 Okay, hello. This was a surprise to most of us, by the way, so we started getting our heads together. So here's a question. We talk about business agility a lot and we talk about the challenges that organizations face. The question is in an Indian context, in a cultural diverse country like India, what are the cultural challenges? Well, what are the cultural challenges that we face by adopting any sort of business agility? From your experience. Doesn't even have to be India. It could be America. Cultural challenges. I think Todd wants to say something. I don't really want to say anything, but I'll start. I've been working in the Indian culture for quite a number of years. And one of the things I think the biggest challenge that I've had working with teams, we have the standard remote challenges and all of that. But I think the biggest challenge I've had is the one, there is a cultural element of not wanting to disagree with when someone says something. And that's probably the biggest thing I've challenged with working with Indian teams compared to working with teams from Eastern Europe or elsewhere, is that I expect challenges from everyone. And when I don't get that, when everything is a yes, yes, yes, yes, and then things don't get followed through, then that's a big challenge. So that's one of the biggest challenges is that engagement and the challenge. That's really how we build collaboration. That's really how we build business agility across the board. We have to have an engagement across the organizations and working as partners. And that's probably the biggest challenge I've had working with teams in India. So the million dollar question, how do you shift a cultural behavior, organizational culture or societal culture? Yeah, and what I have found is that the only way I've been able to, so what I've found is I have to work individually. I find them willing to challenge all the time. It's sort of this business relationship where it starts to be worked differently. And so you have to change that rigid business relationship towards more of an individual relationship. And then I start seeing that change. So that's how it's worked for me. So he's saying small steps and that's how you would change anything. You'd change a culture, an organization, a team, a country. You would say, yeah, let's do small things. And if you want to see behavior change in individuals, you'd begin by modeling it and rewarding it. So I'm leaving. Because you had a question for me. The rash has something to disagree with. What a surprise. I had a counterpoint to Todd. And hence I thought I should take the stage. I think, again, this is a classic stereotyping saying that I have worked with Indians and hence all Indians are like this. The problem is that often a lot of people outside India have worked mostly with services companies. And in services company, this is the way you make business. You're told not to say no. But if you work with the product companies here, they're very different. We have fist fight and we have real fights and people disagree all the time. So I think the point I'm trying to make is company culture actually supersedes the original culture. And so if you're in a setup like a services company, then that culture is basically which encourages people not to disagree. But a product company or a startup company, there is a very strong culture of disagreeing. So that was only my point. So sit back down. So if you have an existing company culture, how do you shift it? So if you have an existing company culture, how do you shift it? What is the reason for shifting? That's a good question. You don't have to ask me questions. I'm going to be asking you questions. In general, because an organization decides they want to have more agility and perhaps it's mandated, perhaps it's decided through a retrospective or some other communal mechanism. But the culture of an organization is generally not necessarily the one that is needed in the future and there has to be an evolution. So the reason I asked you why it's required is because if you see as an industry, we have thrived the IT industry here. And the reason we've thrived is because we are very adaptable. Agile came along. We said, great, we will be agile. Whether you're actually or not doesn't matter. But there is very adaptive. Before that was CMM, CMMI. We went through that craze. So I think people here in my experience are very adaptive and they thrive on that. And that's why if you see last 20 years, the industry has grown significantly. So the question was like, why do we need to change? We're already thriving. Was your question a general question? How you shift company culture or was it related to India now? No, it's a general question. How do you shift company culture? For me, the most system-relevant people in a company usually are the leaders in a company. And the leadership behavior will manifest itself in the company culture much more than the behavior of an individual person. So in my experience at least such a shift needs to come from the leaders. It needs to be lived by the leaders. So that's at least for me one part, a very important part of shifting a company culture. I'd like to challenge your first question before I respond to the second. I think that culture is not our main challenge. I think it very often is used as an excuse. I think the main challenge here is the whole management industry out there. And the business schools and the universities that has produced these kind of mindsets over so many years and all the people that they have in the organizations around now. That is our main challenge, the mindsets. And when it comes to changing company culture, I think that you need to look at the interplay between management processes and culture. You can change your culture by changing your management processes in the right direction and in the wrong direction. And too often, I mean, this is seen as kind of two separate things. Well, culture