 Good afternoon everyone, how are you all doing today? Good, hope you're a good lunch, but not a very good lunch. I'm hoping you can stay awake during this and interact and just make it a nice, lively session. Also, I'm hoping nobody is hiding in eggs or tomatoes or those kinds of things. But I have a face to hide if you do. All right, so, brief intro. My name is Pesh, I work for a company called IHS. I'm a principal project manager responsible for Azure Transformation because of the company. Part of what I do is help some of the forecasting, budgeting and planning for the spinning sessions we do as part of our transformation. I have a colleague here, Sean Dunn, some other colleagues also. And a broad number of you also. So, the two reasons why I'm here in Bangalore. First one, obviously, is for this session. The second reason is we are helping our India teams transform at this point. We are starting the planning of the teams for transformation. The next couple of weeks after this week, Sean and I will be in some sessions like that. So, the two things I want to talk about mainly. The first one is culture. Second thing is the impact of culture on Azure Transformation. What do we need, how does it impact what we are trying to do to stop your organization? So, let's read some common understanding of the definition of what we are trying to discuss. Let's look at what transformation actually means. Transformation is a pro-automatic change in form or appearance. And what is culture? Culture is the attitude and behavior characteristic of a social group. Now, what constitutes a social group? So, there are teams of developers. They are social groups. The organization level is the organizational social group. And it's Bengaluru, or the inhabitants, residents of Bengaluru social group and inhabitants of India social group. Based on what it says, it seems like it has. If you look at your team level, maybe all your developers are exhibiting certain characteristics, a certain way of doing things. That makes them part of the developer culture. And the same is true of your organization. Transcending your team level. Maybe organizations have certain values and principles they want to inculcate in you. That will constitute some kind of a culture as well at the organizational level. Bengaluru is a great place. I was here a couple of years ago on vacation with my family. And it was a really nice time. This is the happening city. This is a vibrant, young youthful, let's go, energetic city, except for the traffic. Other than that, it's fantastic. So my hope is that my current state continues to be the same level of fun, the same level of development that I had last time, in terms of location, in terms of all the work. There are definitions and then there is reality. So there is form and appearance. So these are things that are superficial. Then there are things that are internal, such as behaviors and attitudes. And so these are all internal things. These are things we hold within ourselves. These are things that are characteristics of certain people, certain types, certain groups. When we talk about agile transformation, we are talking about changing certain things. What are we talking about? We look at the overall hierarchy. There is a team level. We talked about the organizational level, city or state level, definition. And then the country. Each of these levels have certain cultural attributes to them. What we do to each of these levels is context-driven. Let me give an example. Let's say that your team has a culture that Friday evening, you will go out and support the local public and have fun. Now as they are doing that, a friend comes by and says, hey, Tish, I have my grandfather celebrating his 90th birthday. Maybe you want to come by and celebrate with us, maybe. And you're like, sure, absolutely. It's a friend. It's an obligation to some extent. But also, you are part of the different social group there among friends. So yeah, absolutely. You'll do that. What he just did is he switched context. You went from being around a team level culture. You just concentrated that level. You went to a different level. And then after the conversation, you jump back to the team level again. So you're changing context without realizing you're doing that. And that's because we have these things internalized. We are absorbed in our culture and the culture is absorbed in us. That is the reason why it is difficult to change these things. It is difficult to adjust these things because they're not the external thing. If your hair is gray, you put some dye on it. But these are internal things. This is hard to change. When you change these contexts, this is very highly frequent. And it's a constant occurrence. You do this all the time. You just don't realize it. When you have an email come from your father, it gets more immediate attention sometimes than an email from your boss, right? It's something important. You want to pick up the phone call and do that. At that point, your life becomes more important than your work. So this context thing happens and we don't realize it. This transition is dangerous, believe it or not. You know, if you think deliberately about this, you think very consciously, intentionally about this, you are doing it right now. You know, you're thinking, when the guy is going to stop, and when can I go back home or something, right? Go back to my coffee table and that's it. So that's a different level of transition you're making. But you're doing that constantly. So, but unlike technical context, where, you know, your program, your boss comes and says, hey, fix the problem, or your product owner comes and says, hey, fix that problem. Yeah, it's a tiresome context thing. That is a draining context thing. This is a rewarding context thing. This actually is a useful context thing because it defines you as a person. It defines you as part of social use. That's the physical difference between context thinking at the cultural level versus context thinking at the work level. Now, this can also prove tiresome if, for example, your wife or your husband nags you on a constant basis on your work. Or your son calls you up all the time on his cell phone and says, dad, you have this problem. I want to do this homework. And your boss is saying, well, I want to get this done. In that situation, this can be tiresome. But usually it's not. That was the example we talked about, the bowling alley or your bar, which is just there. So we talk about culture just now. We kind of have an understanding of what generally means. What makes for successful culture, right? What is something that defines successful culture? If you look at the first important thing about a culture that is important, basically it's the sense of survival that adapts to it. Anything that doesn't adapt will become irrelevant very quickly. The first tool is to adapt. The second is to evolve. When you're not just adapting. When you're adapting, you're also evolving to understand. So the example can be something like