What Culture are you working with and how Agile is it?

© 2013 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com
What Organisational Culture
are you working with
and how does it compare
with Agile culture?
With Rowan Bunning, CST

Rowan Bunning
• Background in object oriented & web dev. with
vendors, start-ups & consultancies
• Introduced to Agile practices over 10 years
ago as: “the way good Smalltalkers develop software”
• Pioneer of Scrum in Australia
• Worked as an Agile Coach / ScrumMaster
at a leading Agile consultancy in the U.K.
• Agile Coach in Australia
• Training in Australia and New Zealand
• Certified ScrumMaster
• Certified Scrum Product Owner
• Effective User Stories
• Agile Estimating and Planning
• Agile for Teams

Outcomes
A. Gain language for your organisation’s type of
culture.
B. Gain insights into characteristics of your
organisation's core culture.
C. Gain insights into the diﬀerence between types
of organisational culture.
D.Gain awareness of similarities and diﬀerences
between your organisation's core culture and the
culture represented by Agile and Scrum.

Workshop agenda
Activity Time-box
Introduction to Organisational Culture 5m
Activity: Culture Questionnaire 15m
Activity: Culture Characteristics 15m
Schneider’s Culture Model 20m
Activity: Manifesto Mapping 25m
Reﬂection & take aways 10m

What is organisational culture?
Thoughts?

How organisational culture has
been described at this Gathering
“...Shared beliefs and values.”
- Xavier Warsee
Paris Scrum Gathering 2013
“Stuff that people do without noticing.”
- Henrick Kniberg
Paris Scrum Gathering 2013

Organisational Culture as per Schein
“a pattern of shared basic assumptions that a group
learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation
and integration, that has worked well enough to be
considered valid and therefore to be taught to new
members as the correct way to perceive, think, and
feel in relation to those problems.”
- Edgar H. Schein

Schein model of culture
- Edgar H. Schein via Jason Yip

More deﬁnitions...
“The behaviour of humans who are part of an
organisation and the meanings that the
people attach to their actions. Culture
includes the organisation values, visions,
norms, working language, systems, symbols,
beliefs and habits”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisational_culture
“A set of shared mental assumptions that
guide interpretation and action in
organisations by defining appropriate
behaviour for various situations”
- Ravasi and Schultz (2006)

Short and sweet deﬁnitions
“The personality of the organisation.”
“The operating system of the organisation.”

Source material
“the way we do things around here *
in order to succeed.”
- William E. Schneider
Our deﬁnition for this workshop
* Underlined portion is as per Deal & Kennedy (2000)

Culture and management practices
“Culture establishes management practices. It ﬁxes
how an organisation plans its work, organises and
coordinates activity, manages performance, and
gets the results it deems important.”

Culture questionnaire
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Please grab a Core Culture Questionnaire.
2. Complete it including the results table on the last
sheet.

What type of culture are you
working in?
2. Please move to the table labelled with the core
culture for which you identiﬁed the highest Total.
Question Core CultureCore CultureCore CultureCore Culture
ID I II III IV
NAME
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. As we reveal the culture name, write it under
under the corresponding roman numeral.
Control Collaboration Competence Cultivation

Schneider culture model
Actuality Oriented
Possibility Oriented
Organisation OrientedPeople Oriented
Control culture
Competence cultureCultivation culture
Collaboration culture
Reference: The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work by William E. Schneider (Apr 1994).

Control culture
Leadership focus
Management style
Organisational form
Role of employee
Task focus
Nature of power/authority
Decision making
Approach to managing
change
Key norms
Climate
Authoritarian / directive, Maintain power
Conservative
Policy and procedure oriented
Hierarchy
Compliance,Adhere to role
requirements
Individuals stay within a function
Role/position titular*
Very thorough, Push for certainty
Mandate it, Resistance to change
Order, Certainty, Systematism
Serious, Restrained
* titular adj. having an important or impressive title but not having the power or duties that usually go with it

Competence culture
Leadership focus
Management style
Organisational form
Role of employee
Task focus
Decision making
change
Key norms
Climate
Standard setter, Taskmaster
Task driven, Rational/analytical
Matrix adhocracy
Be an expert
Function independently
Specialist
Expertise
Very analytical, Formal logic
Achievement goals drive change
Open to change
Professionalism, Meritocracy
Competitive, Intense pace

