe. And all those kinds of things. But, but you're making like a jump, right? When you like, we'll just pick on Scrum for a minute. You're making a jump that if you say we're going to start doing Scrum, the Scrum Master is going to remove the impediments. What you're kind of saying is that the organizational structures and all the different things as the Scrum Master removes the impediments will kind of just happen. You're kind of making that jump. Or if we start doing Scrum. That all of a sudden leaders are going to be empowering and trust their teams and all those kinds of things, right. And in practice, I think we find that often that doesn't play out the way we want it to. OK. And then So what we kind of do next is we go to this idea of, well, if those leaders would just trust us, if those leaders would just empower us, if they would just, if we could just adopt an agile mindset, then that would create the space for the practices to work. And in reality, like what I see more often than not is that you walk into most organizations that are trying to do Scrum and we have matrix teams all over the place. We have dependencies between different teams. We have a disconnect from the person that's riding the backlog up into the product owner organization or there's a disconnect from the backlog up to the strategic objectives of the organization. And so. Kind of my premise in this talk is that if we want to createspace for an agile culture to emerge. We have to kind of we have to kind of put the stuff around that team in place so that people can trust each other, so that people can inspect and adapt so that they can develop relationships. OK. So it's like all of the fun, goodness, sticky notes on the wall, connected teams that work together, I believe is a product of at the small level, just a team that stays together over time with a clear backlog that can produce a working tested increment at the end of every Sprint. Within that container, you can get a lot of teamwork and collaboration. When you have teams with a known backlog that can establish a stable velocity that can put something maybe into production every two weeks. Now that creates the safety for people to be vulnerable to trust. When the organization starts to believe that the system works, the leaders will begin to empower that team and trust that team to evolve. OK, so that's kind of like that's the end of the talk, right? So everything else. What I'm going to say over the next 40 minutes to this point is in support of that key point, so. If we had more time, I would, I would love to get some audience participation. But you know, we start to talk about like what is an agile culture? Like what is it that we're looking for? And so these were just like the things that were top of mind for me. We want, we want trust, we want the team to be ownership, have ownership. We want the team to be empowered. We want organization that can respond to change. We want people to be adaptive. We want solutions to emerge. We want to create safety. We want to have teamwork. Any other words come to mind when you think about the kind of cultures that we want to create? One or two I leave anything out. Innovation. Yeah, for sure we want to be innovative. Common goals, right? All that kind of stuff. Yeah, 100% OK so why is it important? Right. Well, this, this probably reflects my personal because we're gonna get into a lot of personality stuff too, because I'm incredibly fascinated with the idea of personality and how it impacts how we show up. But for me, things like building the right products, getting fast feedback, attention to quality, early delivery, predictability, efficiency, lower cost, innovation, right? But it could also be like, do I have? I'm at work. Do I feel connected, right? Do I feel like I get to make decisions? And that's a that's a really interesting thing because a lot of times when I go to conferences or even pick up some agile books now and then, a lot of the focus is on the environment that the teams operate in. But most of the time when I go in and talk to executives, whether client or somebody that I'm selling to or somebody at a conference, most of the time what people are trying to do with agiles, they're trying to get the organization. Put things in market faster so they can charge money for them. Right. And so there's sometimes there's like a disconnect or like a bridge that's missing between why the teams want to adopt Agile and why leadership wants to adopt Agile. So it's, you got to get really clear on like what it is that you're doing with Agile and why you're doing it and what you want to accomplish with it. So then I kind of go into, well, OK, however we define culture, who's responsible for it, right? Who's, you know, responsible for making it happen. Sometimes it's we, we want to get the leaders on board. And again, all the things trust, empowerment, give us agency, let us make decisions, all that kind of stuff, right? So leadership clearly has some responsibility for it. But I would suggest that sometimes the teams have some responsibility too. Like I'm very much a Stephen Covey guy. I think a lot about personal responsibility. Anybody familiar with Christopher? Free stuff, right? Christopher Avery was like one of the first agile talks ever, like heard about 17 years ago. His books on responsibility process and personal ownership and things like that are, are just mind blowing to me. So I think the teams have some responsibility for the culture that we're trying to create as well. This is one that I think it's tough is like, how do we get our customers to have like an agile culture with us, right? I mean, sometimes we go in to do transformation work with folks and it's like some of the toughest places to work. And those are our customers, right? People that want to adopt agile. Imagine if you're a company trying to adopt agile and you want to get into this inspect and adapt this collaborative, more exploratory kind of world with them and they're like really strictly waterfall or maybe it's a partner company or something like that, right? And then the organization. So that's where I kind of get into this idea of if an organization wants to really be agile. It requires personal empowerment, requires leadership, it requires some trust with your customers or vendors or suppliers, partners, that kind of a thing. But the organization has to be fundamentally set up for it as well, OK. And so this is this is like to me like such an interesting idea. I hope you guys find it as interesting as I do. But when I started really getting serious about thinking about. If we're going to have a culture conversation. And we're talking about moving parts of the organization. At the end of the day, I do think it largely comes down to the people that are in the organization. And it's kind of a funny aside about six years ago as working with a coach and he turned me on to this personality assessment tool. I've got no skin in the game with. I just happen to like it. Don't sell it, don't not owner in it or anything. It was called the color code. Look it up sometime colorcode.com. It's based upon the same fundamental science as the disk, but it's probably not as rigorous. But for me it was super, super understandable. And you could imagine what it's like living with somebody that you don't know me that well, but it's like, imagine what it's like living with somebody like me. Whenever I get like excited about something like this, like I test it on my family. So like I have so many personality profiling tools on my family because I'm kind of like a my leadership team because I think it's something's interesting. I kind of want to know who you are. And then I want to see if the assessment kind of matches it. And this is the one that kind of lit up for me. OK. And we're going to we're going to connect some dots as we go here, but bear with me here for a second. What is that? Where am I yellow? Well, give me a minute, we'll talk. I'll say so. So basically the model, it's really super easy to understand, OK. And so it's like people are on like the vertical axis. I think it's what I have here is they're controlling or non controlling. Logical or emotional? OK, so you end up with basically 4 quadrants. You end up with a logically controlling quadrant and emotionally controlling quadrant. You end U with an emotionally noncontrolling quadrant and you end up with a logically noncontrolling quadrant. And when you start to think about it right, you can kind of derive that like it's again, same science as the disk, but like I can't ever remember what DIC means or whatever. It just doesn't stay in my head. But when I'm interacting with somebody I can usually get a read on are they controlling or not? Are they coming from a logical perspective or an emotional perspective? And we're all hybrids, right? We're all hybrids and mixes of different things.