this. We wouldn't have giraffe, for example, if there was not some kind of animal with a long neck, it would have to reach some tree and some leaf and that was a genetic mutation that got passed down because it would have to survive and the short necked animals wouldn't survive. So over time, we have giraffe, which have all long necks, for example. That's one of the basic examples of how evolution works. The other thing that successful culture was too irresponsible. You can't just adapt and evolve. You can't be all the time consuming things. You can't be just receiving. You can't be able to create something and provide something. So culture must be able to contribute. Without contribution, a culture becomes a selfish culture and usually those kinds of cultures quickly get put out of this if they're not careful. We talk about culture. Let's look at culture of India, for example. Now, India has many ancient cultures more than 5,000 years old. At different points in her history, India was ruled by the British or the Mughals in some parts of India and different influence is there. Now, how did India handle that? It's an important thing to realize that 5,000 years down the line is still surviving and thriving and we are prime examples of that here. There are influences in music, drama, literature, architecture, philosophy and the sciences. If you go down to Bombay, you see some of the very beautiful buildings that are built by the British. If you go down to South India to see some of the temples, the architecture is amazing. There are some good buildings, for example. If you go to Gujarat or to Delhi, you see Mughals and Mughals in Delhi. They are put in Minar and Taj, Mahadev and Agra. These are all influences of our culture. Now, what did that do? Did it change who we are? What it did is it helped us evolve to help our culture adapt. Now, for those of you into food, I'm guessing most of you are into food at some level. That's the concept of Indo-Chinese food. There is Indian food, there is Chinese food, and there is Indo-Chinese food. What is Indo-Chinese food? Is it that you take some noodle dish, add some garam masala to it, and that's Indo-Chinese food? Probably not, to some extent it's probably true, but it's a few dishes. What is fusion other than adaptation and evolution? According to music, there's something called jazz music. What is jazz music? It's a worldwide exponent of this kind of music. So, this again shows you that these are very, very beautiful things that happen when cultures evolve and adapt and contribute. That's the most important thing you should take away from it. You see, curry houses in London, for example, are a big business. So, while India has contributed some things, the biggest contribution I would say is London's curry house. They are extremely popular. They're all over the place, but they are very, very, very expensive and they're one of the good. So, that's an influence that India has had on London food, for example. So, we're talking about how cultures transcend our usual level. Now, we also are talking about other contributions. That's the second thing we're talking about. What is the need for other contributions? Why should we bother? It's part of the evolution adaptation message, of course, but why should we actually do that? Because we have to get your customers faster than other people can. The time market factor is there. We have to pass the delivery cycle and to be able to deliver more complex, more rich features to your customers. Then, there is stronger quality. You want better quality in what you do. You can't just deliver junk products, right? I mean, they will take one look at it. Maybe they can fool them once. Second time, they're going to buy yourself. You're out of business. Then, you need customer focus. You're out of business. Predictable delivery is important, too. It's where you promise the customer. You find a contract with the customer. Hey, instead, I'm going to do this for you. If you don't do it, your credibility is sharp. Where are you then? Next time, you promise something. This happens in all spheres of life. If you promise a wife something or a husband something and you don't do it, you don't follow through. Next time, it's going to be deliverable more. If you promise importance of predictable delivery, more than anything else, right? If you don't have this, the productivity and happiness, all of the above, human beings have to do this machine. Although, maybe a couple hundred years from now, machines are going to do this job, right? They may be out of charge completely. But for now, we are employed, and we are happy to be employed, and we continue to do this, right? So, now here is the last point. I brought it down last because I wanted to emphasize that. This is a total puncture and an emphasize. An emphasize is ownership. Commitment response to being transferred. These are four elements that are absolutely important. Drive in your organization. Without these four, there are other factors, too, obviously. And we see some of those. But these factors are critical to ensuring that the employees are engaged with you. They are on par with you. They are walking the same steps that you are. And the organization is delivering what is promising. Because the employees are delivering what they are promising. But what are we doing with the transformation? When we talk about the transformation, we are saying, hey, let's implement Trump. Let's implement Hanban or XP or whatever. They were the ones that you want to implement. What are we doing with transformation? We are looking at superficial factors, right? So, methodology. That's something. Philosophy. Lot of very favorite words for a lot of different people. Practices. Tools. These things are actually, do you agree? Do you see what I am saying? When you implement something like a tool, and you are saying this is what the information is used. How relevant is that going to be in a couple of years or three or four years on the line? When something much better comes along at a far super far. So, does your transformation account for that? Or does the transformation require that you have the tools to solve the life of a company that makes no sense? Why do we sign yearly contracts with our vendors? There is a reason we sign yearly contracts with our vendors. Because we know that at some point we are going to become irrelevant. So, what is the bet against that? You are making sure that something better comes along. I want to jump ship. Same reason why when you rented a apartment, you know some of the lifetime business, right? You sign up, maybe one year, two years, being rented a apartment complex, and so on. Something better comes along this way. They are enablers in my opinion to some extent. What are they valuable? Are they delivering true value to you? Probably are. But what are we really transforming? These are the things that are important. Let's see what they are. First of all, behavior, right? You want to transform the behavior. By behavior, I don't