How your culture is shaping your agile

How your culture is shaping your Agile
rowan@scrumwithstyle.com @rowanb
Rowan Bunning CST - Scrum WithStyle

© 2016 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com
A little about
Rowan Bunning
• Background in object oriented & web dev. with vendors, enterprise product
development, start-ups & consultancies
• Introduced to Agile via eXtreme Programming in 2001 as:
“the way good Smalltalkers develop software”
• Introduced Scrum organisation-wide in 2003-5
• Agile Coach / ScrumMaster at a leading agile consultancy in the U.K.
• Have trained about 5,000 people in Scrum & Agile
• Certified ScrumMaster®
• Certified Scrum Product Owner®
• Effective User Stories
• Agile Estimating and Planning etc.
• One of first Agile Coaches in Australia from late 2008
• Organiser of Regional Scrum Gatherings® in Australia

@rowanb© 2017 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com
I chose the red pill.
I have not found an end to the Agile rabbit hole yet!
Image courtesy of Village Roadshow Pictures

Session outline
• Why Agile?
• LaLoux culture model in a nutshell
Agile in…
• Amber organisations
• Orange organisations
• Green organisations
• Teal organisations
• What you can do

Some questions addressed along the way
• Q1: What is likely shaping your Agile?
• Q2: What is your org likely misinterpreting
about Agile and Scrum?
• Q3: Why is SAFe so popular and what are
SAFe adopters missing out on?
• Q3: What sorts of changes are required of
leaders in order to shift to high impact Agile?

Thanks to…
Michael Spayd Michael HammanMichael Sahota Jean Tabaka

Q: What is likely shaping your Agile?
Answer 1: Your motivation for pursuing it.
Your Why

agility is not the same as “faster”
“We considered a bunch of names, and agreed eventually on “agile”
as we felt that captured the adaptiveness and response to change
which we felt was so important to our approach." - Martin Fowler
“Agile does not mean delivering faster. Agile does not mean fewer
defects or higher quality. Agile does not mean higher productivity.
Agile means agile - the ability to move with quick easy grace, to be
nimble and adaptable. To embrace change and become masters of
change - to compete through adaptability by being able to change
faster and cheaper than your competition can." - Craig Larman and
Bas Vodde

Where the term “Agile” came from

Which has agility?
Source:YouTube Source: invorma.com/16-super-jumping-animals
or

Ability to steer
Photo credits: thoughtcatalog.com and static.ezermester.hu
not

– Leon C. Megginson, Professor of Management and Marketing at Louisiana State
University at Baton Rouge.
Megginson, ‘Lessons from Europe for American Business’, Southwestern Social Science
Quarterly (1963)
“It is not the strongest of the
species that survives, nor the
most intelligent that survives. It
is the one that is most
adaptable to change."

LaLoux culture model in a nutshell

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Frederic LaLoux
A short history of consciousness theory
Spiral Dynamics
Clare W.
Graves, Ph.D Ken Wilber
Integral Theory

Image source (unmodiﬁed): Reinventing Organizations: A Guide
to Creating Organisations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human
Consciousness, by Frederic Laloux.
Level of complexity
dealt with

@rowanb© 2017 Scrum WithStyle scrumwithstyle.com Source: Frederic LaLoux, Reinventing Organizations (Nelson Parker 2014)
20-25%
50%
20-25%
2%

Agile
Agile Culture
is here
Agile
Most
organisations
have these
dominant
cultures

What happens when you attempt to adopt Agile
in an organisation with an incompatible culture?

Conformist - Amber

Conformist Amber
“Agile” in
Amber
Surrounded by
bureaucracy
30% of organisations including most of public sector

Conformist Amber
Amber orgs value the opposite of Agile
over Individuals and interactions
over Working softwareComprehensive documentation
Processes and tools
Contract negotiation over Customer collaboration
Following a plan over Responding to change
The traditional manifesto

Amber reaction to Agile Principles
“No! Our highest priority is to deliver the
project to the satisfaction of the sponsor.”
“No! Our requirements are known. We don’t
want to be changing them.”
“No! We need all of it. It would be inefﬁcient
to do multiple deliveries.”
“No! We have Business Analysts for that.
It’s inefﬁcient for business people to be
talking with developers who lack BA level
people and elicitation skills.”

