CHAPTER 6

Attack Culture and Structure Together

Culture is like the wind. It is invisible, yet its effect can be seen and felt.

—Bryan Walker and Sarah A. Soule

Janice already had enough to juggle; she didn’t expect this.

Reporting directly to the CIO for a large consulting company, Janice Brill was responsible for guiding her eighty-person software organization through a much larger and broader transformation initiative worldwide. The IT group served a demanding army of consultants who made partner based on their ability to generate results and revenue. As a result, the culture was one that very much followed the chain of command and flow of value. IT was a ser vices organization serving a ser vices organization.

So it was deeply gratifying to see the progress Janice and her management team made in the first few months of the formal change initiative. A transformation backlog was formed; a custom curriculum was developed to train and charter new pilot projects; they picked some promising team leads and had them kick off the first few pilots. Janice was feeling good.

Eventually, however, she started hearing more complaints and issues around one of the pilot projects. Since the team’s direct people manager was fully focused on fighting another fire, she offered to check in on them to see what was going on.

The first team stand-up meeting was convened by Serena (not her real name), who served as the team facilitator. The meeting felt rather robotic. One by one, each person shared what they did yesterday, what they planned for the day, and whether they had any immediate blockers.

Meanwhile, Serena was logging blockers on an issues list that was multiple pages long. “Why are all these issues still open?” Janice asked. Serena seemed defensive and replied sheepishly, “Well, I’ve escalated each to the relevant partner in the firm, but I haven’t heard anything back on most of them.” Janice was surprised. Serena was a promising team lead, from whom she expected more follow-through. “Those partners are very busy. Have you tried following up?” The response was eye-opening: “Yes, I did. But the first few times, we got yelled at for wasting their time, even though the issues were directly impacting the projects they’re sponsoring. I decided we should do our best to plow forward as is. It’s just counterproductive to incur the drama.”

Ouch. Despite using the new agile process consistently, the culture had snapped the organization back into its old habits. As a result, the pilot was in trouble, which means the transformation would take a credibility hit, and that would reflect on Janice’s leadership. This was a problem.

Today’s leaders are racing to reconfigure their organizations to be more adaptive and competitive. However, when looking for guidance on how to do just that, leaders will discover two competing schools of thought in the agile community: “First fix the culture” and “First fix the organizational structure.” In reality, this debate between a culture-first and a structure-first strategy is a false choice.

The Problem with Philosophy

In this chapter, I reveal the pitfalls that have consumed too many would-be agility champions. They develop a strong, philosophically consistent approach to change, which somehow goes sideways.

• The Boost. Yes, it was good to use a consistent philosophy.

• The Barrier. And yet, they’re reverting to old habits.

• The Rebound. So now, attack culture and structure together.

The Pattern of Untapped Philosophy

The Boost: Yes, It Was Good to Use a Consistent Philosophy

Janice knew she had a deeply entrenched culture. So she believed quickly getting results on the ground would be the best way to move the ball forward. And it did.

Leaders Use a Consistent Philosophy

Like Janice, maybe your agile strategy is focused on what we do. Any organization serves the purpose of creating results. So your transformation begins with installing popular practices for projects already in flight. You score quick wins to build momentum. You know it won’t be perfect at first, so “fake it till we make it.” Seeing is believing, so once they start getting results, people will buy in.

Or perhaps you’re of the other school of thought, and believe agility is ultimately about who we are. It started with a so-called manifesto of values and principles.¹ Lean Startup is based on the entrepreneurial spirit of living in uncertainty. The whole idea of DevOps is to bridge the division between the development and operations departments. Therefore, you’ve crafted a strategy that involves executive listening tours, workshops about concepts and values, and regular communication of the vision of empowering staff to work differently.

The Barrier: And Yet, They’re Reverting to Old Habits

Perhaps those new practices installed for quick wins generate immediate resistance. Or maybe the empowerment workshops and listening tours generated some initial energy, but people have gone back to their old habits. They say, “Oh, we believe in the transformation principles, but we have immediate deadlines to hit.” After all the investment of time, money, and political capital to shift culture, the organization snaps back to its old ways. People have blown off the change as fluffy nonsense, and they’ve blown you off as well.