is over here and that's HR. Management processes is over here. That's finance. And no wonder it goes wrong. So I would like to challenge that part of when Naresh said that we are adaptive. I feel that based on my experience with some of the team members, it's like, you know, if you have thought of one idea, then you are so stick to that that you feel that, you know, this is right. And even whosoever, you know, gives reciprocating or anything which is even making sense. But then still people say, yeah, this is good, but then my idea is the best one. So I feel that the still people have that kind of, you know, non-adaptive nature. A fixed mindset. Yeah. But that's not an Indian problem. It's a universal thing. And I liked what you said. And then we think, actually, human beings are taking very similarly. And of course we have cultural small differences, but overall we are driven by very similar things. So you talked about changing management. And one of the viewpoints I have is changing structure, which is not necessarily management, but changing structure can influence the way people behave. And you can call that as the culture of the company now. But if you change the structure, then it can lead to changes in the way people behave. But is the structure shaping the culture or is culture shaping the structure? So this is a bit of a hen in an egg thing, I think. And sometimes the thinking, the mindset of people will result in different structures. But can you change mindset by changing a structure? Maybe. But it needs to be a clever move then. They do say that structure reflects process. That's a bit oversimplified considering the complex adaptive nature of our organizations. Making a single intrusive change structure, any single change is going to distort, but not truly enable a sustainable change. You have to make a holistic change, kind of in slices through behavior. Clearly the leaders have to demonstrate the behavior, but when you really think about it, it's the behavior of the people in the organization that's going to have the strongest influence, consistent behavior in that. So let me pause that because I want to touch. You talk about persistent change and I want to explore that slightly. In your experience, this is the question of everyone. In your experience, what have been the smallest changes that you have seen made in an organization that have had the biggest ripple effect in terms of agility and transformation? The biggest change that we've seen in large organizational transformational change is to hold all managers accountable to being agile leaders at all levels and developing an environment where everyone thrives, where the managers actually own the transformation as opposed to being sort of frozen middle type behavior and when they own it and they start to really role model, as you were saying, role modeling the right agile leadership behavior, everyone thrives at a level that's phenomenal and it's a very subtle little change. Also introducing then leadership circles to support that change, then they take on the big rocks of changing finance systems or HR or anything else. So it's a subtle change with dramatic results because it is holistic. It's not just the structure. The structures will fall away when the organizations are self-organizing and they replace them as opposed to just attacking the structure which is going to get all kinds of resistance and friction. And a bit related to what Beata sometimes says, it's always a recruitment problem. We had done experiments with just changing the recruitment criteria, especially for leaders. So looking really for can we see agile mindset in the candidate that is applying for a position makes a huge change. So the example you gave really fits nicely into why I came up here. So for me, culture is expressed by behavior and habits of everyone in the organization. And behavior and habits are driven, as I see it, by, well, on the one hand, the thing that we have talked about, structure, on the other from the strategy and the third thing is the processes, which is really a triangle. You can find also a lot of studies where they say, well, structure follows process, but there are also studies saying process follows structure and the same is true with strategies. So they are all interwoven. And as soon as you get started there somewhere, you change the behaviors and habits and your example was exactly that. So it was like starting at that, for this thing, I think it was more the process. So how the management did stuff, also your recruitment was a process thing, which changed behaviors and habits and therefore the culture. And here I would like to put forward the context, the Indian context, where we initiated this discussion. It's not about the demographic differences. I am with Naresh on that. It's based on many aspects. It can be services. It can be product development. And more on, on the top of culture is based on the structure. On top of structure is a process. On top of process is a meta process. But when we are targeting about the culture aspect of it and when we are talking the Indian context, it's more of the values and the principle on which that culture is surviving. So the change on the value and the principle is very important. And when your culture shifted from structure to process to meta process and comes into the practices, and if your values and principle are not mapped along with the culture, with the practices you are doing, it's not reflecting there. So it's all about what all practices you are following inside the organization, whether it's matching with your values and principles or whether it's getting reflected with the culture aspects of that. So root, the DNA part of it is the value and the principle. Okay, so I agree that behaviors are shaping the culture. Yes, but what is shaping behaviors really? That is the values and the needs, the basic desires of people, people personalities, right? That is shaping behaviors. So