Conformist Amber
Theory X dominant in Amber
Theory X Theory Y
Dislike work and avoid it Need to work and can enjoy it
Need to control Direct ourselves
Avoid responsibility Seek and accept responsibility
Motivated by money Motivated to realise our potential
Little creativity Highly creative
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

“That sounds nice but we’re not a
tech company that indulges that much
in techie stuff. What we do are
business projects after all.”
“That sounds nice, but when there’s a
project deadline looming, we expect
everyone to rise to the occassion.”
“No! Our steering committees review
progresss based on reports of spend
vs budget and activity relative to
planned milestones.”
“That sounds nice, but everything of
substance must be in writing so that
we know who to hold accountable.
We’re in a distributed world too.”
“No! Our PMO has a project
resourcing process for assigning
resources. We trust our managers
and team leads. Other resources
should just execute.”

“No! It’s about delivering all requirements
in a complex enterprise environment. Big
organisations like ours require big,
complicated solutions.”
“No! We have separate Architects,
BA’s and tech leads for that.
Requirements aren’t up for negotiation
anyway.”
“Sounds nice but we expect them to
already be effective. They should be
maximising their time executing.”
How much of this sounds familiar?
Even if we hold a different view personally, to what degree do
structures, processes and cultural norms continue to keep
things working in a way reﬂective of these beliefs?

Conformist Amber
Insisting on prediction of the unpredictable
"The most serious impediments to using Scrum are habits of waterfall,
predictive thinking over the last twenty to thirty years; these have spawned
command and control management, belief that demanding something will
make it happen, and the willingness of development to cut quality to meet
dates. These are inbred habits that we aren’t even aware of anymore."
- Ken Schwaber

Conformist Amber
Partial Agile only survives within a protected bubble
📖

Conformist Amber
Against the grain
• Hard work protecting the bubble
• Heavy reporting up based on predictive plan
• Secretive by default
• Disinterested in “theory” - can’t reason for continuous improvement 📖
• Positional power up hierarchy where understanding of work situation is
limited 📖
• Good Agile is fragile and can be rapidly destroyed 📖

Achievement - Orange

Achievement Orange
Organisation as machine
Language of machine:
Measurement and control,
efﬁciency, order, programmes,
inputs and outputs, production,
top down, bottom-up, centralised,
decentralised, roll-out.
Language of force:
Consistency, standardisation, Get
people to, make them… etc.
Source: cleanlanguage.co.uk

Control systems in organisations
Market system
Bureaucratic
system
Clan system
• Prices drive very efﬁcient decision making
• Measure Input and Output
• Formal rules, roles, processes, compliance
• Supervision, direction and hierarchy
• Specialisations enable clearer comparison with
like workers
• Informal value based rules
• Allows innovation and collaboration
• Most suitable for unique, interdependent or
ambiguous work e.g. software development
Reference: A Conceptual Framework for the Design of Organizational Control Mechanisms, William G. Ouchi, Management Science, Vol. 25, No. 9. 1979.

Bureaucratic control is booming in Amber/Orange
Market control
Clan control
Bureaucratic
control
• Prices drive very efﬁcient decision making
• Measure Input and Output
• Formal rules, roles, processes, compliance
• Supervision, direction and hierarchy
• Specialisations enable clearer comparison with
like workers
• Informal value based rules
• Allows innovation and collaboration
• Most suitable for unique, interdependent or
ambiguous work e.g. software development

Achievement Orange
Orange orgs want faster but not agility
• Shareholder value + IT as a cost centre —>
playing a cost side, resource efficiency game
• Misinterpret Agile as a tool for increasing
efficiency
• “Program efficiency” and “delivery” are where
Orange orgs believe the problem is
• “Agile” the Execute within “Plan-then-Execute”
• “iterations” used to build out fixed scope to plan
• Actually doing Incremental Development
and calling it “Agile”
• Not: agility, iteration from customer
feedback, working in pure value
order or amplified learning,

Achievement Orange
Cargo cult Agile
“Orange Organisations increasingly feel obligated to follow the fad: they
deﬁne a set of values, post them on ofﬁce walls and company web site, and
then ignore them whenever that is more convenient for the bottom line.”

