how your culture is shaping your agile

How your culture is shaping your Agile

[email protected] @rowanb

Rowan Bunning CST - Scrum WithStyle

mailto:[email protected]

© 2016 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com

A little about

Rowan Bunning• Background in object oriented & web dev. with vendors, enterprise product

development, start-ups & consultancies

• Introduced to Agile via eXtreme Programming in 2001 as: “the way good Smalltalkers develop software”

• Introduced Scrum organisation-wide in 2003-5

• Agile Coach / ScrumMaster at a leading agile consultancy in the U.K.

• Have trained about 5,000 people in Scrum & Agile

• Certified ScrumMaster®

• Certified Scrum Product Owner®

• Effective User Stories

• Agile Estimating and Planning etc.

• One of first Agile Coaches in Australia from late 2008

• Organiser of Regional Scrum Gatherings® in Australia

@rowanb© 2017 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com

I chose the red pill. I have not found an end to the Agile rabbit hole yet!

Image courtesy of Village Roadshow Pictures


Session outline• Why Agile? • LaLoux culture model in a nutshell Agile in…

• Amber organisations • Orange organisations • Green organisations • Teal organisations

• What you can do


Some questions addressed along the way• Q1: What is likely shaping your Agile? • Q2: What is your org likely misinterpreting about Agile and Scrum?

• Q3: Why is SAFe so popular and what are SAFe adopters missing out on?

• Q3: What sorts of changes are required of leaders in order to shift to high impact Agile?


Thanks to…

Michael Spayd Michael HammanMichael Sahota Jean Tabaka


Q: What is likely shaping your Agile?

Answer 1: Your motivation for pursuing it. Your Why


agility is not the same as “faster”“We considered a bunch of names, and agreed eventually on “agile” as we felt that captured the adaptiveness and response to change which we felt was so important to our approach." - Martin Fowler

“Agile does not mean delivering faster. Agile does not mean fewer defects or higher quality. Agile does not mean higher productivity. Agile means agile - the ability to move with quick easy grace, to be nimble and adaptable. To embrace change and become masters of change - to compete through adaptability by being able to change faster and cheaper than your competition can." - Craig Larman and Bas Vodde


Where the term “Agile” came from


Which has agility?

Source:YouTube Source: invorma.com/16-super-jumping-animals

or


Ability to steer

Photo credits: thoughtcatalog.com and static.ezermester.hu

not


– Leon C. Megginson, Professor of Management and Marketing at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.

Megginson, ‘Lessons from Europe for American Business’, Southwestern Social Science Quarterly (1963)

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the

most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."


LaLoux culture model in a nutshell


1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Frederic LaLoux

A short history of consciousness theory

Spiral Dynamics

Clare W. Graves, Ph.D Ken Wilber

Integral Theory


Image source (unmodified): Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organisations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human

Consciousness, by Frederic Laloux.

Level of complexity dealt with

@rowanb© 2017 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com Source: Frederic LaLoux, Reinventing Organizations (Nelson Parker 2014)

20-25%

50%

20-25%

2%


Agile

Agile Culture is here

Agile

Most organisations

have these dominant cultures


What happens when you attempt to adopt Agile in an organisation with an incompatible culture?


Conformist - Amber


Conformist Amber

“Agile” in Amber

Surrounded by bureaucracy

30% of organisations including most of public sector


Conformist Amber

Amber orgs value the opposite of Agile

over Individuals and interactions

over Working softwareComprehensive documentation

Processes and tools

Contract negotiation over Customer collaboration

Following a plan over Responding to change

The traditional manifesto


Amber reaction to Agile Principles

“No! Our highest priority is to deliver the project to the satisfaction of the sponsor.”

“No! Our requirements are known. We don’t want to be changing them.”

“No! We need all of it. It would be inefficient to do multiple deliveries.”

“No! We have Business Analysts for that. It’s inefficient for business people to be

talking with developers who lack BA level people and elicitation skills.”


Conformist Amber

Theory X dominant in AmberTheory X Theory Y

Dislike work and avoid it Need to work and can enjoy it

Need to control Direct ourselves

Avoid responsibility Seek and accept responsibility

Motivated by money Motivated to realise our potential

Little creativity Highly creative

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need,

and trust them to get the job done.