mean something like if a person has some anger issues or something like that, and that's a personal thing. That might be important to transform because in collaboration with the teams, it's affected as a result of that. You won't be happy about that. But I'm not talking about personal behavior. You see what I mean. You're changing attitudes. They're different and dedication towards quality, for example. It's an attitude. A lot of technical people may have this attitude that as long as it's just good enough, I'm going to ship it. Or I'm going to check it in a couple of minutes. It's just a fail. It's not everybody is going to see this problem. Why do we bother? It's just a ship it anyway. It doesn't matter. No, because the product owner says these are critical, you'll fix them. What do you want to fix this? This is how much time it's going to take. Culture. What is going to require a few times to get sick and tired of it. Culture. This is the most important thing. It affects everything. Culture subsumes and consumes everything else. What are the beliefs that somebody has? And why should we look at the beliefs of the critical part of human culture for the human identity? The human identity is enormously complex. For example, you may have already formed an opinion of me. You may be thinking this guy is not effective or something like that. So you have already formed an opinion. You already have your belief system at this point telling you what to make of me from either a biased point of view or a prejudiced point of view or from the point of view of higher experience. Maybe somebody looked like me in the past and hurt you. This guy is a little... You carry these kinds of prejudices and biases in the pandemic or look at that. And these will affect how you work in the office. You are not a different human being when you are at home than when you are at the office. You are the same person you can be. You put on a mask. You put on some kind of curtain in front of you which shows a different person outside. When you get home, you are totally different. For example, a high court judge or a big policeman or a chief of police in the office with all our respect and authority the way he walks, the way he talks people are afraid of him to some extent. They are fearful. He gets home, he is on his hands and knees and his kid is riding his back. His kid is on his back and he is laughing at him. Even if he is pulling his hair, it's the same person. He puts on a different identity in the office than wins the phone. These are all internal things. These are internal things that we try to mask by wearing some other thing on top of it. It's incredibly difficult to change. It's incredibly difficult to transform. So while these four in the front the official factors are there, they are important. What's way more important are the things that are important. Do people agree, gentlemen? What do transformations bring up? They bring up hidden biases. Let me give you an example. I was giving this example several days ago and I think it's because some people when they get bored here, they are bored. But let's say you go on vacation a month later or something and you notice something is murky on top. You've got to be dead inside. Hopefully, you know dead animals. Then you try to clean the surface. You look down, it's been murky. So you bring your cleaning device. What is that? When you start doing that, the water gets dirtier. Does this mean the water was dirty always? Or does it mean the water is dirty now? The things get louder. The water gets cloudy and more and more dirty. What is it really doing? It's actually cleaning the systems. It's coming out because the cleaning process removes those things. It gets rid of those things and those things have nowhere to go but throw it out or hang around until they are pulled away. Why am I giving this example? Because agile is exactly that. Agile will do that. It will shine a light on every single corner of the phone where you don't clean usually that have been around for 5-10 years and you never bothered to clean it. It shines a light on those dark corners where you completely forgotten about the bad processes, the bad behaviors, the bad attitudes that have been dwelling for a long, long, long time until they have become institutionalized. At this point, it's in the memory of your organization's organism. Your organization is an organism because we are an organism. If you take us away, the company is nothing but a shell. Whatever we are, we are just that. That's why transformations, just like they bring up all the muck and the dirt out of the system, are transformations that bring up hidden biases. What are they? This is a very brief list. If you look at books by Dan Ariely and Kasan Steen, Richard Thala, you will read a lot of interesting information about what makes us what we are and what kind of biases we carry inside. We talk about cultural beliefs in general systems. Look at these, right? Visual studios do the best thing there is in the entire world. I mean, never consider equities, for example. Even though in some ways, it's going to be better. I'm carrying a technological bias. Process and procedure. You may believe that this is the way things ought to be done and it's different. I'm not going to listen to it because this will work for me and what should I bother to change, right? That's your bias right there. Methodology bias, some people are married to strong or to, I don't want to, whatever it might be. I don't even refuse to consider anything else. I never talked this morning about transformation leadership. One of the things you mentioned was if you come back ten years later and hear organizations and you recognize what the organization looks like, will you be able to identify what the organization looks like? If you cannot, that's probably a good thing. Things have changed. So why should we have a bias about that such methodology? You should be able to say, for now it's working, right? You get together and they follow the herd mentality. One person says, yes. Other people feel pressured. It's really difficult to say no and they go with it. There are very interesting social experiments done on these kind of topics and some of them are very disturbing because they are scary. Catascore is another famous thing. You don't want to change. This is working for us and this is great. Changing the pathology structure, a lot of angst, a lot of annoyance. An availability bias, anything that is available to you most recently in the memory is the MRU, right? Those things pop up in front of your head. There is proximity bias. Anything you are closest to, you always consider it to be the most important thing. That will affect how you look at things. So anchoring is another important part. When you do use a story estimation, now anchoring I want to take a couple of seconds and give you a story about this interesting thing. This is an experiment done where the goal was tell me the population of a certain country, right? Just give me the population