Leaders Struggle with Snapback

The Boost: So Now, Attack Culture and Structure Together

Culture is often described as “the way we do things around here.” Naturally, that encapsulates both tangible things (policies, metrics, structures) and intangible things (values, symbols, language, behaviors, assumptions). The lines of reporting, defined roles, and career paths absolutely have impact on the vibe, the tone of daily life in an organization. And yet, the word “culture” is almost always used to describe the fuzzy elements of work, as if culture is separate and apart from those tangible elements. The truth is, structure and culture, the tangible and the intangible, are inextricably interconnected. You cannot evolve one without simultaneously impacting the other.

Change leaders can double their credibility with a strategy that incorporates both perspectives. In this chapter, we explore the following:

• Overcome the culture-first trap. How do we operationalize our desired culture in order to get momentum?

• Overcome the structure-first trap. How do we contextualize our new organizational structure in order to get staff on board?

• The agile leadership canvas. How you can use a collaborative brainstorming template to ensure you keep your balance and don’t lean too far into one direction.

Through this two-sided conversation, we guide an organizational transition that is both meaningful and sustainable.

Despite several decades of success with agile methods, the debate still rages. What is the best way to get some quick wins? What is the best way to scale those wins across the organization? What is the best way to sustain those gains over the long haul? Since the beginning of the movement, the debate falls into two predictable camps.

The Two Schools of Transformation Approaches

The first group will rightly say agile is a collection of approaches that reflect an underlying mindset. Any change we make in our organizations can only be sustained by the right cultural mindset. We must change our culture first.

Others will recommend changing structure first. These experts will highlight that culture is amorphous and nebulous. It is more achievable to start with adjustments to policy, org structure, role definitions, and other such tangible items. Culture, as it turns out, comes last.

In truth, the reality is this is the classic trap of a false choice. The most successful transitions to organizational agility feature a simultaneous blending of both cultural shifts and structural changes. Unfortunately, too many change champions fall prey to one of these camps. Let’s take a look at how easy it is to fall into these transformation pitfalls.

The Culture-First Trap

Here’s a typical story I’ve heard from several champions of agility, as told from Ted’s perspective.

Ted attends an agile conference. In one presentation, he hears, “Agility is a mindset. It means shifting from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.” In another session, he hears, “DevOps is not about tools, it’s about culture. Unless you fix the underlying belief systems of the organization, people will not perform the practices.”

Ted learns that merely “doing Scrum/Lean Startup/DevOps” doesn’t create lasting change. You need to change who you are as a team. He decides this is what he wants his team to be about. When he returns to the office, he declares at the next meeting, “As of today, we are an agile team. We are going to be an oasis of awesome. The one team that shows everyone what excellence looks like.” He prints and hands out business cards to everyone on the team with those values printed on them, believing in his bones this will inspire new behaviors.

The rest of the team, including the manager, are dumbfounded. During lunch, many joke quietly, “I wonder what kind of drugs they were handing out at that conference?” “Let’s see how long it takes for this to pass by.”

A week later, the team is locked in a very loud argument.

“What on earth are you doing to all the reports, Bob?”

“Well, Ted says we’re empowered now, so I changed the layout for all the RMT reports, because they were just wrong.”

Ted is stunned and chimes in. “What?! Empowerment is one thing, but you’ve got to let people know what you’re doing.”

Bob is confused. “But Tisha has been working on her thing without any status. I’m not doing anything different than her.”

Tisha confirms the story, barely blinking as she says, “Yep. Given that we’re experimenting now, I’ve been using a prototype design process. I decided that was more important than the support tickets we usually do.”

Because Ted wants to be consistent with the cultural philosophy, he resists the demands to dictate any new behaviors or policies. That blowup becomes the first in a series of disagreements on what the new values actually mean. Six weeks later, the team is in bitter disarray, and Ted is ready to throw in the towel.

Many of the unicorn organizations we admire in business today feel fundamentally different from our own. They use funny jargon. Every day is casual Friday. Managers are nowhere to be found, and custom art is hanging in the halls. Because they feel different, they attract and retain better talent, and they are more comfortable taking innovative risks.

