Why culture matters

- What does it mean to be agile? Well, as you can probably guess from the name, it's really just about being nimble and responsive. Change is all around us, so instead of trying to ignore change or control it, agile teams focus on being adaptable and resilient. Sounds great, but how do you build that dynamic into your organization? Culture. Culture is the collection of all the shared values, beliefs, priorities, and behavioral norms that help individuals within a group navigate different situations and solve problems. Culture is a shared experience that's developed through shared learning. An individual who wants to be agile within a culture that isn't set up to be agile is going to have a really difficult time. So to help us understand what we mean by culture, let's take a look at a metaphor that was developed by Edgar Schein in his book, Organizational Culture and Leadership. So, imagine a farmer, and this farmer specializes in growing lily flowers in a pond. So she goes around and has all these day-to-day interactions with people, and while she's talking she shares her vision for these deep pink flowers that are going to dot the pond, among the beautiful green leaves. So these statements of what you might expect are one aspect of your culture, but so is the evidence that emerges. So let's say that the flowers that blossom are white instead of pink. So how would you go about changing from one color to the other so that everything's congruent? Well, there's a few options. The farmer could just say they're pink when they're not, but we know that's not the right answer. And she might go around, just painting all the flowers and say, "Look, they're pink," but that's not right either. So if true change is going to happen, what the farmer's going to need to do is look at all of the seeds, the water, the fertilizer, what Schein calls the invisible DNA of the pond. And Schein notes, "Leaders who want to change culture "cannot do so by painting the blossoms "or pruning the leaves. "They have to locate the cultural DNA "and change some of that." There's a lot of flower-painting in the agile world. And what I mean by that is it's tempting to just implement frameworks and methodologies, and then call it a day. But the truth is that these important practices won't stick, and you won't achieve your real goal of being nimble and responsive if you don't also address the underlying culture of your organization. If we're going to enable our teams to be truly responsive in the face of change, we need to do more than just paint the flowers. We need to address our cultural DNA. Culture, even though it can be squishy and invisible and sometimes hard to define, it has one of the biggest impacts on whether or not organizations are truly agile.