of a certain country. Before that experiment was done as a side test. The real test is not the population of the country. The real test is this. The participants were asked to give their social security numbers. If you are not familiar, in the US there is a nine digit number that is like your PAN ID, for example, in India. So people are asked to write down those numbers. Some people are asked to write, and some people are not asked to write that number. Interesting thing is everybody who wrote down their social security number gave the population of that country as a much higher number even though that number has nothing to do with the population of that country. Why? Because they got anchored in that value. That's called anchoring bias. They will say 75 dollars off and 70 percent off of that. You are looking at that number maybe 200 dollars worth of something and they are saying 75 percent off. This is great. This is a great deal. I save so much money. You are anchored at the 200 level when the worth is probably 50 bucks and you are still being 50 bucks. So that is anchoring. These kinds of things affect us on a daily basis. We don't realize that they are. I strongly encourage you to go research some of these on a daily basis. Use of story estimation quickly can fall into this kind of a trap where people start thinking 50 points, everything is 50 points, everything is 70 points. That kind of things can happen. So what do biases lead to? When you have some kind of bias, it can lead to resistance because bias is all about resisting change. So what are the types of resistance you may come across? This won't work. For example, that's a common thing. This hasn't worked before. We tried this two years ago or something and this hasn't worked. It doesn't soar to our team, personality, cultural company. It doesn't work for us because of these reasons. Or things are fine the way they are. Why change? Let us go. Too disruptive. This is just too much of a big deal. Let's not worry too much about this. And so let's avoid this situation. Let's not change. What will happen if the team fails? Let's make it on time. Who's going to take responsibility? So that's another fear factor that comes into play. Let's someone else do this first. We'll follow if it works for them. So that way you're kind of passing the bar and say, let's not worry about it. Let's somebody else do this stuff. And we'll see what happens. We'll be curiously through them to this process. We will support them. We'll be a backup for them. If it succeeds, fantastic. It doesn't. Well, we didn't lose anything. So these biases, these resistance items that we just talked about, these are actually real. They are very real. Can somebody show hands, tell me if you've encountered this before? Anybody? Practically 60%, I would say 65%. Yes, absolutely. That's why it says it's a very strong, small list. But biases are real. They are absolutely real. And that is something you just have to live with. You can't do much about it. You have to work around it somehow or find a way to reduce the impact, mitigate the risk of bias affecting your transformation. That is absolutely critical. But before we go further, let's look at motivation. You'll understand why we are looking at it when we look at it in a few slides from now. So there are two types of motivations, intrinsic and extrinsic. When you look at studying for an exam, you want a result, a certain result, you work for your boss and your boss is saying, well, you've done this much. You've fought for that. Because there's going to be a reward, because there's going to be some money at the end of it, because there's going to be some stock option at the end of it, whatever, you're working for it. That's extrinsic motivation. Motivation for something tangible, real, that is not going to be something that's driven by you internally. That's extrinsic motivation. What is intrinsic? Take cricket for fun. Why would you take cricket? You're not such a gentle girl. You're not a champion. Maybe you are, I don't know. But you play for fun. You play just for the sake of playing. Just play for the sake of playing. There's no other reward other than a feeling of happiness or satisfaction or joy or being with your team, being with these people that you consider your friends and colleagues. That's why a lot of companies have, the company I work for, IHS in Bengaluru, has a cricket team. So after work, they go down and they have a game of cricket every now and then. And the reward is the end of it. In fact, it's more hassle, isn't it? You take all your stamps and you go down and you put all those things down, play in the heat. What joy do you get out of that huge hassle of driving in Bengaluru traffic to get to where you're getting and playing? You get internal satisfaction. You get the kind of happiness that cannot be matched by anything else. There's no reward except the process itself. In this situation, the journey is the destination, as I like to say. So playing for fun's sake, it's its own reward thing. For the sake of playing, it's its own reward. That's why people do that. Now, we're going to talk about some scenarios here. We will try to understand some of these scenarios. There's a template I'm following in those scenarios to make it useful for after I'm done with this session. You can take it with you. It's on SlideChat if you can find it or you can talk to me after the presentation. I can work with you and get you those slides. These are some of the common categories of cultures or worries and doubts from generally people that are in the process of adopting Azure. Categories may be valid or they may be exaggerated. Sometimes they're valid. For example, somebody may say, our culture doesn't really support this or that. Sometimes they're valid and I agree. Sometimes they may be exaggerated because you just want to avoid that whole situation to begin with. Some of them may be emotional. For example, I'm working in this team. Because I have the kind of skills that you need there. That's why I'm separated from my colleagues. That's an emotional statement. Sometimes it's purely technical. For example, you may say, the kind of work we do, the kind of projects we handle, the kind of technologies we handle may not be suitable for Scrum or for Azure. Waterfall is best for it. That's an argument you can make in certain regions. Individuals, sometimes it's a cultural thing. For example, you could say Asian cultures tend to be formed around groups. Western cultures tend to form around individuals. Western cultures are usually very individualistic. And Asian cultures tend to be very group oriented. So sometimes that can be a factor too. And sometimes it's an individual factor. I may not be the kind of person that likes to work with a team. I may be a lone wolf. I like to do my own thing. I've been doing my own thing for so long. Now you're asking me to work as part of a team. That's nonsense. I don't want to do that. So these kinds of things come up as well. Sometimes it's behavioural