Creating Culture

The way you charter work creates culture. If you ask people to build features, they will, and they will value the delivery of those features, even if delivery doesn’t create big picture success. They will value the traits and behaviors that make it possible to deliver features. On the other hand, if you ask people to be responsible for success, you are asking them to work in a new way. And although eventually this approach will shape a new culture, that cultural transition needs to be made consciously, and new cultural traits need to be developed and supported.

In other words, changing the way you charter projects is a critical first step, but that change must be accompanied by explicit work on culture.

Building Element 1: Humility

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, CTO at Etsy from 2011 to 2015, led a pioneering team that many people in the tech world watched with admiration. The Etsy team members were leaders in the DevOps movement and pioneers in the open source community. They introduced numerous techniques that advanced the state of the art. So it’s notable that, upon his departure from Etsy, Elliott-McCrea wrote a short essay that focused not on technical accomplishments, but on culture—the culture he helped build during his tenure as CTO.⁴ Although his role was technical, the takeaways cut across the entire organization’s culture.

The first point Elliott-McCrea makes in the essay is a humble one: he emphasizes the dynamic nature of software when he says, “Nothing we ‘know’ about software development should be assumed to be true.” This is an articulation of perhaps the most important cultural value in a sense and respond world: humility.

It’s one thing to know this intellectually. Being humble, though, is the emotional side of this knowledge. It means facing a great deal of pressure from our coworkers, our bosses, and our customers, who want us to have answers and to be certain. Google’s first product manager for enterprise products, Rajen Sheth, describes how early customers asked him in 2006 what Google’s three-year road map was for its enterprise product suite. Sheth and his team had a vision, but their plan to achieve the vision was filled with uncertainty. After all, no one had ever created a suite of web-based products for the enterprise before, at least not on the scale that Google was planning. The team created a flexible road map, but even that was only a year long. “How could I know what I’ll be doing in three years when I’m not even sure what I’ll be doing in three months?” Sheth asked.⁵

This is a tough position for a manager to be in. In Sheth’s case, he was asking enterprise customers to buy products like email systems that typically have a ten-year life span in an organization. Looking customers in the eye and saying, “I really don’t know how we’ll get there, but I’m confident that we’ll get there”—that’s hard. Rather than face this pressure head on, though, few of us do what Sheth did: admit we don’t know. Instead, we often choose to make plans, commitments, and budgets. This may seem a better choice in the short term, because these tactics allow us to avoid a difficult conversation, but they frequently backfire in the long run. Customers and stakeholders want to believe that initiatives can be predicted, planned, and budgeted. But when the inevitable happens, when complexity disrupts our careful plans, we are faced with a new problem: reporting the bad news. So great is the pressure to avoid discrepancies between plan and reality that we can close ourselves off from learning entirely. Never mind the problems! Keep the production line running! Hit the deadline!

One manager at a leading financial services firm put it this way: “The struggle is really with traditional product owners who made decisions in one way in the past: these folks are used to being experts. They’re used to having the answer. And they’ve had career success up until now working this way. These folks have a hard time making decisions in a new way, a way that’s more of a conversation with customers.”

So humility is an important building block of a learning culture. Admitting we don’t have all the answers means that we have to find a way to get the answers. We have to figure out how to learn what we need to learn in order to succeed.

Building Element 2: Permission to Fail and a Safe Environment

For a learning culture to thrive, your teams must feel safe to experiment. Experiments are how we learn, but experiments, by nature, fail frequently. In a good experiment, you learn as much from failure as from success. If failure is stigmatized, teams will take few risks.

We once worked with a team at a large financial services organization in the United States to help it learn how to get concepts out of the R&D lab and into the field. In our early meetings, we suggested experiment after experiment. Each suggestion was met with the same response: “Oh, we can’t do that here, because …” It was frustrating, of course, both for us and for our clients, because we all wanted to work this way. But as frustrating as it was, the team members were correct. They weren’t allowed to take the risks associated with the tactics we were proposing, even though these seemed like very small risks to us. One young manager, during a follow-up call a few months later, told us that despite the prohibitions, she had gone ahead with a few small experiments. They had been successful, and her boss celebrated her success—and told her never to do that again!