Achievement Orange
Agile positioned as “delivery” tool
• Management by Objectives (MbO): “deﬁne objectives (predict); follow-up
(control); strategic planning; mid-term planning, yearly budgeting cycles, key
performance indicators, and balanced scorecards” [LaLoux14]
• Leads to negotiating ﬁxed Scope & Date…
Contract negotiation over Customer collaboration
• “The most serious impediments to using Scrum are habits of waterfall, predictive
thinking over the last twenty to thirty years; these have spawned command and
control management, belief that demanding something will make it happen,
and the willingness of development to cut quality to meet dates. These are
inbred habits that we aren’t even aware of anymore.” - Ken Schwaber

Achievement Orange
Agility constrained by hierarchy of objectives
Delivery DeliveryDelivery
Scrum is put into these boxes
Team
Program
Portfolio

Achievement Orange
Agility constrained by hierarchy of objectives
Delivery DeliveryDelivery
Scrum is put into these boxes
Team
Program
Portfolio
SAFe ﬁts neatly into the Amber-Orange
status quo structures and mindset rather
than offering a path to transcending it.

Achievement Orange
Project/PI focus over customer focus
• Programs, projects as means of
control
• Projects, Programs, PMO
abstract away the external
customer
• Internal stakeholder interests
dominate over external customers
• Big programmes = big batches
Project
Focus on project delivery
😃
😞
Focus on Customer

Water-Scrum-Fall
💡 $
ArchitectsBusiness AnalystsProject Control
Board
User Reps Operations
SIT UAT
System
Testers
Deployment
😞
Benefits Realisation
begins
Business case
Big Batch
Specification
Big Batch
Project Scope
Product
Backlog Current Product
Users
Limited Coverage
Agile Team
Programmers & Testers only
Months
2 weeks
each iteration
Months
Released
Dependent on other
groups to get anything
specified or released

SAFe adopters are likely missing…
• agility
• high responsiveness
• ability to work in value order
• elimination of dependencies
• Systems Thinking and optimising the whole
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• genuinely collaboratively business-development relationship rather than continuation of
The Contract Game
• minimum viable bureaucracy
• high performing teams

Achievement Orange
Clash with self-organisation
• Pre-deﬁned job titles and roles impede
self-organisation
• Individual performance review
• Efﬁciency drive + technical work =
• narrow division of labour + hierarchy
for technical supervision
• local optimisation
• Opposite of generalising specialists
and Scrum rule of no titles or sub-
teams

Achievement Orange
Professional mask impediment
• Fear of disempowerment an elephant in the
room impediment to Agile adoption
• "Emotions, doubts, and dreams are best
kept behind a mask, so that we do not
make ourselves vulnerable. Our identity is
no longer fused with our need to be seen as
competent and successful, ready for the
next promotion.” [LaLoux14]
Image credit: 9hues.com

Achievement Orange
What Amber/Orange orgs get wrong
• Mistake Scrum and Agile as just another process to be compliantly
followed
• Agile framed as a delivery method not requiring change by senior
managers
• By pursuing fast and/or efﬁcient, starve adoption of slack for learning
• Attempt Agile within ‘The Contract Game’ of up-front scope & date
negotiation
• Add Agile in addition to what already exists rather than rationalising it

Transitioning from Orange to Green
Involves eliminating formal constraints
replacing them with team self-regulation,
values, responsibility, inspect & adapt

“I visualise Scrum as a rocket. Pushing that rocket
forward is the power of its engines. But puling it back
are the forces of gravity. If the rocket it able to push far
enough, it can enter into orbit. But if it cannot, it will
inevitably get pulled back to earth, right where it started.
The implications of Scrum must be pushed far enough
into other parts of the organisation so that the entire
transition is not pulled back by organisational gravity.”
- Mike Cohn, Succeeding with Agile
Escape velocity

Leaders must go ﬁrst for organisational culture change

Orange vs Green executive stories
In order to hit our predicted
half-yearly profit target,
As an executive,
I want all projects run to
produce the predicted results
on time and budget.
Orange
In order to continually delight
customers in a turbulent market,
As an executive,
I want high capability teams of people
with purpose and passion, learning
about customers and creating high
value products that serve the
interests of all stakeholders.
Green