if you don't hire the people with the right values in an agile organization, it will never be agile, right? Because you can fake behaviors, but not for long. You will always hit a kind of a wall when you fake behaviors too long. So you need to have the right value structure in people from the beginning. I want to disagree. And I disagree with Chess Humboldt's words. So these are not mine, but I like them very much. So he said, if you have a broken system and you hire the right people, you will not fix the system, you will break the people. And vice versa. So I disagree with Chess. It's not enough to hire the right people. The organization's value structure needs to be agile, right? And then you need to have people who adhere to that value structure. And it's not enough to hire new people into the wrong value structure. So I just want to touch on a topic that a few of you have mentioned. And you're talking about values and one of the key values of business agility is the customer. The customer is at the heart of much of what we do. How do you, what advice or suggestions do you have to bring the customer closer into the engagement, closer into the organization and build that customer centricity that many organizations lack, I'm afraid. First and foremost, go and meet your customers. Get the people who are in the value chain to actually go and spend time in the closest point in your organization where you touch a customer. So in a software development environment, get the software engineers answering help desk calls. Just build empathy through feeling their pain. So who out here is actually sat on a help desk and listen to the customer complaints? A couple of you. I've got a great story of sending software and hardware engineers who were designing products for farmers. And we sent them out into the cow shed. And the one engineer was holding a prototype device that was intended to be used by farmers in the cow shed. And in the cow shed, in the milking shed, he was walking along and behind there was a cow's backside there. Cow lifted its tail and let go. And the device failed. It didn't survive being covered in three to five liters of cow manure. So was the programmer covered in the three to five liters of cow manure. And that really gave him empathy for what his customer is going to need to deal with and likewise what the device will have to deal with in the real world. And that was the first time he'd ever been on a farm. You're going to disagree, fantastic. So often I hear examples like this. And I think these are kind of weird one-off examples in my experience. Because you're giving an example of someone who went to a cow shed didn't have any experience of being there and accidentally happened. It may not happen to the guy who's always there because he learned the lesson. So maybe that empathy of this may not be required in the product. In this specific case, I'm just trying to highlight that. Similarly, I've worked enough for really successful startup founders and their philosophy is customers are idiots, don't listen to them. Usually the most noisiest customers are the most useless customers. And the ones who are really important are ones busy doing stuff. So I'm just trying to pray the devil's advocate saying there's the flip side of it that we need to be careful because a lot of times people go all out. So my intent, my story is build empathy, not necessarily the specific example. And yeah, the Henry Ford quote comes to mind all the time. It's a self-correcting engine, not for the Ford analogy there. But if you don't respond to your customers, you're not going to survive. And I can remember back when I was at Intel, we had a defect. It was called FDIV, if anyone has ever heard of that. FDIV as a sort of a corporate revelation because our CEO at the time said, this is something we don't need to fix. And he said this into the social media sphere back then. And it ended, every analyst came after us where we actually as a company put everyone on the support line to do the recalls. And it was several million dollars at the time of this recall. And I can remember two years ago, this was like eight years after FDIV, the paradigm shift that was created by that one defect was still floating around and everyone would go, oh, we don't want another FDIV. And people were educating this story, this myth now to most of the millennials who were in the organization, they were still perpetuating that myth that us as a company, we cannot be that again. So that also brings up process is created when someone stuffs up and the answer, let's never let that happen again, so we add more process. So I'm not saying that's what happened in this case. How do you make it such that in an organization, when a failure like that occurs, it is both a learning experience, but it is also treated as a, it does not change, it does not reduce the agility of the organization. I think it actually, the crisis actually created the agility. One of the comments I make to most people who are adopting agile is that when do you have the most speed and the most efficiency? Typically it's when you go into a task force mode and I ask especially the bigger companies, well why don't you just behave that way all the time? Treat everything with that same level of urgency that you would, if you were to go create a task force versus I can be complacent for some period of time and then other periods of time, when the crisis hits, I'm going to have to go jump around and do stuff. I think all companies are pretty good in crisis mode, at least that's something I've observed because in crisis mode usually what's happening is a lot of the constraints that are usually prohibiting the organization system to respond properly to a customer, they are gone and all of a sudden everybody can do exactly what's right. And that's why we sometimes say a bit in a joke we should be constantly in a crisis mode because we would just do what's right. But it's really not