Sandboxing, discussed in chapter 7, is a way to reduce the risk of experimentation. The idea is to create a set of procedures, rules, and constraints that your organization can live with and within which failure is acceptable. But procedural guidelines are only one part of sandboxing. You also need the cultural permission to experiment. This means creating an understanding with your colleagues and leaders that your progress will not be linear and predictable and that you should not be judged by your delivery rate (the amount of stuff you ship) but by your learning rate, and by your overall progress toward strategic goals—in other words, by the extent to which you achieve the outcomes in question.

One culture-building practice that organizations use to create permission to fail is the blameless postmortem. This regularly occurring meeting provides an opportunity for the entire team to go through a recent time period (product release cycle, quarter, etc.) or to review a specific incident and honestly examine what went well, what could be improved, and what should not be continued. Often, these postmortems are facilitated by someone outside the team to avoid any bias or conflict of interest. Think of this activity as continuous improvement but applied to the way the team works rather than the product it’s working on.

The motivation for this process is that failures should be treated as learning opportunities. In order to learn from failures, you need to make an accurate assessment of what happened, why it happened, and how it can be prevented next time. It would be simple to treat this inquiry as a hunt for the person responsible so that this person can be disciplined. But if this is the outcome of the inquiry, then the people involved will not be motivated to share the truth of what happened. Instead, they will cover it up to avoid punishment. So, in order for people to learn, the blameless postmortem process must include an ironclad guarantee that they can speak without fear of punishment. And that guarantee must be upheld each and every time.

Sandboxes, blameless postmortems, and other safe-to-fail learning tactics mitigate the big risks organizations face. They allow teams to learn and to respond to changing conditions. They do this by encouraging small amounts of risk. It’s a trade-off that many organizations find difficult to accept. Instead, many organizations push toward increased process control in order to mitigate all risks. This approach mixes up different kinds of risk. It sees small operational risks and seeks to control them absolutely, while remaining blind to the big existential risks. When you increase operational process control, you decrease the freedom your teams experience. As your teams believe they have less freedom to deviate from “standard” processes, they will become less curious and seek increasingly safer solutions. It means they are likely to stay the same, even as markets shift, technology improves, and new paradigms emerge that challenge your position.

Building Element 3: Self-Direction and Alignment

Netflix, another company that takes a very proactive approach to creating and managing culture, opposes these kinds of process controls as a core tenet of the way it operates, declaring, “Process brings seductively strong near-term outcomes.”⁶ As an alternative, Netflix values hiring responsible people and giving them permission to operate within constraints, with permission to fail, and thus it creates the opportunity for the individuals and the organization to grow and evolve.

In many ways, this approach embodies the work of Douglas McGregor’s famous theory X and theory Y of management.⁷ McGregor, a management professor in the mid-twentieth century and author of The Human Side of Enterprise, proposed that there are at least two discrete ways that managers think about employees and that these assumptions translate directly into management approaches. Theory X proposes that employees dislike work and that the only way to get them to deliver their work is through explicit control, direction, and threats. No sensing. No responding. No learning. This theory holds that employees will shun responsibility, avoid taking the initiative, and relish the explicit direction and tight controls that management can provide.

Theory X describes a worldview held by many managers in industrial-age businesses. In a predictable world where the manufacturing, cost, and use of your product are well known, theory X management was perceived as the right culture. Theory X holds that employees can’t be trusted to make good decisions. This makes it consistent with top-down management, in which managers do the thinking, and workers do the labor. There may in fact be places where this management approach makes sense, although the success of the Toyota production system, which introduced thinking and decision making back into the production line, would argue against this approach.

Nevertheless, for information workers, thinking and decision making are the work. And, in a learning culture, we all become information workers. In this world theory X-style controls will drive an organization toward irrelevance faster than anything else.

In contrast to theory X, McGregor describes theory Y, a worldview based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Theory Y proposes that security and fear are not the only motivators for employees. Instead, theory Y holds that self-direction, alignment with a greater mission, and a desire to improve society are what drive performance, results, and innovation. It’s in situations where the mission is clear and the organization is aligned around it that self-direction takes root and delivers superior outcomes. Workers who are self-directed will want to take personal responsibility for quality, collaboration, creativity, and learning.

This is what makes alignment with mission so important in a sense and respond world. Workers need to understand the mission, understand what it means to them, and see how their work connects to and contributes to achieving the mission.

