#Agile and Culture

“Agile doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, everywhere, it depends on your culture” is a common “qualifier” and as compared to the worst offenders that obstinately try to justify clinging to waterfalling out of sheer insecurity and lack of ambition, this objection may or may not have legs. 

Of course “Culture” is a term so vast, it’s little wonder it also serves as a blanket set of excusing generalizations.

First, there’s the difference between “culture” and “culture”. One as a set of practices, beliefs, and behaviors of a larger group be it selected by gender, nationality or creed and one as the way in which a certain organization behaves. 

The latter is what I immediately assume we are speaking of and naturally, with that assumption in mind, I dismiss any nuanced debate as an attempt to dilute the overall message in which we are all humans and we all can and should change the way we think to become #Agile. 

In other words, I admit I’ve personally been far from enthusiastic when it comes to comprehending how different people may react to Agile depending on factors such as say, their geography and the non-work cultural baggage that comes with.  

To top it off, to prove or disprove my “no other culture than the enterprise’s matters” theory I went looking for data as to how Agile works in different countries about a year ago, and not found much at all. However, a piece of news popped up this week in my feed to suggest there is something to read now!  

A pair of fellow Agile anthropologists (and really, there ought to be more of us, oughtn’t there? Aren’t we all curious about the inner workings of this, the most intense of personal and team bettering exercises and the most effective of new ways of thinking?) have spent some time traveling the world looking at really Agile teams and learning what makes them different and how their individual cultural make-ups affects the way they relate to the concept.

Glaudia Califano and David Spinks used the Lewis method of socio-emotional modeling of culture based on various human characteristics and noticed different nationalities and geographies mapped differently which of course affected the way they took decisions, collaborated and communicated which are the three pillars holding Agile together. 

If you read about their fascinating journey,- irrespective of what you think of the premise and the tools used to examine the hypothesis and even irrespective of what you think of the findings,- one thing that you’ll immediately feel is a slight sense of envy because they got to meet these many amazing people who get that Agile is a way of thinking and live it every day.

For one thing and as an example they got to take to 10Pines the (should-be-famous) “boss-less enterprise” making software in Argentina without management in place but they have also seen people who have crossed geographies with their Agile mindset and got to understand how that changed their perspective and what type of resistance or enthusiasm they encountered.

Fascinating stuff and hats off to companies such as Red Tangerine and others that are significantly moving the needle of collective curiosity and do the research everyone else should -I was actually musing the other day that with things such as The Stage of DevOps reports it’s a handful of companies that keep caring enough to openly probe and bring answers and it’s always the winners such as Google or NewRelic etc- 

I wish I would have heard about their work earlier and I could have asked them to please keep a keen eye on how Psychologically Safe these respective teams are, in particular how that plays out as a determining factor in the emerging concept of “pop-up teams” and whether there are ways in which we can make the “reactive” and “linear-active” cultures more open to emotive feedback, but having only just discovered them I am not sure if the concept was thought of but I’m excited to find out. 

How’s that for #goals? They got to travel the world and study truly flexible, resillient, hyper-intelligent, fast, accomplished, purpose-filled, curious humans, in their natural environments and obviously psychologically safe teams and to learn what makes them tick and be of true #Agile mind and heart. 

May your week be as filled with curiosity and discovery!