Simply put, successful organizations have vastly different cultures than average organizations. It’s a truism that we take for granted. Which is why the culture-first approach resonates so deeply in modern business. “Culture comes from the top,” as the saying goes. But when you start there, and stay there, you run into two very painful realities.

Pitfall: All Sizzle, No Steak

Most experts will agree a common theme across the agile/digital/lean movements is that each is primarily about a new mindset. Leaders and teams are challenged to let go of their decades of training and experience in favor of a new way of working. It’s much more important to emphasize “being agile” than merely “doing agile.”

My university literature professor once explained to me that “You can’t speak to the general without the specific. You can’t talk about grief until you tell the story of a recent widower unconsciously walking the streets to his wife’s favorite coffee shop at midnight in the rain.”

Likewise, talking about noble virtues like honesty, respect, and value sounds great. But until you hang something tangible on those values, they aren’t visible. Until the invisible is made visible, change simply will not happen. People will ask, “What do I do differently? Is my job at risk? What does that look like? Where do I start?”

Even more unsettling is that you run the risk of losing credibility in your role. One organization I worked with had to shift one manager to a new role. When describing the challenge, his vice president explained it to me like this, “He’s a great person, but he only talks a great game and never does anything. When his team comes to him asking for guidance and direction, he simply tells them, ‘You’re empowered—go figure it out.’ That group has been stuck for a while, because he’s not adding the substance they’re asking for. He’s all sizzle, no steak. All hat, no cattle.”

Pitfall: Your Agile Is Not My Agile

When leaders live in abstraction, followers are left to interpretation. Simply issuing the order “go forth and collaborate” will result in very different kinds of collaboration across the organization. Humans need details. Unless we offer concrete examples or guidelines, they will not thrive with mere platitudes.

Just as the old parenting adage goes, there is freedom in boundaries. People thrive knowing what is safe harbor and what is out of bounds. Without something explicit in the way of universal guidelines, your teams will argue over what agile means. Tragically, if they are all different, they’ll all be justified in their positions, drifting even farther apart, leading to more conflict, more delays, and more execution issues.

Ted isn’t the only one. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has famously been pushing the edge of self-organization at the online retailer. In 2014, he installed the Holacracy method, to encourage a culture of self-organized employees making faster decisions with more engagement. At the time, it was heralded as the most progressive management experiment in the tech industry. But that experiment started with the assumption that managers were no longer needed and staff could do whatever they wanted. That created a Wild West dynamic that took time to corral and settle. Years later, Zappos is very proud of the unique dynamic they have, but let’s be honest. Most other organizations simply do not have the stomach for that bumpy of a journey, regardless of how golden the destination.²

The Structure-First Trap

Now that we know a culture-first approach isn’t ideal, it’s easy to see the appeal of making big structural changes. Here’s how that scenario generally goes.

Emmit attends a certification workshop that details the ROCKIN agility method. He becomes convinced it is the ideal strategy for the organization to transition to a faster, better, cheaper version of itself.

To accelerate the transformation, he hires one of the “big five” consulting firms to help make it happen. The ROCKIN consultants descend upon the organization, wielding their templates, org charts, and flow charts. People are allocated to new “innovation pods” and informed that their new roles will be totally different. New, unfamiliar project management tools are installed, and “coaches” hover over people, instructing them in the new way to do their new jobs.

Because these changes are made so swiftly, staff feel confused and begin to slow down out of fear of making mistakes. Meanwhile, middle management feels isolated by the role shifting, so they begin actively resisting the initiative.

Within a year, Ted becomes frustrated with the consistent push-back and the pain-to-reward ratio, fires the consultancy, and the initiative is dialed back. The new processes are diluted into something that looks more familiar but has limited impact. Finally, the most forward-thinking champions declare, “That’s not agile,” and leave the firm to become consultants themselves.

At first glance, this structure-first approach has advantages over Ted’s culture-first philosophy. Namely, we can actually see that something different actually happened. There are material changes on the ground. However, without a direct effort to incorporate cultural elements, two recurring pitfalls emerge.