“That sounds nice but we’re not a tech company that indulges that much

in techie stuff. What we do are business projects after all.”

“That sounds nice, but when there’s a project deadline looming, we expect everyone to rise to the occassion.”

“No! Our steering committees review progresss based on reports of spend

vs budget and activity relative to planned milestones.”

“That sounds nice, but everything of substance must be in writing so that we know who to hold accountable. We’re in a distributed world too.”

“No! Our PMO has a project resourcing process for assigning

resources. We trust our managers and team leads. Other resources

should just execute.”


“No! It’s about delivering all requirements in a complex enterprise environment. Big

organisations like ours require big, complicated solutions.”

“No! We have separate Architects, BA’s and tech leads for that.

Requirements aren’t up for negotiation anyway.”

“Sounds nice but we expect them to already be effective. They should be

maximising their time executing.”

How much of this sounds familiar?Even if we hold a different view personally, to what degree do

structures, processes and cultural norms continue to keep things working in a way reflective of these beliefs?


Conformist Amber

Insisting on prediction of the unpredictable

"The most serious impediments to using Scrum are habits of waterfall, predictive thinking over the last twenty to thirty years; these have spawned command and control management, belief that demanding something will make it happen, and the willingness of development to cut quality to meet dates. These are inbred habits that we aren’t even aware of anymore."

- Ken Schwaber


Conformist Amber

Partial Agile only survives within a protected bubble

📖


Conformist Amber

Against the grain• Hard work protecting the bubble

• Heavy reporting up based on predictive plan

• Secretive by default

• Disinterested in “theory” - can’t reason for continuous improvement 📖

• Positional power up hierarchy where understanding of work situation is limited 📖

• Good Agile is fragile and can be rapidly destroyed 📖


Achievement - Orange


Achievement Orange

Organisation as machineLanguage of machine: Measurement and control, efficiency, order, programmes, inputs and outputs, production, top down, bottom-up, centralised, decentralised, roll-out. Language of force: Consistency, standardisation, Get people to, make them… etc.

Source: cleanlanguage.co.uk


Control systems in organisationsMarket system

Bureaucratic system

Clan system

• Prices drive very efficient decision making • Measure Input and Output

• Formal rules, roles, processes, compliance • Supervision, direction and hierarchy • Specialisations enable clearer comparison with

like workers

• Informal value based rules • Allows innovation and collaboration • Most suitable for unique, interdependent or

ambiguous work e.g. software development Reference: A Conceptual Framework for the Design of Organizational Control Mechanisms, William G. Ouchi, Management Science, Vol. 25, No. 9. 1979.


Bureaucratic control is booming in Amber/Orange

Market control

Clan control

Bureaucratic control

• Prices drive very efficient decision making • Measure Input and Output

• Formal rules, roles, processes, compliance • Supervision, direction and hierarchy • Specialisations enable clearer comparison with

like workers

• Informal value based rules • Allows innovation and collaboration • Most suitable for unique, interdependent or

ambiguous work e.g. software development


Achievement Orange

Orange orgs want faster but not agility• Shareholder value + IT as a cost centre —>

playing a cost side, resource efficiency game • Misinterpret Agile as a tool for increasing

efficiency • “Program efficiency” and “delivery” are where

Orange orgs believe the problem is • “Agile” the Execute within “Plan-then-Execute” • “iterations” used to build out fixed scope to plan • Actually doing Incremental Development

and calling it “Agile”• Not: agility, iteration from customer

feedback, working in pure value order or amplified learning,


Achievement Orange

Cargo cult Agile“Orange Organisations increasingly feel obligated to follow the fad: they define a set of values, post them on office walls and company web site, and then ignore them whenever that is more convenient for the bottom line.”


