 Okay, I met Israel at Agile 2008 and since that time I've been corresponding with him a bit in an email And I've also been reading his blog the Agile executive which Some of his reflection and some of his experience really changed my perspective about how some of this stuff can be done At a level and a perspective that I wasn't really thinking of before so turn the time Thanks for the kind words Andrew and thanks for all your help in giving me feedback on this presentation I'm helping me with some of the graphics and many thanks to Kay and to Nate and Chris and Any others of the organizers who I might not know in person But who have pulled together this refreshing conference. I Actually, I'm reminded of the years ago when I was a student in the Israel Institute of Technology We had the quips then that in the second year you understand what you were taught in the first year in the second year you get the second year and We have actually never figured out when do you understand the third year When I was working on preparing this presentation. I had a feeling of the metaphorical third year Being understood by me There you think so that folks in the agile community and myself have been doing over the past five six years started to make sense to me and You can think about this presentation actually as sharing my aha minutes with you The aha minutes are about the four principles of the manifesto About four cultures in whose context you can apply the principles and Finally about a tool that I highly recommend to the agile champion the mirror Looking at the principles. We all have been subject recently and for quite some time now To various suggestions to add a principle to the manifesto or to tweak some of the principles of the manifesto, etc And while I have great respect for those suggestions, I do not think that those capture the heart of the matter The heart of the matter to me is that the agile principles are disruptive Not in a negative manner, but rather in a positive manner pretty much along the line of Christian sense disruptive technologies And what happens because they are disruptive by nature? we run into intrinsic obstacles and The secret source is really not about the principles themselves, but the way we apply them either to bypass the obstacles or if necessary I Have actually jotted some of the experiences that I encountered along the years Some companies had crossed the cousin Years ago and now hide behind their bureaucracy and their processes in order not to recross the cousin Had business designs were for one dollar in license revenue You were expected to produce Something like three or four dollars in professional services and customer support revenues some others Were unable to bridge ever between contract language and agile principles and as a result Whatever was accomplished in R&D circles could not manifest itself in terms of the business realities And I'm sure that people here can add a very long set of painful if not traumatic episodes to this list More alarm the usual is When I read the Ken Schwaber interview in agile collab a few a few months ago and in this interview Schwaber speaks about 75 percent of the scrum initiatives Not living up to their potential The things that was alarming to me was we don't normally Embark upon things where the odds are three to four against us. This is sort of does not make sense and Coming from such an authority as Schwaber the things that are really intrigued me Was the feeling of what's wrong? Namely personally the agile principles make a ton of sense for me I know quite a few people whom I consider to be highly competent To whom the principles make a lot of sense So what is a discrepancy? How come that very very sensible and may I say timeless principles? lead to such a pessimistic estimate I Was tuned at about the same time to look at our Schneider's classic are about re-engineering your organization and One of the things that Schneider's say there was to characterize culture Characterized culture as how we like to do things in order to succeed here And in thinking about the principles of manifesto, I Concluded that I could actually describe them as how we do software in order to succeed So what happens when we roll in the first agile license in it to our organization? We introduce duality in the culture and in various cases We might actually introduce Conflict between cultures The way agile says we would be wise to go about it May be counter to the way our corporate culture says We want to go about it and with this thing I Started looking very I don't work and Actually, I would characterize this presentation in many ways as Being application of his theories into the realm of agile now Why To the agile champion Take a look, please this taxonomy of It is taken from Schneider He identifies for core cultures the control the collaboration cultivation And the cultures Trans In which they look at data or pay attention to data and according to the way in which they process it so some cultures Look at data in the future Can I be heard? How is it now? Should I try to raise my voice or okay? Thanks So some cultures Are looking at future data They are all about what could be accomplished Next year or the year after or maybe even five years into the future some other cultures Pay attention to what is happening today Namely the future may be very very interesting, but don't it what is happening today in Georgia or any other place The other aspect is how cultures Make decisions So some cultures are very personal you have a charismatic leader who really Care is a day Some others are very cut and dry Here is a data the data is the only things that matters, etc Now if you take a look at those four cultures, I Have listed here For each culture what characterizes it what it is about an Organization which typically uses this culture and a personification of this culture So if you take the control culture for example, obviously it's about power Militaries from time immemorial tended to be control culture And if you think about personification Surgeon is a good example When he or she operates on me, I would very much like The person the surgeon to be very very methodical very much in control of the situation very much driven by Parameters like by blood pressure or whatever they monitor If you go left and look at the collaboration culture You see the nurse there as characterizing a fairly similar function in the collaboration culture The difference While both the surgeon and the nurse hear a tone about the patient The nurse tends to develop a much more collaborative relationship with the patient And there is any number of studies in hospitals That the recovery of the patient Depends to a great to a great extent on the collaboration with the nurse Now this business of personification is actually deeper than might catch the eye if you remember Schneider's definition that Culture is a way we do things here in order to succeed you could actually think about character as The way I do things in order to succeed the parallel is very very obvious and If you accept this premise, it's actually gives us a very interesting lens to look at agile rollouts And I would call this lens the psychoanalytical lens What do I mean by that? When we start an agile rollout is really like putting a plant in a soil and The business of the feet between the two is of crucial importance now Going back to the four cultures that we talked about As an agile champion you can find yourself in any one of the four cultures This is a