Pitfall: Too Fast, Too Furious

Several agility pioneers believe strongly in this approach. Craig Larman, the cocreator of the Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) method, starts all of his consulting engagements with a staff restructure.³ Author Jeff Sutherland has popularized another all-or-nothing approach known as “shock therapy.”⁴

However, that barrier to entry is simply too high for regular people. This approach requires a significantly high pain tolerance on the part of everyone from team leads to senior leaders. Often, it requires a willingness (even an eagerness) to incur conflict within your leadership team, turnover of your most tenured people, and even the risk of litigation from those who feel betrayed.

Granted, change of any kind is unsettling to some. But by definition, those leaders who advance change have a higher change tolerance than the mean average of the people inside the organization. Moreover, you may be willing to disrupt your own department, but then how will those changes impact your customers, vendors, and partners.? You may want to be agile, but is everyone else on board? Most of your stakeholders will share your frustration with known problems but will be unwilling to help fix them.

Move too fast, and you might leave behind the people you wanted to follow you in the first place.

Pitfall: Action Without Intent Is Noise

Even if you take a measured pace, your staff and stakeholders will still be asking you, “Why?” There is a reason why the most compelling organizations have mission statements. They create clarity and focus. By articulating a vision of what we are trying to achieve, and why we even want to achieve it, people are able to place action within a context.

In a Harvard Business Review article, Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind summarize this dynamic, explaining leadership as a conversation. Gone are the days where universal, one-size-fits-all edicts pass muster. From technology to globalization to upcoming generations, several business trends are “forcing the shift from corporate communication to organizational conversation.”⁵ Modern leadership is about conversations.

Even more common, impatient leaders will often jump to a structural fix before a proper root cause analysis determines the underlying problem at hand. The quick fix yields little results, so another new silver bullet method is implemented, and so on, and so on. Facilitating real conversation enables true reflection. Without that, you run the risk of several successive knee-jerk mandates, each of which inspires change fatigue and lowers morale.

The False Choice of Transformation Philosophy

A Holistic Philosophy

As you can see, a one-sided perspective on leading agile organizations can spell trouble. However, each perspective brings necessary truths to the table, as we can see in the figure.

Instead of falling into this classic trap, the most effective leaders capture the best of both worlds in a blended approach. Here are three tips and a case study that reveal how to do just that.

Tip: Operationalize the Culture

In order to ground a culture-oriented thought process, we want to reshape it with some structural elements. To do that, we simply ask one question: “How do we operationalize this?”

If you’re locked in a conversation about the pain of today versus the promise of tomorrow, you can ground that conversation with this simple prompt. Rather than wandering along in a fog of vague values, explore a tangible, visible, physical change that can move the status quo.

A Holistic Approach to Transformation

In her best-selling book Dare to Lead, research professor Brené Brown talks about the uselessness of talk without action:

If you’re not going to take the time to translate values from ideals to behaviors—if you’re not going to teach people the skills they need to show up in a way that’s aligned with those values and then create a culture in which you hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values—it’s better not to profess any values at all. They become a joke. A cat poster. Total BS.⁶

Instead, she offers an elegant way to turn beliefs into behaviors. For each value you aspire to emulate, discuss these three questions:

• What are three behaviors that support this value?

• What are three slippery behaviors that are outside this value?

• What’s an example of a time when you were fully living into this value?

It’s that simple—and that powerful.

Tip: Contextualize the Structure

Meanwhile, the more analytical leaders on your senior team will want to go straight to mechanics. That’s good. But to inform those changes as more than just management mandate, ask the opposing question: “How do we contextualize this?”

For every new process or policy, challenge yourself with “why.” “Why do we need to change at all? What’s the real problem here?” Then be prepared to broadcast those answers, over and over and over again.

In the best-selling book Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains the neurology of change.⁷ The basal ganglia is where we process routine, standard operating procedures. The prefrontal cortex is where we force ourselves to try something different. There is literally a different part of the brain involved in day-today activities versus new behaviors.

That means we need a lot of encouragement and repetition to replace old habits with new ones. Leaders can help that by repeating the context of the change, over and over again.

Tip: Transformation via Evolution

Transformation is all the rage. Every new executive wants to be the turnaround leader who made a mark and left a legacy in record time. But beware, hotshot. If you go too fast and too furious, you might just wipe out.