Pluralistic Green

Pluralistic Green
Interdependence and Shared Values
• Motivation: Power has shifted to Customer /
constituent, need to “Delight” the customer
• Structure around customer value creation
• “Culture is paramount” - deliberate culture
• Share values instead of policies, processes
• Value Relationships over Outcomes
• Honest about uncertainty 📖
Image credit: gomindshift.com
< 20% of organisations inc. start-ups and growth mode

Pluralistic Green
Customer Collaboration
• Vendor seeks ongoing partnership with
client 📖
• Multi-stakeholder win-win-win increases
complexity
• Agility required to wrestle success
• Value side management
• Business steering development directly
makes sense (Product Owner) 📖
Image credit: phoonies.wordpress.com

Achievement Orange
Organisation as Organism, Culture
Organism language:
“Living systems, environmental
conditions, adaptation, life cycles,
recycling, needs, homeostasis,
evolution, survival of the ﬁttest,
health, illness.”
Culture language:
“Socialise, values, beliefs, ideology,
rituals, diversity, traditions, history,
service, shared vision and mission,
understanding, qualities, families.”
Source: cleanlanguage.co.uk
Photo credit: holganix.com

Pluralistic Green
Green is easily misunderstood from
an Amber/Orange perspective
"...it is clear to me that PRINCE2 is agile, and therefore I have always been
running projects in an agile way since I started my project management
career.
I fully expect Agile to fade away given time and perhaps end its days as a
niche small project delivery (web projects) [approach] advocated by the
major web agencies such as Conchango.” - Kevin Brady, 2011
Source: eprince2.com/articles/prince2-is-agile/2011/03/17/

Pluralistic Green
And now, some words of wisdom from my
favourite management though leader…

Pluralistic Green
Inverted hierarchy
• Distaste for power imbalance
• Inverted hierarchy where
management supports teams
• “Frontline workers make far-
reaching decisions without
management approval” 📖
Image credit: Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

Pluralistic Green
Green values Servant-leadership
• “Green insists that leaders should be in
service of those they lead.”
• “In some innovating companies,
managers are not appointed from above,
but from below; subordinates choose
their boss, after interviewing prospective
candidates.” [LaLoux14]

Evolutionary Teal
Team Performance Curve
Source: The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-performance Organisation, by Jon R. Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith, Harvard Business Press, 1993.
The “Compromise Units”
________________
______________________
____________________
All the characteristics of a real
team, but the members are deeply
committed to one another’s personal
growth and development
Equally committed to a common
purpose, goals, and working
approach for which they hold
themselves mutually
accountable.
___________
Has not yet established collective
accountability. Requires more clarity
about purpose, goals or work-products
and more discipline in hammering out
a common working approach.
______________
Has not focused on collective
performance and is not really trying to
achieve it. Has no interest in shaping a
common purpose or performance goals.
_______________
Members act primarily to share
information, best practices, or
perspectives and to make decisions
to help each individual perform within
his or her area of responsibility.
___________
Working group
PerformanceImpact
Time
Pseudo-team
Potential team
Real team
Exceptional team
Real teams come naturally

😞😃
Folding everyone into end-to-end teams
$
Flow of Value
Beneﬁts Realisation
begins
Vision &
Business Goals
Product
Backlog
Current
Product
Users
Feature Team that is fully
cross-functional
2 weeks
each iteration
Released💡
Feedback re Product and Process quality
OperationsSystem
Testers
The Agile Team has the skills and
authority to create usable Product
Increments each iteration
Architect
Business
Analysts
Broadening of skills

Finally… Scrum makes perfect sense
• The elements of Scrum that get
broken in Orange orgs make
perfect sense in Green
✓ Agility
✓ Customer collaboration
✓ Servant-leadership
✓ Self-management (Teal)

High Impact Agile
Overall Impact
Extent of Scrum Adoption
High Impact zone
•Green-Teal consciousness dominant in
leadership
•Leading deliberate Green-Teal culture
•Thinking and doing as per implications
of Scrum and Lean principles
•Environment nurtures high engagement
and high performing teams
Implementation as per what
is explicit Scrum Guide only
Superﬁcial “fake Agile”
as typically implemented

Evolutionary Teal

Evolutionary Teal
Teal: purpose, self-management and possibility
• Perceived context: we evolve with the world
• Belief: amazing things will emerge from a
truly supportive environment
• About unleashing human ingenuity
• Volunteering, free choice, true taking of
Responsibility 📖
• No projects - long-lived product
development
• No budgets - why create scarcity,
why play games with each other?
Image credit: healthyplace.com
Very few organisations