The preference for theory Y-style approaches is pervasive in the software world and reflected in the Agile Manifesto. One of the principles of the manifesto states, “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”⁸

Building Element 4: Transparency

In the early 2000s, Nokia stood at the apex of the mobile phone world. Before the advent of the smartphone—the first iPhone shipped in 2007—Nokia was the undisputed leader. And yet it faltered badly. It was unable to respond effectively to the changes in the market, and a mere seven years after the iPhone’s release, in 2014, Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft. That business continues to struggle, though. By the end of 2015, it accounted for only about 1 percent of global smartphone sales.⁹ What happened?

A recent study by Quy Huy and Timo Vuori, professors of strategy at the European business school INSEAD, argues that the failure was rooted in “shared fears among [Nokia’s] middle and top managers [that] led to companywide inertia and left it powerless to respond to Apple’s game changing device.”¹⁰ In this study, the authors uncovered a pattern in which both “temperamental leaders and frightened middle managers [were] scared of telling the truth.” As a result, leaders at the top of the organization were not able to develop an accurate picture of the reality on the ground. Middle managers either kept bad news quiet or explicitly lied to leadership about the state of the work.

As a result of hearing only good news, top managers became even more demanding in terms of technical ambition and target dates for delivery. But these demands were unrealistic, because the teams were already far behind. As a result, product quality slipped to the point that Nokia, once a technical powerhouse, had to resort to sourcing its smartphone operating system externally.

The ancient Greek playwright Sophocles wrote, “For no one loves the messenger who brings bad news.” So we’ve known for at least that long that there’s a temptation to blame the messenger. And yet, this only serves to starve the king of the information he needs to rule. So it is with information flow in our organizations. It leads, at least it did at Nokia, to what Huy calls a “pluralistic silence” in which no one was willing to speak the truth that, if accepted, might actually have saved Nokia’s smartphone business. In order to thrive in an information age, we need information. Thus, organizations that promote transparency—the honest sharing of information—are the ones that will thrive.

Mike Bland, formerly of Google and currently a practice leader at 18F, the new digital service organization in the US government, wrote recently about the importance of transparency in his experience, first at Google and more recently in the government. Bland describes his motivations for building a web-based information hub to help people at 18F find each other, discover what other people are working on, and share knowledge. He wrote, “We believe that how we work is just as important as what we produce for our partners. Product is a reflection of process. By setting an example of an open, thriving learning organization, 18F provides an example that members of other federal agencies can use to introduce similar methods into their teams.”¹¹

Building Element 5: A Bias toward Action

If you’ve been in any organization for more than a short time, you know that there are certain subjects that come up for debate over and over. You sometimes hear these topics called “religious wars,” because they have a quality of ongoing struggle in which each side believes with absolute certainty that it is correct. When these topics come up, you can sometimes hear the less partisan in your organization groan, “Here we go again.”

These kinds of debates tend to paralyze groups, and it’s important to avoid them. One of the core process points of sense and respond teams is that you’ll be making many small decisions, seeking feedback, evaluating the evidence, and then deciding once again how to move forward. And you can’t do this quickly if you’re constantly debating and analyzing the data. In fact, lengthy, repetitive debate is often a symptom that you don’t have enough evidence. In those cases, you need to take action that will generate more evidence, create insight, and allow the team to learn its way forward. You need to initiate a two-way conversation with the market.

Uncertainty is our enemy and obstacle. As we’ve already argued, in the information age we cannot always accurately predict the effect our actions will have. We cannot use Newtonian math to predict the behavior of our software products. Instead, we have to try things, test ideas, probe. In short, in order to move forward and gain clarity, we must act.

One of the principles we wrote about in our first book, Lean UX, was that teams need to prioritize making over analysis. We encouraged product teams to make something—a prototype, an experiment, a customer interview—to get the information they were missing, rather than sit around the conference room debating the validity of an idea.

The same approach works at the management level. As the way your company works shifts in response to the uncertainty technology brings, management must adopt a bias toward action, toward experiments that create the data you need to make decisions.

