Culture Shift, Transformation, and Change - take small steps

Yesterday when I crossed the SR520 bridge from Seattle to Redmond, I saw the beautiful set of trees with fall foliage smile at me (again). In millions of leaves, the Nature expresses its beauty through rich array of colors. This applies to our work and lives too. About a year back, I wrote about Change - an opportunity in disguise. In the past year at Starbucks I had learnt more about working in a new company and organization in the middle management during times of change. 

Yesterday I also attended an event for Tech Executives hosted by Madrona in Seattle. There were discussions about Data, Security, Prioritization, Changes, and Culture. Majority of the attendees have been leading transformations, preparing for changes in the business and technology landscape. When I talk with my team and peers, I hear the interest and ideas for change so we can pursue innovations faster and better. Often we are faced with growing demands, more projects, constrained resources and time. Often the opportunities are fantastic and cross boundaries. We see technology investments that span across many areas: extend from physical to digital world (ex: @Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay), from the US to other markets (ex: WhatsApp), from China to other markets (ex: Luckin Coffee), from closed source to open source (ex: JavaScript nodejs), and from on-prem to one-cloud to multi-cloud solutions. 

Now we have many possible avenues to handle change. Emerging technologies including #AI, #Cloud, and practices like #Agile, #TestDrivenDevelopment offer possible solutions. Investments in #Personalization, #Automation, #Simplification, #Partnerships, #E2EQuality, #AppModernization, #DigitalTransformation, etc., hold promise. Pursuing these promises require us to act. And we need to act now. 

Now, more than in the years past, we need to act with diligence, intent, speed, collaboration, and discipline. Now we also need to act in concert with our peers, teams, and leadership. Now we have to both educate ourselves as well as educate others to bring along the change we desire. Now we need to consider the technology trends not only locally, but also trends in other regions and countries too. And we need to foster a cultural shift to create the transformation.

Now, we can understand the importance and value of culture shift and learn from many other examples in the software industry (ex: Microsoft’s growth in cloud business) and outside software industry (ex: organic foods). Culture shift is fostered through intent, inspiration, commitment, communication, completion, and celebration. Most individuals, teams, and organizations continue forward with inertia - doing work in the same old way. Intentional adjustments have to be made to make a change, even strongly for culture change. Quickly with intent, one needs to formulate an inspirational target to work towards, so we have sufficient strength and willpower to handle challenges that come our way. Committing and continuously gaining commitment for change is critical to keep the shift and transformation going. Constant communication on intended target state is critical. Completing changes builds positive strength for our future steps. Even if an intended change did not fully complete, reflecting on what happened can help us gain confidence and insights to move forward. Finally celebration reinforces a sense of accomplishment, camaraderie, and encouragement. A strong dose of #growthmindset is required to ensure we keep focus to learn, adopt and proceed forward.

Looking ahead, based on the learning, I had adopted a mindset to consider a lot of changes, prioritize changes, and focus on landing a few changes. Someone asked if there is a culture. index that we can measure and tune. Sadly there is no single index that can fit for all culture shifts. Success is about making positive incremental changes and not about landing everything. Success is about bringing along people. Sometimes the benefits may not be visible till the full journey of change completes. Success is about celebrating and continuing with the shifts with new learning. So patience and persistence are critical too. 

Our observations include: Economy is changing, business models are changing, culture needs changing. The question for us is: Are we changing our mindset? Are we changing? I believe taking small steps can help us shift our culture to transform and adapt to external changes.