Evolutionary TealCPJ inspired by Jeﬀ Bezos' most recent annual letter.
medium.com/21st-century-organizational-development/type-2-organizations-df3f1f53c66c
Distributed decision making

Evolutionary Teal
Self-management
• No “reporting lines”
• High agency teams, little formal structure to take
power away
• Org functioned as social network
• Trust relationships valued
• Team interaction directly with visionary Executive
• Recent comments… “had a great culture”
“best team I’ve ever worked in”
Image credit: @NielsPﬂaeging Twitter

Evolutionary Teal
People and roles are organic, dynamic
• Team involvement in hiring
• Not hired into narrowly deﬁned job.
Instead, roles emerges from individual
• Uncool to refer to someone by job title
• “Job titles and descriptions hardly do
justice to unique combinations of roles,
and they are too static to account for the
ﬂuid nature of work in Teal
Organisations.” [LaLoux14]
• Empathy is essential 📖

Evolutionary Teal
Psychological safety
Pair Programming taken up readily
as safety existed 📖
See Google’s Project Aristotle
Image credit: Calqui

Hypothesis Driven Development

Evolutionary Teal
Wholeness
• Encouraged to be yourself 📖
• Non-conformists
• Strong intrinsic motivation and
loyalty 📖
Photo: careerandhumanresources.blogcommunity.com

Evolutionary Teal
Evolutionary purpose, breakthrough innovation
Inventions in the 1990’s and early 2000’s… 📖
• Enterprise collection management product used by
Library of Congress, Bundesarchiv etc.
• One of first web app languages
• One of first e-retail sites
• Most complex Govt. transaction in
1999 to register for ABN
• First semantic XML-based content
management
• Meta-level object framework for business
application development
• Semantic web-based knowledge system re-
definable without programmer
• Solar thermal “big dish”
Photo: Unknown via Aperture

Evolutionary Teal
Humility is a challenge
• Social proof from the “big corporates”
• Status through position or individual
achievement
• Impediments to progressing…
• Ego, identity and positional status
• Fear of vulnerability and looking incompetent
• Lack of trust between managers separated
from the work
• Lack of belief in team-based and self-
regulating alternatives
Image credit: fortune.com

Conclusions

Summary of Insights
• Many are pursuing Agile for the “wrong” reasons*
• Organisations are (mis)interpreting Agile to ﬁt their current level of
consciousness
• “faster, cheaper” motivation bends “Agile” to be an incremental delivery tool
to project goals at the expense of customer-centric agility
• Water-Scrum-Fall is a typical consequence
• The elements of Scrum and good Agile that get broken in Orange orgs are
what makes perfect sense in Green
• “An organisation cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of
development.”
* Pursuing ends for which it was not intended by those who invented it

What you can do yourself
• Listen for language reﬂecting a
machine metaphor
• Have the conﬁdence to take of your
Professional Mask, say “I don’t know”
• Cultivate your own Green and Teal
beliefs and share them

What you can do to invite others
Image credit: Yi Lv, Odd-e
Example Causal Loop Diagram• Ask leadership:
• why change?
• would you like to talk about culture &
leadership?
• Talk about sources of uncertainty, variability
• Tell stories and engineer experiences that
challenge limiting beliefs
• Use Systems Thinking to explore current
beliefs about organisational dynamics
• Point out where behaviour is not aligned
with purported aspiration

To learn more…
• Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
• reinventingorganizations.com
• We the people: Consenting to a deeper democracy by John Buck and Sharon Villines
• sociocracy30.org
• meetup.com/Teal-Sydney-Reinventing-Organisations-and-Holacracy
• medium.com/teal-for-startups
• What would it take to Have and Agile Enterprise? slideshare.net/AgileNZ/lyssa-adkins-
michael-spayd-keynote
• cleanlanguage.co.uk
• Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay
• Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change by William
B. Joiner
• Talk to me… I have many more stories!

@rowanb au.linkedin.com/in/rowanbunning
Rowan Bunning
rowan@scrumwithstyle.com scrumwithstyle.com

How your culture is shaping your agile

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