Building Element 6: Empathy and Customer Value

A few years ago, design researcher Jared Spool studied teams to see what effect exposure to customers had on product success. According to the study he published in 2011, teams that met with real customers for at least two hours per team member every six weeks produced superior products.¹² In the study, Spool calls this key metric exposure hours, or the number of hours that each member of the team is exposed to customers. This last point is important. Teams that do a lot of research but in which only research specialists participate do not see this improvement in product quality. The second key point in the study is that the research can’t be done only once. It has to be done continuously; the study found a frequency of at least every six weeks to be the magic number.

In other words, repeated exposure to customers struggling with real-life problems, in the field, drove more empathic conversations and helped teams focus on solutions that added customer value.

Sense and respond approaches consider customer value as the necessary path to achieve business value, and so they place customer value at the core of everything the organization does. This means that the organization must build and maintain high levels of empathy for the customers it is serving. Everyone from the CEO to the call-center representatives must have a sense of what your customers are trying to achieve, what’s getting in their way, and how your solutions help them overcome those obstacles. Empathy helps us find a path through uncertainty. It pokes holes in our assumptions about our customers and their needs. It grounds us in their reality.

Sometimes customer empathy is your company’s only chance of maintaining a strong market position in the face of global competition. This was the situation in which Maxdome, a German video streaming service, found itself in 2015. Maxdome was facing two major challenges. First, the German market is generally skeptical of subscription services. Increasing the pressure, both Netflix and Amazon Prime were on track for local launches in the immediate future. A subsidiary of the German-language mass media conglomerate ProsiebenSat.1, Maxdome decided to reinvent its service—and the company culture—from the ground up.

Maxdome CEO Marvin Lange knew he couldn’t win a feature-based arms race against well-funded rivals like Netflix and Amazon Prime.¹³ So rather than give his teams a list of features to start developing, Lange gave them a strategic challenge—a mission: to win by being the best at “video discovery” and “content inspiration.” This would be the goal of the service. The firm wouldn’t measure progress in terms of features built. Instead, the benchmarks would be customer acquisition, service usage, and retention.

To figure out how inspiration and discovery would manifest, Lange gave his teams one more challenge: to get to know their customers. Lange told us that an organization that understands the needs, pain points, and cultural eccentricities of its customers will ultimately build a superior service. “We as a management team now always challenge everyone to do real user testing on everything, and to put the customer first,” Lange told us. “Sounds very basic, but it’s not.” Lange has rolled out five tactics to achieve this.

First, he has required every manager to take customer service calls once a month. The managers’ job is to experience the front lines of customer frustration. What’s driving the phone calls? Where is the product failing? What are the opportunities to improve? Maxdome’s managers could easily receive this information in a monthly report, but the discomfort of hearing it directly from customers helps ensure that these concerns don’t get lost in feature prioritization discussions.

Second, each year around the holiday season, Maxdome’s managers try to sell their service on busy shopping streets around Germany. This scenario goes one step further than listening in on support calls. Managers aren’t just seeking customer input or complaints; they are actively trying to convince random passersby to purchase the service on the spot. (We’ve talked throughout the book about the two-way conversation with the market. Sometimes, we’ve meant this metaphorically, but in this case, managers are having literal conversations with their customers.) The managers try out different on-the-street sales tactics to see what works. The pitches and concepts that convert strangers into customers on the street are the ones managers will integrate into marketing and advertising, and into product development work, in the coming year.

Maxdome’s third initiative is to provide an unlimited budget for customer exposure. Anyone in the organization can set up conversations or user experience studies with customers to determine how (or whether) to move an initiative forward. The only requirement is that the learning from these studies be made broadly available and that the insight the studies yield be used in decision making. Since Lange established this program in 2015, Maxdome is running studies at a pace of about forty to fifty per year.

Fourth, Maxdome has started a process it calls “dogfooding.” Derived from the phrase “eating your own dogfood,” this is the process of company employees using the service they are building on a regular basis for their own downtime entertainment. Nothing will motivate a manager of a team to design and develop an intuitive and usable video discovery feature like having his three-year-old screaming for her favorite cartoon as Dad fumbles through clunky menu structures, slow search results, and poor content choices.

Maxdome’s final initiative is knowledge transfer. Every month, the firm holds an all-hands meeting where the customer insights people have gathered are shared broadly. They discuss the new behavior patterns they are seeing and consider how these patterns might affect product plans. In addition, Lange always shares a few short video clips of managers doing their time in the call center. This helps drive home the point that empathy is a companywide concern.