In his book Adapt, Tim Harford explains that the modern toaster is so complex, no one person is able to build one independently.⁸ Consider integrating a heating element, a voltage transformer, a heat-resistance shelf, a spring-action ejector, and a rotary timer. That did not happen overnight; it is the culmination of decades of gradual adjustments and enhancements interjected by one manufacturer and then another.

Building a new team, let alone a new organization, is way more complex than a toaster. It requires both a great deal of energy and a great deal of time. This means we are faced with the fundamental tension: sustainable change requires that we be impatient with the status quo but patient with the people in it.

To add insult to injury, the larger the organization, the more likely change is needed, and also the more step-wise your agile journey should be. Let’s hear how one leadership team was able to pull it off.

Case Study: United States Government Program

Several years ago, the human resources office of the United States federal government was reeling from unfulfilled initiatives. In response, then-director of the Office of Personnel Management, John Berry, declared a new strategy: “After failing three times to modernize the federal retirement system with the big bang approach, the Office of Personnel Management is taking a new tack that focuses on incremental changes.”⁹ He set a new cultural tone.

Deep inside the organization, one branch chief heard the message. The leadership team for the USA Staffing program took the challenge to heart. In 2012, they embraced agile methods as a way to realize Berry’s new vision within their own program, which is a key service in hiring government employees.¹⁰ First, they operationalized the new methods for only a single delivery team, keeping true to the direction of “one step at a time.” Then the next step was to build a program-wide competency in product ownership with role definitions and training. These were immediate structural changes.

During this phase, they made an important cultural discovery: attracting the right change-minded people was more critical than where those people were stationed. So they adjusted their remote work policies and expanded their internal recruitment beyond the Washington, D.C., area.

With a strong team in place, they were then able to parse the agile value of partnering by hosting recurring focus group meetings. These meetings continue to this day, allowing partners and stakeholders to share frustrations and ideas in an open forum. It worked. They’ve been able to modernize their program and build customer confidence through an evolution of both the tangible and intangible aspects of organizational design.

Their strategy was based on a holistic philosophy. First, Berry set a cultural tone by issuing the mandate, “What we’ve been doing isn’t working. We are doing things differently. Period.” Right after the cultural message, one branch chief responded with several structural changes: pilot projects, competency development, role definitions. Then the remote policy and the focus groups turned cultural values into tangible, tactical actions.

This yin-yang approach created sustainable change. The good news is it’s not magic. It’s repeatable. You can do this too, using a simple template.

The Agile Leadership Canvas

It can be challenging to strike the right blend of institutional and inspirational change. As a result, executives will be tempted to hire consultants to install a proprietary commercial methodology detached from your context. However, it turns out to be a rather simple proposition. To help that conversation, we are fans of the Agile Leadership Canvas^TM. Here’s how it works.

Canvas Design

The Agile Manifesto is the foundational document that chartered the agile movement. It advocates four complementary values to achieve better business outcomes:

• Empowering: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Delivering: Working product over comprehensive documentation

• Partnering: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Adapting: Responding to change over following a plan

Our collective goal is to create organizations that emulate these values and generate those outcomes again and again, year after year. When we superimpose these values on the two-sided conversation of agile culture and agile structure, we create a simple grid that can be used to elicit and compare ideas for evolving the organization.

Maria Uses the Canvas Holistically

Let’s see how manager Maria could use the canvas to guide her team toward a holistic change strategy.

After several weeks of research on how to bring agility into her department, Maria believes it’s time to make her move. She calls her team together and says, “You know I’ve been investigating how agility could drive our group to better results. I think it’s time to start moving forward, but I need your help to figure out how.”

She hands out the canvas and asks, “Which of these values resonate with you? Which of these will move the needle forward?”

Some people begin brainstorming on empowerment. Web developer Divya says, “I do think we could benefit from a more empowered workforce. That will help us attract and retain talent, which we seem to be having a hard time doing.”

Maria presses further: “What would that look like operationally?”

Divya replies, “I liked that article you shared about Amazon being among the most remote-friendly workplaces.¹¹ Perhaps we could announce a new work-from-home experiment.”