sustainable for people to be in a crisis mode all the time. That's a lot of stress I guess. So how do you get the agility of a crisis mode without the stress of a crisis mode? You make sure you've got the right feedback loops in place and ultimately you're measuring the things that matter and that is really make visible the cost of excess process to the point of really looking at value divided by that cost so that you expose it and then enable organizational teams to address it. But it's that invisibility that kills you when that process just keeps growing and growing. If you don't have those radical feedback loops in place to expose those. It's feedback loops and communication, communication, communication and that is also, I mean, I would not subscribe to that that all customers are stupid or whatever. I think we should always listen to the customer and communicate with the customer. It doesn't necessarily mean we do all the things that the customers also do. We need to have to be sparring partners in that sense I think in the edge of agile we are not like having a customer-supplier relationship. It's more like partnership kind of attitude that we need to develop. Co-creation. I still think we got to be careful with that because we're in business for those customers. The reason why we are in business is because they come to us and buy things. I remember back in the 19, I think it was in the 1980s I spent a lot of time in Japan and we, from our western lens we were always trying to paint this as a partnership but from their perspective is no, you are a vendor and we do have our needs and we need these needs met versus, you know, let's go into some cooperative mode to go work together. It wasn't sustainable from the aspect that we do have an entertainment between our success and their success but we live in such a competitive world today that if we're not satisfying those companies they're going to go find somebody else who will. For me, I agree partly to you and I partly disagree with you because I think that really depends on what kind of thing you are talking about. If it's a bit of a legacy product or a commodity thing I'm absolutely with you. When it comes to innovation and when you have a lot of uncertainty involved then co-creation I think is the much stronger concept. Alright, so we're almost out of time and I think dinner is going to be outside fairly shortly so let me ask one question of each of you. If there was one change that you would recommend to a mindset, a specific mindset that someone needed or for that matter a specific activity that they would need to do to help develop business agility, just one thing what would be that one piece of advice that you would give them? Shane, do you want to start? I'm going to go with customer empathy. Meet people where they are. I'm going to go with building a deeper self-awareness of how your own mental models and cognitive biases might be getting in your way and really hold yourself accountable for that deepening awareness so that you can actually start acting in a more agile way, kind of believing. I think it just comes down to you need to deeply understand the value of what you're delivering. It's not the speed, it's not the efficiencies, it's directly the value that's being produced by the business. Okay, and then I would say that psychological safety would be the most important thing of everything to create that safe space for people to be able to feel good and perform well in our organizations that will create all the difference where the leaders have to go first and show that they can make mistakes and be fallible. Last but not least. Other than recruitment. And related to that, I think we need to work on the system, not the people. All right, both. Thank you very, oh, hang on, yep. You can. Thank you. Hello. Yeah, my question is, we always stress on values a lot that what value we are giving out of the system, out of any framework which we are using. From your experiences, what all different aspects of values you consider are important. Like one example could be business value, what business value we are giving to our customer. Another could be knowledge, knowledge, another value that out of the system, that what value is coming out of that. In that terms, what are the other aspects which you feel are part of values? What is value? Value is going to be in the eye of the beholder. And if you look at its stakeholder management and the ability to do effective sense making within the scope of your ecosystem, you really need to dig in and understand what are those people who are attracted to your business? What are the personas? What problems are they trying to solve? And are we a part of that, helping them to be able to get that stuff done? Immediate value is also different than brand value. Brand value is if I deliver it consistently, it'll be like Apple when they say, if you go by an Apple store and there's people waiting in line, you ask them why you're waiting in line, it's just because they might release something new. They've produced enough value to the point where people trust that whatever that next thing is going to be, I'm going to go wait in that line. I'd say that values are extremely personal and very individual, and everybody has a different value structure and it comes from your basic needs. Basically your personality is shaping your value structure. So it could be power, it could be independence, it could be that you value tranquility or any such thing that is deeply personal to a certain person. And there's a value and values are somewhat different. Value for the customer, for the stakeholders, and it's sustainable value for the organization and for the customers and for the planet and the environment at one level, and then the values that the organization espouses and that the people in that organization exhibit. All right, let's stop there. I want to say thank you to the panelists and everyone who came up onto the stage.