adjustment. Sometimes people may just get angry and exhibit some symptoms which are not so pleasant. You swear words, they may curse, they may get angry, whatever. So you want to be careful about that. And sometimes it may require some kind of education. Sometimes there are unfounded concerns about what you're trying to do. They may not have any validity, but they are unfounded. So you want to be careful about that. Sometimes there are concerns about task estimates and accuracy. Sometimes what happens is teams make a concern that they may be penalised by their estimates. And estimates are not supposed to be accurate to begin with, but people take it that when you estimate something, you've got to do it. You will do it in that time because you estimate. You told me you will do it in five days. It's the sixth day. It's not happening. What's wrong? So these kinds of implications can actually affect how projects work. We talked about agile transformation. We talked about how it touches teams. What we didn't talk about is a lot of things. It affects finance, your HR, it affects sales, your marketing team. How does it affect HR, for example? Now, show of hands, how many of you have goals that are set on the basis of individual results? How many of you have goals in your company as part of an annual thing where it says individual results, for example? You've been a good developer. You've been in a good QA, you've opened so many test cases. You've opened so many defects, whatever. How many of you work for companies where your goals are set by group objectives, team objectives? This is very encouraging. So agile touches that. For companies that are rooted in individual contributions, that's important too. I'm not going to de-emphasize that, but I'm saying for companies that are rooted in the kind of attitude where the individual comes first, we'll have problems. Where you're changing the way you're working and they're saying, let's look at the company point of view. What's good for the group? What's good for the company? Let's make it a group objective. Let's make it a team objective. That's a better strategy when you deal with this. How does it affect your sales or marketing team? When you go agile, you're trying to deliver frequently. Your sales team is probably used to telling your customers, oh, this will take one year. Don't worry about it. Just hang on. But now with agile, you might be delivering faster. So the conversations that your sales team is having with your customers can change. It will change dramatically, actually. So there are some promises they may make and you ought to be careful about managing those promises because they will think, now that you're agile, I'm going to get something every two weeks, or every three weeks, whatever your sprint iteration is. Length is. So we should be careful about those kind of conversations also. It can also affect different other aspects that you never even thought of, maybe even legal, for example, who knows. So agile transformation will affect a lot of different areas of the team. Some of them, what do you have? Some of them may be completely unexpected. Some of them are unintended consequences of doing this kind of transformation. So you should be careful. You should weigh your transformation carefully. You should see where all, what are the areas it's touching, how it's touching it, what are the implications of those kinds of things. So this is also very concerned about workday hours. For example, you may say, well, every two weeks I'm supposed to do something, right? If I'm supposed to do something every two weeks, I'm under a lot of pressure. I'm under this unit of code every two weeks. That's difficult for me to do. So that can raise concerns about work hours. How many hours am I supposed to work to do this? That raises the concerns about estimates. If I promise something, I'm going to be held responsible for it. So these are different scenarios that can happen when you're handling this. And of course, you're talking about being fearful of change. There are two things that most people are concerned about. The first one is change. Change is always, not always, most of the time stressful. It causes something to get modified in your belief system or your internal system that kind of maybe violates it to some extent. And you don't like that. You don't want that change to affect you. And so change can be and usually is stressful. And so you're fearful of anything that is stressful. So the underlying emotion under all of these is fear. Resistance, bias, doesn't matter what you call it. The underlying emotion at the root of all is fear. Therefore, the first and most important thing that a manager can do, the most useful and effective thing a manager can do is remove that fear. Create an environment where people are fearless. People are not afraid to speak their mind. People are not afraid to say, there's a problem. Raise their hand and say, there's an issue here. How many of you work for organizations where it is encouraged to be a dissenter? Encouraged to be somebody with no conversations going on? Is it encouraged? A few hands. In the Israeli army there is always this trend where if five people are saying something the sixth man is obligated to argue against it. He's obligated. He can't agree. So the reason why he's obligated is however crazy his justifications may seem that dissent is important. Dissent is critical. Dissent is not reason. Dissent is not lack of patriotism. Dissent is not something that is being stubborn or resistant. Dissent in a healthy way is extremely healthy. It is what makes you question what you're doing and answer questions that have not been raised so far. If you don't have dissent you have a bunch of yes do you really want to go along the path where five people are telling you this is all great, this is full of land of milk and honey and sunshine and you find out two weeks from that point that it's really not what it was supposed to be. So there are huge implications for when people don't dissent but everybody becomes a yes man or there's a group thing as I mentioned earlier. So Shusho finds again how many of you believe dissent is important? That's amazing. It's almost every single person here. So you believe that it is true are you doing something in an organization to say that value this? Okay. Of course. I understand. I understand. On principle you have to disagree. Totally agree with that. That is how you get your way, right? That is how you win influence. So without dissent you're going to have a problem. I'm not saying find somebody who's going to fight for the sake of fighting or say some nonsensical words for the sake of saying nonsensical words but you must have that one person at least one person who says let me think about this. Let me think about this. There's something off about it. Let me go research and come back. You have to have that one opinion which stands out if you don't you are just at very high risk of failing. Now we come to kind of the core of