Achievement Orange

Agile positioned as “delivery” tool• Management by Objectives (MbO): “define objectives (predict); follow-up

(control); strategic planning; mid-term planning, yearly budgeting cycles, key performance indicators, and balanced scorecards” [LaLoux14]

• Leads to negotiating fixed Scope & Date…

Contract negotiation over Customer collaboration

• “The most serious impediments to using Scrum are habits of waterfall, predictive thinking over the last twenty to thirty years; these have spawned command and control management, belief that demanding something will make it happen, and the willingness of development to cut quality to meet dates. These are inbred habits that we aren’t even aware of anymore.” - Ken Schwaber


Achievement Orange

Agility constrained by hierarchy of objectives

Delivery DeliveryDelivery

Scrum is put into these boxes

Team

Program

Portfolio


Achievement Orange

Agility constrained by hierarchy of objectives

Delivery DeliveryDelivery

Scrum is put into these boxes

Team

Program

Portfolio

SAFe fits neatly into the Amber-Orange status quo structures and mindset rather than offering a path to transcending it.


Achievement Orange

Project/PI focus over customer focus• Programs, projects as means of

control • Projects, Programs, PMO

abstract away the external customer

• Internal stakeholder interests dominate over external customers

• Big programmes = big batches

Project

Focus on project delivery

😃

😞

Focus on Customer


Water-Scrum-Fall💡 $

ArchitectsBusiness AnalystsProject Control Board

User Reps Operations

SIT UAT

System Testers

Deployment

😞

Benefits Realisation begins

Business case

Big Batch Specification

Big Batch Project Scope

Product Backlog Current Product

Users

Limited Coverage

Agile Team Programmers & Testers only

Months

2 weeks each iteration

Months

Released

Dependent on other groups to get anything specified or released


SAFe adopters are likely missing…• agility

• high responsiveness

• ability to work in value order

• elimination of dependencies

• Systems Thinking and optimising the whole

• customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• genuinely collaboratively business-development relationship rather than continuation of The Contract Game

• minimum viable bureaucracy

• high performing teams


Achievement Orange

Clash with self-organisation• Pre-defined job titles and roles impede

self-organisation • Individual performance review • Efficiency drive + technical work =

• narrow division of labour + hierarchy for technical supervision

• local optimisation • Opposite of generalising specialists

and Scrum rule of no titles or sub-teams


Achievement Orange

Professional mask impediment• Fear of disempowerment an elephant in the

room impediment to Agile adoption

• "Emotions, doubts, and dreams are best kept behind a mask, so that we do not make ourselves vulnerable. Our identity is no longer fused with our need to be seen as competent and successful, ready for the next promotion.” [LaLoux14]

Image credit: 9hues.com

http://9hues.com


Achievement Orange

What Amber/Orange orgs get wrong• Mistake Scrum and Agile as just another process to be compliantly

followed

• Agile framed as a delivery method not requiring change by senior managers

• By pursuing fast and/or efficient, starve adoption of slack for learning

• Attempt Agile within ‘The Contract Game’ of up-front scope & date negotiation

• Add Agile in addition to what already exists rather than rationalising it


Transitioning from Orange to Green

Involves eliminating formal constraintsreplacing them with team self-regulation,

values, responsibility, inspect & adapt


“I visualise Scrum as a rocket. Pushing that rocket forward is the power of its engines. But puling it back

are the forces of gravity. If the rocket it able to push far enough, it can enter into orbit. But if it cannot, it will

inevitably get pulled back to earth, right where it started. The implications of Scrum must be pushed far enough

into other parts of the organisation so that the entire transition is not pulled back by organisational gravity.”

- Mike Cohn, Succeeding with Agile

Escape velocity


Leaders must go first for organisational culture change


Orange vs Green executive stories

In order to hit our predicted half-yearly profit target, As an executive, I want all projects run to produce the predicted results on time and budget.Orange

In order to continually delight customers in a turbulent market, As an executive, I want high capability teams of people with purpose and passion, learning about customers and creating high value products that serve the interests of all stakeholders. Green


Pluralistic Green


Pluralistic Green

Interdependence and Shared Values• Motivation: Power has shifted to Customer /

constituent, need to “Delight” the customer • Structure around customer value creation • “Culture is paramount” - deliberate culture • Share values instead of policies, processes • Value Relationships over Outcomes • Honest about uncertainty 📖

Image credit: gomindshift.com

< 20% of organisations inc. start-ups and growth mode


Pluralistic Green

Customer Collaboration• Vendor seeks ongoing partnership with

client 📖

• Multi-stakeholder win-win-win increases complexity

• Agility required to wrestle success

• Value side management

• Business steering development directly makes sense (Product Owner) 📖

Image credit: phoonies.wordpress.com


Achievement Orange

Organisation as Organism, CultureOrganism language: “Living systems, environmental conditions, adaptation, life cycles, recycling, needs, homeostasis, evolution, survival of the fittest, health, illness.” Culture language: “Socialise, values, beliefs, ideology, rituals, diversity, traditions, history, service, shared vision and mission, understanding, qualities, families.”