Ultimately what these tactics illustrate is Maxdome’s dedication to building a culture of continuous learning through customer empathy. Teams constantly evaluate plans as new customer insight arrives and continuously shift their effort in increasingly accurate directions. Their barometer for success is customer behavior. If they can positively impact it, they report that as a success. If not, they report it as learning, not failure, and quickly assess how to make the next effort better.

This approach has helped Maxdome in areas beyond product quality. Not surprisingly, when people are able to do higher-quality work, their satisfaction increases, and this is what Maxdome is seeing. Since it has started these programs, Lange reports that the number of Maxdome employees who would recommend Maxdome as an employer has doubled, from 35 percent to roughly 70 percent.

Building Element 7: Collaboration, Diversity, and Trust

In 1959, musician Miles Davis assembled his sextet to record a new album he called Kind of Blue. The musicians gathered with almost no idea what they were to play and without any rehearsal. Davis was at the height of his career, but he was also becoming frustrated with bebop, the style of jazz he had been working in for a decade. He had been experimenting with a new style, modal jazz, and for Kind of Blue, he wanted to go all in.

Over the course of only two days the band recorded what was to become the best-selling jazz record of all time and what many people consider the greatest jazz recording ever. One critic wrote, “Kind of Blue isn’t merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it’s an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence.”¹⁴ How was this possible? What was the culture Davis created during those sessions that allowed that creativity to happen?

In his 2011 TED talk, Stefon Harris, himself an accomplished jazz musician, noted that there are “no mistakes on the bandstand.”¹⁵ Instead, he said, every note played is an opportunity to move the “product” forward in a new direction, but only if you’re listening to what your bandmates are doing and are prepared to seize the opportunities that their playing creates for you. Harris makes the case that this collaboration and listening, and this willingness to embrace what your colleagues are doing, is what allows jazz improvisation to happen.

Jazz is improvised music. It can’t be predicted, written down, or precisely scripted in advance. Improvised music is an interplay between freedom and constraints. Musicians obey certain constraints—a key, a rhythm, a set of chord changes—that keep them together. But they also have freedom to explore—to make decisions within those constraints. What we call “mistakes” happen when musicians inadvertently step outside a constraint. They play a note outside the given key, or they step out of the tempo. An alert band of collaborators can catch this moment and turn it into an opportunity. They accept the new note, they understand it implies moving to a new key, and they, in that moment, decide to move in that direction.

This was Davis’s secret sauce. He was a master improviser and had been collaborating with these musicians for years. So even as he changed from bebop to modal jazz, what he was really doing was changing the constraints. The underlying working process—the collaboration, the listening, the improvisational skills—these hadn’t really changed. Davis provided the vision in the form of “sketches” for each song. This was like strategy—the high-level direction for the band. However, he had the humility to leave the execution to the other players’ individual brilliance. Davis created a space where the best ideas emerged from the talented team that he hired—Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. Davis’s sketches set the direction, but the instrumentalists built the music together. A piano solo here, a saxophone accent there. They listened to each other. The music became a conversation with peaks and valleys, shape and form.

Collaboration is critical to sense and respond approaches. It starts with the idea that a small team, working in short, iterative cycles will need diverse skills. There’s no time for lengthy, sequential work with hand-offs between specialists. We write about this in detail in chapter 6, but we want to spend a few more moments with the idea here, because there’s a cultural component to collaboration that allows the process to happen.

One of the things that makes collaboration so powerful is that it combines people with different points of view and different skills to work on a problem together. The challenge, of course, is that the same thing that makes diversity so powerful can also serve as the root of conflict: different people have different values, make different assumptions, have different biases and prejudices, and bring different knowledge to the table. To turn this mix into a productive team rather than a free-for-all, you need to create some shared purpose, and you need to create trust.

This was certainly true for Thomas Edison at his famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Edison, along with his employees, often stayed late in the lab to work on experiments. During these late evening hours, Edison was known to host what he called “midnight lunch,” convening his employees for dinner, storytelling, even singing and playing music together. These sessions helped everyone get past the work and the role definitions and get to know each other as people.¹⁶ This type of activity creates a baseline of trust to draw on when, for example, an engineer and a product manager come into conflict over some feature.