this. Now I'm not going to be talking about each of these slides because that is difficult to do. There's too many of them but we are going to talk about some cultural roadblocks and behavioral challenges in some of these areas that you would face. So first is ownership. Let me do a quick check on my time. So first is ownership. This is sometimes a narrow issue, a narrow view of ownership. For example, somebody may be concerned about what's directly laid on the team's plate and nothing else matters. So this is not my problem or my team's problem is one such example. How do you deal with this? What strategy do you use to deal with this problem? You can emphasize transcending the job description and you can say well a given problem is everybody's thing to solve. It's not just your problem, this is a business problem. You can get it to solve this issue or you can emphasize going above and beyond the call of duty. So how many of you have companies where it is encouraged to break down silos and virtual walls that you built around yourselves? That's 50-50 I guess. So that can cause problems when you have these walls dividing you that can cause a lot of problems. Talk about how the business can succeed when they support each other and don't create islands because it's very easy to create islands, when you do that. So in this fashion we have a whole bunch of slides that talk about what these issues are and how we can resolve them. There's something called belonging we're going to just go through quickly but I'm going to show you what they are. There's something called belonging, there's status quo. So each of these slides if you look at the template that I followed first of all I describe the issue what the issue is and a general statement or a brief description and then there are some strategies that you can use to deal with these kind of issues. Now culturally as I mentioned to you certain cultures are inclined not to disagree inclined not to say no they just find it hard to say no in certain cultures it is very easy to say no. If you look at culture of India in general or Asian cultures in general there are two things that play one is consideration, one is fear fear is universal, everybody has that in them. Now consideration is something different. I was giving this example a couple of days ago where you talk to let's say your director calls you from some other country and expects you to give a status update and you're telling them well there's something wrong with it there is something wrong with something and you're not able to tell the person that because number one it's the element of fear what do they think. Number two it's the consideration that if I tell this person something is wrong they will get stressed or upset about it and so that's the consideration aspect which is kind of unique to Asian cultures so saying no or expressing there's a problem is very difficult in certain cultures. There's also things like leadership what can we do to encourage leadership, what can we do to make sure people take up these ideas and they run with it. You have to create this kind of environment where there's no fear where people are encouraged to experiment and people are encouraged to make mistakes if they have to to get it going. So we look at execution and commitment very narrow idea of execution and commitment is a very common theme. So how many of you have dealt with situations where you were told this is a problem but then a response from the team came back that this is an outside scope of responsibility and duties. How many of you have faced this situation? That's a pretty decent number, right? So I would say about 40%. So what does that mean? Why? Why? And for example this is somebody else's headache and I have to go home, it's 5 p.m. But what can you do about it? You can educate the team about the growth that is possible. You can elaborate how the organization grows by contributions and you can talk about horizontally, grow horizontally. How many of you have companies which have an enterprise social network implemented in your organization? That's pretty good. So is Jive the main platform you're using or Chatter or Yammer or something? Okay, Yammer, okay. So mostly Microsoft. So that's important. Use the tool. Leverage the tool to spread it. That's very critical. You have to use that to build networks and break the horizontal, grow horizontally, break the vertical walls down. Oh, thank you. So it's in action right now. My colleague just posted a picture of me on our internal social network. Anyway. So responsibility. This is about my pay grade. This is not my decision. This is my lead's decision, right? So how do you deal with that? Tell your members it's okay to stop the train and say, okay. Interruptions are okay. Hold your horses. Sometimes you may need to hold your horses. Demonstrate your commitment. And the most important thing is they learn something is valuable only when they can question something and take charge of the situation. If you cannot question something, like I said about descent, if you cannot question something, question the purpose of something, you're not learning. You're simply following orders. What is so great about following orders? Anybody can follow orders. Horses and elephants and monkeys can follow orders. Why should we just blindly follow orders? Question them not with the sake of being argumentative or for the sake of being a pain, but question because you want to learn. You want to genuinely know why and we'll come to one of the most important things. There's of course the communication issue which is extremely valuable and critical and people ignore these things. Agile transformation where companies focus on tools, methodologies, processes, ignore the human element. This is one area where the team never grows is communication. How many of you have faced unintended consequences of bad communication? Like an email that was misrepresented or some communicate from the head of the department. That's pretty good. This is valid. This happens. You have to deal with these in that fashion. Let's proceed helplessness. I can do it but I don't want to do it because I can't do it. I don't want to stop from doing it. You know, not wanting to step on other stores. You're sensitive about something. I'm helpless. Nobody is helpless. Your helplessness stems from your desire not to offend, desire not to step on other stores, or desire not to take the initiative. That's what is the problem. So how do you deal with that? You can pull together and tell stories of people being recognized and promoted for doing this, for taking this approach and show them you value their ability to be altruistic. If you have something that goes beyond that pale of whatever they're supposed to do, you'll be rewarded for that. Like I said, manage the idea of recommendations for helping others. That's very important. You have to stand with your team. Rocking the board is another problem. You don't want to rock the board. You don't want to say no. There are all sorts