Source: cleanlanguage.co.uk

Photo credit: holganix.com


Pluralistic Green

Green is easily misunderstood from an Amber/Orange perspective

"...it is clear to me that PRINCE2 is agile, and therefore I have always been running projects in an agile way since I started my project management career.

I fully expect Agile to fade away given time and perhaps end its days as a niche small project delivery (web projects) [approach] advocated by the major web agencies such as Conchango.” - Kevin Brady, 2011

Source: eprince2.com/articles/prince2-is-agile/2011/03/17/


Pluralistic Green

And now, some words of wisdom from my favourite management though leader…


Pluralistic Green

Inverted hierarchy

• Distaste for power imbalance • Inverted hierarchy where

management supports teams • “Frontline workers make far-

reaching decisions without management approval” 📖

Image credit: Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde


Pluralistic Green

Green values Servant-leadership

• “Green insists that leaders should be in service of those they lead.”

• “In some innovating companies, managers are not appointed from above, but from below; subordinates choose their boss, after interviewing prospective candidates.” [LaLoux14]


Evolutionary Teal

Team Performance Curve

Source: The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-performance Organisation, by Jon R. Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith, Harvard Business Press, 1993.

© 2015 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com

The “Compromise Units”

________________

______________________

____

____

____

____

____

All the characteristics of a real team, but the members are deeply committed to one another’s personal

growth and development

Equally committed to a common purpose, goals, and working approach for which they hold

themselves mutually accountable.

___________

Has not yet established collective accountability. Requires more clarity

about purpose, goals or work-products and more discipline in hammering out

a common working approach.

______________

Has not focused on collective performance and is not really trying to achieve it. Has no interest in shaping a

common purpose or performance goals.

_______________

Members act primarily to share information, best practices, or

perspectives and to make decisions to help each individual perform within

his or her area of responsibility.

___________

Working groupPerf

orma

nce

Impact

Time

Pseudo-team

Potential team

Real team

Exceptional team

Real teams come naturally


😞😃

Folding everyone into end-to-end teams

$

Flow of Value

Benefits Realisation begins

Vision & Business Goals

Product Backlog

Current Product

Users

Feature Team that is fully cross-functional

2 weeks each iteration

Released💡Feedback re Product and Process quality

OperationsSystem Testers

The Agile Team has the skills and authority to create usable Product

Increments each iteration

ArchitectBusiness Analysts

Broadening of skills


Finally… Scrum makes perfect sense

• The elements of Scrum that get broken in Orange orgs make perfect sense in Green

✓ Agility

✓ Customer collaboration

✓ Servant-leadership

✓ Self-management (Teal)


High Impact Agile

Overall Impact

Extent of Scrum Adoption

High Impact zone•Green-Teal consciousness dominant in leadership

•Leading deliberate Green-Teal culture •Thinking and doing as per implications

of Scrum and Lean principles •Environment nurtures high engagement

and high performing teams

Implementation as per what is explicit Scrum Guide only

Superficial “fake Agile” as typically implemented


Evolutionary Teal


Evolutionary Teal

Teal: purpose, self-management and possibility• Perceived context: we evolve with the world • Belief: amazing things will emerge from a

truly supportive environment • About unleashing human ingenuity • Volunteering, free choice, true taking of

Responsibility 📖 • No projects - long-lived product

development • No budgets - why create scarcity,

why play games with each other?Image credit: healthyplace.com

Very few organisations


Evolutionary TealCPJ inspired by Jeff Bezos' most recent annual letter. medium.com/21st-century-organizational-development/type-2-organizations-df3f1f53c66c

Distributed decision making


Evolutionary Teal

Self-management• No “reporting lines” • High agency teams, little formal structure to take

power away • Org functioned as social network • Trust relationships valued • Team interaction directly with visionary Executive • Recent comments… “had a great culture”

“best team I’ve ever worked in”

Image credit: @NielsPflaeging Twitter

https://twitter.com/NielsPflaeging


Evolutionary Teal

People and roles are organic, dynamic• Team involvement in hiring • Not hired into narrowly defined job.

