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Reframing Agile Team's Cultures
Reframing Agile Team's Cultures as the Team’s Ecosystem
- a conceptual idea from an Agile Safari -
Lifespan of an organization is declining, and the era of cloud and cognitive computing is disruptive in many ways. It also offers many opportunities but that requires quick adaptability and responsiveness to what the market is telling organizations. Since companies started to automate, bring in computers, robotize their working environments in the 1950’s, there has been a shift in ways organizations are lead and managed. There has been a shift from telling people what to do towards empowering people in what they do. On top of that, organizations began to realize that teams actually hold the power to better adapt to ever changing situations and circumstances while the speed to go-to-the-market has never been more challenged than now. Within technology, Agile ways of working have proved in the last 30+ years to be more successful and ultimately became the new standard. Paradoxical, many organizations are actually still in their first wave of adopting an Agile Mindset and struggle to embrace an Agile friendly culture: defining what success looks for a team and setting them up for that, bring in more experimentation to fail forward, form a team and invest in keeping them together, and celebrating behavior over achievements. Higher levels of consciousness are needed to resiliently respond to these challenges and deliver what the organization’s customers really want.
Technology has become a main differentiator in the market to make things happen and is a huge driver to deliver value sooner and better than before. The exponential growth of technology (IT) driven teams in the world in the past 30 years, asked for a different way of leading people in the teams. Simply put, you don’t have by default a high-performing team if you hire the best people in the market and put them in a room. Team forming requires people to interact and find out how they actually get work done as a team. And this is the issue nowadays. Despite investments in bringing people together, discussing, thinking and defining their aspirations in how they would like it to be, in reality people fall back to their own engraved behaviors and undermine the early concept of what an ideal team culture could look like. The consequence is that you have some nice posters on the wall about their team agreements and values, but basically nobody follows them. Wasted time and energy. Let’s stop doing that because the time is ticking. The opportunities for an organization to streamline with what their customers want or to explore new products and markets based on the baseline of their current product portfolio, are ever declining. When the organizations’ teams are not able to respond and adapt, this leads to organizations being dropped out of the infinite race: game over!
“This is the issue: people undermine the early concept
of an Agile culture when they fall back
on their own engraved behaviors”
Striving for more balance through defining the ideal ecosystem* for a team.
ecosystem: An ecosystem is a natural system that consists of all living things, or organisms, that occur in a certain area. The organisms (plants, animals and micro-organisms) that influence each other within an ecosystem form a community of life.
Teams are a fractal of an organization thus we state that a team’s culture is a fractal of the organizational culture. How things are done within the organization is how things are done in the team at least to a certain degree. However, teams have the power to create a subculture that has already evolved. The challenge here is to keep conforming to the organization when called upon, even when you are already having a more evolved culture. And that is exactly why it is important that the team itself becomes more conscious about their own ecosystem and refer to that rather than their culture.
In a way, an ecosystem feel tangible, feels like you can actually own it, while a culture feels like that fluffy bear in the corner of the room, lovely to look at, nice to cuddle, but what does it do?
In a recent get together between Agile enthusiasts from 2 Belgian companies, people reflected on the (misleading?) question: “How do you bring an Agile culture to your team?”. A first iteration on this question resulted in a more circular approach in co-creating an ecosystem that actually works for the team, rather than framing Agile Culture. The concept of circular ecosystem proved to be much more light-weight to digest and easier to understand and could present a picture of what you are aiming for from Agile Team performance perspective. Co-creating an Agile Culture, starting from the reality of the team, might not always lead to success. That is why an ecosystem, more tangible in nature, might give some guardrails.
Key concept:
Lead by example, model the behavior you want to see (vulnerability, daring to fail, creating a safe environment) and then focus on the first follower (empower the first follower).
Work on inspection, collaboration and adaptability. That leads to happier people, innovation, fresh ideas, continuous improvement and ultimately a more appreciative environment.
Essential value to live by is responsibility.
In the conversation, we’ve started from the concept that a team’s culture is highly influenced by the behaviors of the leaders in that team. We have, for that reason, defined lead-by-example as the essential booster for creating a healthy Agile Ecosystem
Lead by example: We’ve recognize both formal and informal leaders. Typically, scrum masters are best suited to model the Agile behavior. However Scrum Masters need to quickly identify the informal leaders in the team. Help them understand what a healthy Agile ecosystem looks like, get them on the bandwagon and influence the team through their voices. They boost the evolution towards that healthy Agile Ecosystem.
Radical Responsibility: Thing happen to the team and these things can or cannot be their fault. That basically doesn’t matter, it what you do afterwards with it: regardless of the situation, it boils down to you taking up the responsibility to do something about it.
Install a collaborative growth mindset to get better ways of working together.
Set the horizon that work can be fun, around innovative new ideas and within a space that’s showing appreciation for the things you do.
The question is how this can help to save organisations from dying. The Boston Consulting Group, presented a broader context on the lifespan of organisations and what principles to take into account:
Cohesion. Avoid implosion. Align internal and external stakeholders around a clear and common mission and pay attention to succession planning.
Prudence. Avoid overextension and vulnerability to infrequent but severe risks. Create a modular structure with buffers to prevent the escalation of shocks; focus on long-term health, not immediate TSR; and stress test your plans against 10- or even 100-year risk events.
Adaptiveness. Avoid being made obsolete by change. Implement a culture of information gathering, experimentation, selection, and iteration; strive to harness a diversity of perspectives.
Embeddedness. Avoid becoming an object of external (legal or social) sanction. Foster transparency, connectivity, and co-evolution with your company’s social, cultural, and natural environment. Bake sustainability principles into your business planning.
The 4 principles are in line with a team’s healthy Agile ecosystem. Building a team takes time and once the team is actually formed*, it makes sense to keep the team stable around a product or set of services for a longer period:
Cohesion: Having a clear purpose and make sure people can deliver
Prudence: Keep looking ahead and manage blockers and shockers before they actually impact or stall the ecosystem through inspection.
Adaptiveness: Keep inspecting and adapting, failing forward, experiment, …
Embeddedness: Build your connectors with the organisation and transparently report out about progress, value delivery, team’s health status, happiness… so the organisation can support in an optimal way. Embed you team in the organizational DNA.
Let’s build healthy Agile ecosystems. Make it tangible and actionable.
More than anything, the value is in the dialogue and mindset;
the question is whether it helps to start the dialogue? What do you think?
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