The importance of social ties is something we sometimes forget, but it comes up repeatedly when people talk about creative teams. In a recent article on building productive design studios, designers Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson lay out fifteen principles for a good design studio, and many of them have to do with building good social ties across the team. Say “Good morning” and “Good night,” for example, to start building a courteous social culture. Laugh more to deflate conflict and draw people closer together. Eat and cook together to encourage people to let their guard down; be vulnerable and human together. Meet out in the open to encourage trust and openness. Bring the outside in, or share family life and outside interests with one another, again, to become more human in one another’s eyes. These are great practices for any team, not only for design studios, because they create an atmosphere in which collaboration is possible.¹⁷

Embracing Change Means Embracing Culture Change

How do you change culture? This is a question for which there are no easy answers, and a topic of never-ending debate for managers, consultants, and experts. There’s no shortage of opinion. “Culture is conversations,” one expert declares. Another pundit writes, “Culture is what you do, not what you say.” Still a third claims, “Culture is what you do when the CEO isn’t in the room.” They may all be right to some degree—in other words, these ideas may not conflict but may merely reflect different parts of the whole. Culture building, like much of what we talk about in this book, is rife with uncertainty.

So where do you start? We think that an important first step, perhaps not surprisingly, is to embrace the idea that culture, like everything else, is in a constant state of change. Shani Hilton, deputy editor in chief at BuzzFeed, told a reporter, “We’re still in a state of figuring things out. We’re into change, we’re used to it, we’re down with it. The bigger we get, the harder it is to get people to realize: We don’t have to do things the way we’ve done them for the last six months.”¹⁸

And John Borthwick, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who runs Betaworks, an innovation incubator in New York, put it this way: “Each change, each innovation is considered to be the new normal, a new steady state when in fact the new normal is a state of continual innovation.”¹⁹

Culture change certainly comes from doing new things. This action-centered view of culture creation come from the idea that culture is what you do. The Maxdome story shows that by encouraging people to do new things, you can create new perceptions and new points of view, and from there you can add new elements to a culture. To get people doing new things—and the things you want—you need leadership.

In other words, culture change must be led. Embracing change as a cultural value starts at the highest levels of the organization. It starts with transparency and humility at the board and C-suite levels. It impacts the way we structure our conversations with the rest of the company and is reflected in the way we communicate with the organization. Here, for example, is how Dean Baquet, editor in chief at the New York Times, shared his plans for the future of the newsroom there.

So much of what we’ve discussed in this chapter is present in this memo. A willingness to experiment. An openness to debate. An emphasis on empathy. And an embrace of continuous change.

Making Culture Everyone’s Priority

Culture doesn’t come only from the top. In fact, you can’t impose culture on an organization, at least not without inflicting a great deal of collateral damage. Zappos founder Tony Hsieh tried this in 2015 by forcing his fourteen hundred employees to adopt holocracy—a management style that eschews managers and process in favor of autonomous collectives. Hsieh declared that anyone who didn’t want to work in the new system could take a severance package and leave. Some published reports say that as many as 18 percent of the workforce may have taken this option, and many of those who chose to stay suffered through a period of morale challenges and feelings of betrayal.²¹

Instead, it seems more productive to embrace a meeting of both top-down and bottom-up culture change initiatives. This echoes the pattern we see throughout sense and respond approaches. People are working in new ways. Pay attention to these new behaviors. Support and amplify them, and support the culture leaders who are leading the way. Create a feedback loop inside your organization in which a new culture can emerge. Support what’s happening organically, and create probes and tests to encourage more of what you want to develop. You might not know in advance what you’re looking for, but when you see it, you might recognize it and then be able to build on it.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, in the same essay we cited earlier, went on to say this: “You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying.” What he is intimating is that continuous improvement isn’t the work of one person. It’s not the responsibility of one department. It has to be a shared organizational priority.

Sense and Respond Takeaways for Managers

• Sense and respond approaches are not only about process changes. They are equally about building a learning culture.
• The key elements of a learning culture are humility, permission to fail, self-direction, transparency, a bias toward action, empathy, and collaboration.
• Managers must embody these values and support them where they emerge in the organization.
• Culture change is rife with uncertainty. Culture is in effect a product of your organization’s ongoing conversation with itself about itself. So approach it with a sense and respond mindset. Observe what’s working, amplify it, and don’t be afraid to experiment.