Instead, roles emerges from individual • Uncool to refer to someone by job title • “Job titles and descriptions hardly do

justice to unique combinations of roles, and they are too static to account for the fluid nature of work in Teal Organisations.” [LaLoux14]

• Empathy is essential 📖


Evolutionary Teal

Psychological safetyPair Programming taken up readily as safety existed 📖 See Google’s Project Aristotle

Image credit: Calqui


Hypothesis Driven Development


Evolutionary Teal

Wholeness

• Encouraged to be yourself 📖 • Non-conformists • Strong intrinsic motivation and

loyalty 📖

Photo: careerandhumanresources.blogcommunity.com


Evolutionary Teal

Evolutionary purpose, breakthrough innovationInventions in the 1990’s and early 2000’s… 📖 • Enterprise collection management product used by

Library of Congress, Bundesarchiv etc. • One of first web app languages • One of first e-retail sites • Most complex Govt. transaction in

1999 to register for ABN • First semantic XML-based content

management • Meta-level object framework for business

application development • Semantic web-based knowledge system re-

definable without programmer • Solar thermal “big dish”

Photo: Unknown via Aperture


Evolutionary Teal

Humility is a challenge• Social proof from the “big corporates” • Status through position or individual

achievement • Impediments to progressing…

• Ego, identity and positional status • Fear of vulnerability and looking incompetent • Lack of trust between managers separated

from the work • Lack of belief in team-based and self-

regulating alternativesImage credit: fortune.com

http://fortune.com


Conclusions


Summary of Insights• Many are pursuing Agile for the “wrong” reasons* • Organisations are (mis)interpreting Agile to fit their current level of

consciousness • “faster, cheaper” motivation bends “Agile” to be an incremental delivery tool

to project goals at the expense of customer-centric agility • Water-Scrum-Fall is a typical consequence • The elements of Scrum and good Agile that get broken in Orange orgs are

what makes perfect sense in Green • “An organisation cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of

development.” * Pursuing ends for which it was not intended by those who invented it


What you can do yourself

• Listen for language reflecting a machine metaphor

• Have the confidence to take of your Professional Mask, say “I don’t know”

• Cultivate your own Green and Teal beliefs and share them


What you can do to invite others

Image credit: Yi Lv, Odd-e

Example Causal Loop Diagram• Ask leadership: • why change? • would you like to talk about culture &

leadership? • Talk about sources of uncertainty, variability • Tell stories and engineer experiences that

challenge limiting beliefs • Use Systems Thinking to explore current

beliefs about organisational dynamics • Point out where behaviour is not aligned

with purported aspiration


To learn more…• Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux

• reinventingorganizations.com

• We the people: Consenting to a deeper democracy by John Buck and Sharon Villines

• sociocracy30.org

• meetup.com/Teal-Sydney-Reinventing-Organisations-and-Holacracy

• medium.com/teal-for-startups

• What would it take to Have and Agile Enterprise? slideshare.net/AgileNZ/lyssa-adkins-michael-spayd-keynote

• cleanlanguage.co.uk

• Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

• Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change by William B. Joiner

• Talk to me… I have many more stories!

http://reinventingorganizations.com

http://sociocracy30.org

http://meetup.com/Teal-Sydney-Reinventing-Organisations-and-Holacracy

http://medium.com/teal-for-startups

http://slideshare.net/AgileNZ/lyssa-adkins-michael-spayd-keynote

http://slideshare.net/AgileNZ/lyssa-adkins-michael-spayd-keynote

http://cleanlanguage.co.uk


@rowanb au.linkedin.com/in/rowanbunning

Rowan [email protected] scrumwithstyle.com

mailto:[email protected]