Cultivation culture
Leadership focus
Management style
Organisational form
Role of employee
Task focus
Decision making
change
Key norms
Climate
Catalyst, Empower / enable people
People driven, Nurturant
Wheel-like circular lattice
Express yourself
Be willing to change, develop, grow
Functionalist, Generalist & Specialist
Charisma
Participative, Organic / evolutionary
Embrace / assume change
Change is automatic
Humanistic, Growth and development
Freedom to make mistakes
Lively / magnetic, Caring

Collaboration culture
Leadership focus
Management style
Organisational form
Role of employee
Task focus
Decision making
change
Key norms
Climate
Team builder, Coach
Collegial, Democratic
Group cluster
Collaborate. Be a team player.
Utilise others as resources
Generalist
Relationship
Experimental. Lots of brainstorming.
Trusting
Team calls for change
Open to change
Synergy, Egalitarianism
Esprit de corps/camaraderie

If Agile is culture
...what sort of culture is it?

Created at Paris
Scrum Gathering
Agile Manifesto
value/principle Scrum value /
ScrumMaster
responsibility
Software
Craftsmanship
manifesto value
Kanban method
principle/property

From LAST Melbourne
August 2013
Agile Manifesto
value/principle
Scrum value /
ScrumMaster
responsibility
Kanban method
principle/property
Software
Craftsmanship
manifesto value

Culture Change
“In any industry, the better-performing organisations
had cultures that were congruent with their
environment. Wholesale culture change is required
when an organisation’s core culture is inherently
inconsistent with the true nature of its enterprise.”
"Many organisations that dive rapidly into Agile ﬁnd
cultural norms already in place that tend to
constrain progress and hold them back."
- Dan Mezick, The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager.

Is culture change the holy grail of
Agile transformation?
Cultural Chan!

Case study: quotes from client A
"The biggest change I've seen is to our culture."
- Head of R&D at a client after 6 months of Agile Coaching
“Improvement in quality.”
“A lot of enthusiasm. People
contributing more in meetings.”
“A lot more interaction between
team members - people feel a
lot more empowered.”
“Much easier to see the progress.
We can take measurements every
couple of weeks and see the
progress.”
“Test cases reviewed already
[as they are created.]”
“Helping to focus on the
tasks at hand because of the
short sprints and it doesn't
turn into a huge job.”
“[The Architect] is a lot more on
top of the work that is being done”

Culture at start of engagement B
0"
5"
10"
15"
20"
25"
30"
35"
40"
45"
50"
Control"culture" Collabora3on"culture" Competence"culture" Cul3va3on"culture"
March"19,"2013"
Project(Team(Core(Culture(
"

Client B survey 5 months later
0"
5"
10"
15"
20"
25"
30"
35"
40"
45"
50"
Control"culture" Collabora3on"culture" Competence"culture" Cul3va3on"culture"
March"19,"2013"
August"8,"2013"
Project(Team(Core(Culture(

Where are the culture change
Knobs?

Larman's 4 laws of
organisational behaviour
1. Organisations are implicitly optimised to
avoid changing the status quo middle- and
first-level manager and “specialist” positions &
power structures.
2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be
reduced to overloading the new terminology to mean
basically the same as status quo.
3. As a corollary to (1), any significant change initiative
will be derided as “purist” and “needing customisation
for local concerns” -- which deflects from addressing
weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo.
4. Culture follows structure.
See: www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Larman%27s_Laws_of_Organizational_Behavior

Agile Overview © 2012 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com
Culture change
through structural change
ROI Delivery
Scrum
HowWhat
Improvement
Develop the right
thing
Develop the
thing right
Work together well
Product Owner Team
ScrumMaster
Stakeholders Users
Management
Hierarchical Scrum

Culture Change Model
Results
Actions
Principles
Values
Beliefs
Experiences
Become
Inform
Reference: Dan Mezick, The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager, FreeStanding Press, 2012.

Recommended reading
The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making
Your Current Culture Work by William E. Schneider
(Apr 1994).
The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager
by Mezick, Daniel (Jul 17, 2012).
Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture:
Based on the Competing Values Framework by
Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn (Mar 29, 2011).
Organizational Culture and Leadership by
Edgar H. Schein (Aug 16, 2010).
The main reference
for this workshop.

www.scrumwithstyle.com
rowan@scrumwithstyle.com
Twitter: @rowanb
au.linkedin.com/in/rowanbunning
Rowan Bunning
Image credit: Hugh MacLeod aka gapingvoid

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