of problems going on and you never know. How many of you face a situation where there was something very wrong and how many of you have faced this problem where it was just hidden, almost hidden to the last minute? I know my colleagues have had this issue and some others are raising their hands and this happens quite a bit where people don't want to say no or they don't want to express their problem because they can paint them in the wrong color. They're afraid of that. These are some strategies you can use to help your team say it's okay to rock the board. It's okay to say there is a problem. It's okay to say no. That's perfectly important. I can tell you I have a hard time saying no sometimes. I have had to work weekends and late nights because I didn't tell my boss it was okay to say no. I feel like it was okay to say no and I got extra work on top of it. I have since learned to say that but infrastructure issues are very common too. Now why am I bringing up all of these topics here? What are these categories that I'm making? There are four categories. First, things I've experienced Second, is when I have observed, not experienced but observed other teams and other colleagues have this problem. The third category are stories from people that have told me that this has happened. So denial, this is a very common problem. You're going to have denial as one of your base problems to some extent. So this is the why, but you don't question people don't want to know why we are doing something. You don't question why but you're not doing something. So lack of transparency. So these are issues that are actually real. This is a very small list of things that I've gathered over time, but you will see this is a very small list. You personally are probably dealing with issues that are way more complex than this and way more in number. You just don't see it here because it's something that I have not picked up on maybe but these are real. These are issues that are actually happening. What can we do about these? These are cultural issues. Some of these transient cultures are absolutely true. Some of them are across all cultures no matter where they are. Some of them are very specific to a certain culture. I think people here can recognize which of these are specific to their own culture. I think that should be clear by now. Nobody told me to do something. Well, nobody told me to unit test. Because it's something that people think they are owed. Somebody has to tell them what to do, hold them by the hand and walk them. So if they don't do that then they can't do it. So these are some strategies you can use for each of these situations to deal with. What are some recommendations? I have some recommendations. Remember this talk is about cultures. How cultures affect. Each of the things I have listed, like I said, are true cultures. Some of them are very specific to some cultures. And what are some recommendations? How can you work around some of these? First of all, work conduct workshops. Try to conduct workshops and conversations. Have meetings about cultural differences and sensitivities around dealing with other cultures. You have to have this conversation. If you don't do that, if you think for example that your only managers need this. Only directors need this. Only VPs need this. They are the ones who are dealing with customers from other countries. Your developers don't need this. But you forget. If you're part of a global organization like in IHSS I deal with, for example, people in Ukraine, my previous job, I dealt with Ukraine. Now I deal with the dance, UK, India itself, and so many other countries. I have to be sensitive to each of these countries where they come from. What do they mean? I have to be very careful about that. Leadership should encourage more meaningful exchanges across different locations. If leadership is not doing that, then there is a big problem and this is going to affect you. I talked about ESN, Enterprise Social Network. Please, if you don't have it, please use it. Please look at using it across the organization. This is very important. This can easily help you get that cross-domain knowledge going, help your colleagues across different countries connect together and collaborate. Leadership doesn't understand that all cultures may not value the same things. For example, in Germany, you can't contact somebody after 5 p.m. The blackberry won't show it. The email will shut down automatically. People value vacation in France and Europe generally. In some countries, not so much. The US is probably the worst of all in taking vacation time. They just don't. They're always working. So these are some real problems and we should help people that these are issues you should be aware of doing a great disservice to your organization. And spread news widely about any successful things that you've done. If something has worked for you in the past, something has gone well, please spread the news. Talk about it. If you don't talk about it, they will never know about it. If you don't discuss these things openly and widely, how will anybody know what's going on? These are the roots of your success. You have to take this seriously. And finally, identify local champions and leaders. You may have some local champions and leaders who are willing to do these things for you. Identify them. See who's willing to take up the gauntlet and say, well, I will take care of it. I'll lead a session. I'll work across silos. I will deal with these people. And I can help train the rest of my team in how to deal with different cultures. If you don't have these things going on, at least one or two of these things going on, either you're not a global company or you're a global company but you don't really care about working across cultures and understanding how cultures work. So that is the pretty much the end of my presentation. Questions? A big part of that actually depends on the manager how he reacts hearing a problem. If the team talks about a problem and the manager's reaction is not that great, the team will not talk about a problem next time. So why we can teach the team or train the team about culture changes or either culture is more important to have the day-to-day interaction managed by the leadership in the proper manner. I have seen that a big challenge in several organizations. That's one of the reasons I was talking about leadership being important. The question generally was if the manager is not going to be positively favorably oriented towards these kind of conversations, the whole thing will fail. That's true. That's exactly the problem I'm talking about. If your leadership at the highest level goes on down, doesn't say this is important, nobody's going to pay attention to these things. Some of these things have to be mandated. So yes, if you want to encourage a fearless environment, your manager has to be open to that. He has to be trained to understand that this is critical. The command and control structure that Sean was talking about earlier, that's