 Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Very early on in my career, I was working as a graduate accountant at a professional services company. I ever heard some colleagues talking one day about a new piece of work that had just come in. Now, generally the atmosphere was one of excitement because it sounded like a really fun client and an opportunity to do something really really good instead of a lot of the drudge that we've been doing recently. The buoyant mood though was somewhat popped because one of the people in that group started, I would say, despondently complaining that there was absolutely no chance of him getting a spot on the project team simply because he hadn't been there long enough. I mean he was generally regarded as very very talented but he hadn't clocked up as many hours as some of his less talented colleagues and that was one of the ways that assignments were largely handled in that organisation. Now his colleagues tried to cheer him up. They pointed out that someone else had been put on another project recently simply because they were more junior and the company could charge them out to the client at a higher rate and claim a higher margin. Now those two stories told me a really good deal about the culture of that organisation and after I'd been sent yet again to the bakery to collect the cakes for the latest management meeting I handed in my notice. Now you've probably heard the phrase they just didn't fit the culture or culture eats strategy for breakfast or we don't need a process change here we need a cultural change. Like me you probably hear the word culture a lot and you've probably got a pretty good idea about what it means to you at least. We all seem to agree that culture is one of those things that's critical to success both for teams and for organisations but it's really difficult to define and pin down. Of course that doesn't stop people actually trying to define it. Gruenert and Whittaker, if I've pronounced that correctly, they once said that the culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour that the leader is willing to tolerate. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Gandhi apparently said that a nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people and Walter Lippmann said that culture is the name for what people are interested in. Their thoughts, their models, the books they read, the speeches they hear. Now I'm not sure if any of those quotes actually helped but I don't think culture is something that can be documented. I don't think it's something that can be prescribed and I do have a lot of sympathy for the view that culture is very hard to change but I do believe that it can be changed I do believe that it can be influenced over time and most cultural change that I've experienced has been gradual but I've also seen it possible to be accelerated and my definition of culture is it's the collection of stories that we tell about what works and what doesn't work in our organisation. I believe the most powerful and the most repeated stories become part of the accepted culture and if we want to change the culture we need to create opportunities for different stories to be written and told and ultimately valued. You remember my story at the beginning? Well I formed my opinion about the culture based on the anecdotes of my colleagues and interestingly enough the story about my resignation and the explanation of why I resigned had a small impact itself on the culture as well because I know at least one other person who followed suit based on hearing that story. Now I do a lot of work with leaders to help them visualise their current culture and assess if that's working to help business performance and resilience or whether it's hurting it and then to listen to the stories that are being told and explicitly value the ones that are helpful and create opportunities for and then recognise new stories that support the more helpful new culture. I think stories are a great way to approach this because our brains are actually hardwired for stories. It's how information's retained and passed on from generation to generation and as a leader within your organisation you need to become a good storyteller not a fictional storyteller but someone who can command the narrative in such a way that it compels people to listen invites them to understand the value and the meaning in the story and then want to pass it on and replicate it and it's a skill that we can all develop and it's a skill that I cover in my Lessons for Agile Leaders course. So if you think you need a bit of a culture change in your organisation and you want to help make that happen, why not check it out?