Cultivating an Agile Culture
In surveys of Agile organizations, ‘Culture’ is consistently cited as the number one barrier to effective adoption of Agile principles & practices. But what is this nebulous thing we call ‘culture’, anyway?
Culture: the set of behaviors that are accepted and expected within an organization.
While culture may seem nebulous, it can actually be measured - or characterized - in a meaningful and objective way. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) is a widely validated tool for assessing organization culture. CVF is described in the book Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, by Kim S. Cameron & Robert E. Quinn. CVF defines four archetypes for cultures, defined along two axes of competing values, as summarized in the diagram below.
Our Certified Agile Leadership (CAL-I) course goes deeper into CVF and some powerful change-management frameworks for effectively navigating big change initiatives. We’ve designed the course in collaboration with the Agile Leadership Journey - a team of the world’s very best Leadership Coaches.
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CVF also has an associated assessment tool called the OCAI for measuring the ‘shape’ or profile of your organizations’ culture, which can be depicted as a radar chart as shown below. There is no ‘best’ culture, but some culture profiles are better suited to different business contexts. The top two quadrants (Collaborative and Creative) correlate well with Agile values & principles. Even so, that doesn’t mean the other quadrants can be neglected altogether; higher-performing organizations generally need some degree of balance with at least some elements of all four quadrants. See below for profile representing a typical Agile organization.
Culture profile supportive of Agile values & principles
Because leaders define organization structure and incentives (both implicit and explicit), leadership is the primary driver of an organization’s culture. Leaders can be deliberate about structures, incentives, behaviors and practices to shift the organization’s culture profile to the desired shape. Changing and even maintaining the culture requires sustained attention and effort; it’s a never-ending job for leaders.