very true. It happens where people just get focused on every single minutiae, small details and somebody questions something, they get panicky. Oh, does this affect my effectiveness? Somebody questioning my competence. So yeah, there should be an element of fearlessness everywhere. The culture we want to drive towards is to have the team question what do we want to question. And the manager should not be personally determined at all. But thank you, good question. Anybody else? Yes, that's the whole point. The manager creates a safe environment. If he doesn't do that, then the teams can't get the full benefit of the situation. Yeah. Which was the most difficult one for you in your organization and how did you circumvent it? Easy. Communication. That is the biggest challenge. The same word can mean different things in different ways. As an example, I can say he's cultured. That means one thing. I can say your organization has a cultured. That's different. I can say India has a separate type of cultured. That's a different thing. The same word means different things. A lot of people that I observed did not understand the import on the context of the information being presented. Email is probably the worst way invented to communicate. The worst. One of the worst. Avoid email by all means. But personally what I've encountered is communication has been the number one enemy or the lack of communication or bad communication has been the number one enemy for effectiveness in terms of getting deep collaboration and connection going. Any other questions? So one question. You spoke about the shared goals versus individual goals. So when it comes to quality of the product that's being delivered, so should we not measure the individuals instead of measuring as a team? Yeah, that's nothing wrong with that. Like I said, you can do both. Point is to do just one exclusively could be a problem. So if you just measure individuals, you're going to get individual results. So if I just measure lines of code, people are going to put 10,000 comments. If you just measure defects, people are going to open crazy defects. Defects make no sense. So that's individual measurement can be risky. Group measurement, you're making the team accountable for something. Yes, absolutely. But you also have to recognize leaders in your team. Some of them may be aspiring leaders. So generate measures for them. Find out how they can collaborate. Change the job description. At IHS currently we are in the middle of reevaluating our job descriptions. We are changing our job descriptions for a better team, better match, collaboration, better matching, customer engagement. We are changing job descriptions as we speak. So that's something we've recognized and what you just brought out. So thank you, good question. Anybody else, any other questions? Yeah, sure. Testing in is used to log a lot of defects. Yeah. QA manager end of the year during a presale. He tries to identify how many, how these guys log in the bugs and based on that performance here, now in agile world here QA guy should not worry about how many bugs he's lagging. Okay, so he has to help the developer to fix the bugs quickly. So he may not go to the bug zealot to log the defects. He will not face the time. So he tries to sit with the developer and just send a bug with the mail or put it in Excel. Yeah. So that here we can pick in the process. Yeah. But this is making the, making difficult for the manager to validate the Q engineer. Q engineer is worried that he's not getting the results. I understand. So how do we resolve such kind of issues? So this is the fundamental problem I talked about when you measure things such as number of defects. Metrics are dangerous. That's rule number one, metrics are dangerous. You got to be careful what kind of metrics you're measuring. You know, like say you manage what you measure, you measure what you manage. Be careful about metrics because if you measure things like, I just mentioned lines of code, number of defects, you're going to have a problem because people are being incentivized again, if you look at the team as a whole, what should you really look at? The attitude needs to change. The only question you have to ask is this, did we deliver value to our customers? If you did, the team succeeded. Nothing else matters. These defects and other things, they don't matter. They're important, but to measure them exclusively as an index of performance of a QA is extremely misguided. And that's some of the things that are going on in our own organization. I can tell you, this is not a new problem. How many of you have had metrics that measure the wrong thing? That's a decent number, right? We understand these issues happen because we measure the wrong thing. Why do we measure the wrong thing? Because it is easy to measure the wrong thing. These things are available easily. You go into your TFS, you report in two seconds, you can get a report on how many defects were opened by how many people, right? Because this information is accessible, people go for that. That's what causes the problem. In fact, you explained this problem from the management point of view as speaking like a testing engineer. So actually here, testing engineer, he's identifying good bugs. He's doing a very good job. It is easy to influence between a good testing engineer and a bad testing engineer. Good testing engineer impresses good bugs at the right time with the right quality. But the thing is, management doesn't know that he's doing a good job in agile world. That's not entirely true. The manager, if he's not involved with the team, he doesn't know that. If the manager is involved with the team, attends a daily stand-up or something or talks to people on a daily basis, see, the root is communication again. If the communication is not happening with these people, he will never know. So he can't sit behind his computer and keep looking for how many defects are being opened on a daily basis. If he's doing that, he's not doing a job. I can hire an accountant for one-tenth of a salary to do the same job. Why is he a manager for? He's a manager to mentor and grow his team. If he's not doing that, he should really be fired, in my opinion. I think he's not answered, because manager doesn't have a role in ideal Scrum team. So, always here, there is a lot of communication between the people manager and the team. Understood. And that is grounds for training. That is really grounds for coaching. Coaching is the key there. The manager needs to understand what is important. If he's not going to be coached properly, he's going to measure the wrong things. I think we are going to be out of time in about two minutes. Is there a, what is next session, I think? Okay, sorry, I got, but you had a question? I can answer you offline, sorry. Yeah, I can take your question offline. Okay, okay. But you can talk to him then. All right, I'll wrap up then. I'll wrap up then, sorry. Okay, thank you very much and great session. Thanks for the feedback. Okay.