Lead analyst Larry responds, “That’s a good idea. Meanwhile, I’m thinking that we encourage a shift toward empowerment by making things fun. I liked that post about Tata Group’s annual Failure Award to encourage daring innovation.”¹²

These first ideas are recorded onto the canvas.

Later in the conversation, Orlando, the operations person, speaks up, “I’m frustrated with failed projects. This is the core value that resonates with me the most. I say we need to mandate collaboration, where nobody works from home, and create more accountability around any mistakes. There’s just not enough discipline here.”

Maria knows they’ve hit on a key conflict. “That’s a good point, Orlando. But that goes directly against the other ideas we had. Perhaps we could have both an empowering and delivering organization. What might that look like?”

Wanting to keep things positive, Divya chimes in, “What if our work-from-home policy is reserved for our rock stars? We set the precedent that it’s an earned privilege and an incentive for high-value candidates.”

Orlando responds to her intent, “Okay, I see where you’re going. From our audit last year, we found that quality issues were the top cause of project delays and complaints. I’ve been wanting to encourage more ownership of those gaps. So instead of only doing the HR-mandated training path, what if we take personal ownership of how to use our annual professional development budget? It could be spent on any work-related training that addresses our top team priorities.”

Excited at the new level of creativity, the team jots down those revisions.

Eventually, Larry interjects, “Team, this was a good conversation, but honestly, I think trying these ideas will be plenty for now. If we do more than this, our people will freak out. Let’s try this for a couple months, and see if we generate movement.”

Janice Takes a Stand

After confirming that the cultural problem was more than an outlier, Janice Brill made a decision. With all the progress made on installing new team structures, new processes, and new tools, it was time to make a cultural statement.

Pulling the Scrum Master aside, Janice offered the truth and some support. “I am sure you have noticed the team is not resolving open issues, deliverables are slipping, and stakeholders are getting grumpy. If it’s okay with you, I would like to step in temporarily and show you a different way of engaging the team and the stakeholders.”

Over the next two weeks, Janice formally inserted herself into the team and started using much more of an assertive style. When the team started sharing their daily updates as if reporting status to her, she would snap, “Don’t talk to me—these are your teammates. You tell them what you need.”

Later, she walked Serena over to one of the principal partners and said, “Hey, Bob, I hear you’ve been sitting on an either- or decision on which data policy you want us to follow for the data modernization project. So which is it?” The partner barked back, “Hey, Janice, you know I’m busy. I haven’t had the time to look at the pros and cons.” Janice bit back, “Fair enough, then does that mean Serena gets to decide for you? If we don’t make a decision now, we lose two weeks on the deadline, which is how long you’ve had this question.” “Fine. Just use the EU policy for now. That one’s the tightest, so it will cover most cases. We good?”

Janice smiled. “Yes, we are. Thank you.” As they walked into the elevator, Janice turned to Serena and said, “This is what empowerment looks like, Serena. There is a time for coaching, and there is a time for leading. You should be showing your team members how you stand up for what needs to be done.”

That lesson was meant for her, but it also serves as a lesson for us. Sometimes encouraging our staff is not enough. In order to cement our structural changes, we need to make the cultural statement of role modeling the behavior we want to see.

Summary

In this chapter, we confronted the debate between “doing agile” and “being agile.” By trying to be philosophically consistent, we’ve learned about:

• The culture-first trap. This leads to the charge that your change is “all sizzle, no steak.” Moreover, it leaves the transformation open to uncontrolled variation and interpretation.

• The structure-first trap. Here you run the risk of going too fast, too furious. Moreover, without sufficient context, your staff will view the change as noise.

• The agile leadership canvas. We can use a collaborative brainstorming template to align our teams on how to attack culture and structure in a holistic fashion.

It is a fact that how we approach change is often driven by our philosophy. Unfortunately, too much of the conversation around organizational agility is limited to all-or-nothing approaches. A project is either agile or traditional. We use either this methodology or that one. A transformation is either culture-driven or structure-driven.

The best leaders are those who can move beyond these false choices and spark a simple conversation around both sides of the equation.