given you are operating within a certain environment Assume for a minute that you are within a control culture. You could definitely stay within this culture and Rather than trying to change into things which are very difficult to accomplish Tried to build on the strengths of this culture Now various people have told me that actually control culture is very inappropriate for agile and I beg to differ a Gile culture. I'm sorry control culture tends to be very methodical Tends to be very rigorous tend to be very very good at putting processes in place So if you are the agile champion within the control culture You can build on those aspects and others as things that would help the assimilation of agile big time and Remember the duck where is Kay? Staying within your culture You are staying with a very good duck as distinct from embarking on some adventures Now the other thing that you could do You could try to move into a session adjacent cultures and in this example It is exemplified by moving from control to collaboration or moving from control to competence and You actually need to think about it in terms of character change You don't change your character by a three-day blitzkopf someplace If you are serious at least in terms of Freudian theory about changing your character it takes years and It's a process in which you invest a lot. The returns are not in the next week or the next month or even the next year And the opinion of various experts is that the same haunts for the enterprise You might find yourself spending a decade trying to change the culture To fit into what you would like it to be for the agile purposes so this is a very lengthy and High investment approach to the rollout of a child Now the third one is you could move all the way to the opposite culture For example, you could move try to move from control to cultivation And I would contend that this is a equivalent of a transplant of a personality Even if you are the founder of the company This is something that would probably be extremely difficult and quite unlikely to fail now if you take a look this framework of for core cultures They actually shed light on the estimate which from Schwab air about 75 percent of failure What happens if you go random on The way you apply a job without any attention to cultural aspects You have got three routes out of four which are quite difficult You have got two adjacent cultures and one opposite cultures and in those again if you accept a psychoanalytical view Those are Difficult and lengthy and I very much doubt that anyone here has ten years to make an agile role out successful As the cultural change suggests Now assume for a minute that you started agile and it's going very very well One team is doing it beautiful a second team is doing it beautiful And you are actually and rightly so feel quite good about it. You expect success to be get success I Would actually contend that you to the interplane between scale and culture Success does not necessarily be get success Jim high Smith is talking about two ways in which you could scale One way you could scale up you had 15 developers on your Floor doing agile then you had 20 then you had 30 etc And up to a point this is actually very very effective way of scaling because a You remain within your culture B, you are likely to stay with the semi-gile infrastructure that you have used in the first few projects So in terms of moving up It is extremely effective, but up to a point At a certain point in time you lose The ability to put more people in your floor or in your building or even in your country or you can't get the talent and at this point in time You find yourself scaling up And here all of a sudden particularly these days you are likely to face another culture The guys in Moscow or in Beijing or in San Paolo have their own a national culture And instead of two culture to think about namely your own culture as a corporation or organization and The culture of a child all of a sudden you need to be very very mindful About how things are bestowed and how things are done in San Paolo, Brazil or any other place that you might be doing a job So what happens the scale up at a certain point in time force forces you to go into scale out At which point in time You are likely to run into additional cultural considerations and quite complicated ones at times There is another strategy Which is quite effective up to a point and this is scale diagonally What I mean by scale diagonally You take the success that you had in R&D with a child and use it to drive success in other functions marketing sales finance, etc and People actually respond to it quite well at the beginning For the simple reason that people take notice that things are working in a very very different manner in R&D However, what happens is that you are trying to affect other downstream functions You are likely to hit other cultures The guys doing revenue recognition in your finance department Are quite likely to be of a very very different culture than the band of happy developers That are doing the code so what happens is You can make people take notice and be responsive to change But you need to be very mindful of how many cultures You cross when you go all the way from R&D in this example to revenue recognition. I Would actually contend That you can't really go much Beyond the joint agile infrastructure That you have and by joint agile infrastructure I mean one that each and every one of the constituencies marketing sales customer service, etc. Can use and This is for the following reason if you go back to Schneider's taxonomy of culture being characterized by the data that it pays attention and By the processes that it uses to make decisions If you have joined infrastructure You basically agree on the data There may be all kind of question about interpretations what it means what will be in the future, etc But in terms of one dimension of cross-cultural issues You have got common base of data In terms of process while joined infrastructure doesn't necessarily Imply that the processes would be agreed to It often time make suggestions as to what are the processes that would make sense to use Given that there is commonality of data So when you leave your rail head sort of speak and branch into other downstream functions and other cultures please be very mindful about How far your infrastructure can take you The examples that I would like to bring is from BNC in 2006 At this point in time we were doing agile for about two years and the results in R&D are Started being quite good We did however have a ton of problems in marketing and sales being able to capitalize on it And while we did not have anything like Schneider's taxonomy of cultures we intuitively felt that the differences between the business and R&D are gonna kill us and The joint infrastructure that we created Was actually completely manual We introduced a go-to-market process in which I and my colleagues on sales professional services Customer support, etc Would meet time and time and time again to understand what are the effects of agile on go-to-market This was very tedious and quite primitive However, you can imagine how much it could give us if we had a tool back then like agile portfolio management Which would be meaningful both to the strategic decision-making and to the operational aspects of marketing and sales Well, I mentioned the mirror at the very beginning and I do not mean it in the Grimm's brother sense This is not about snow white rather Use the mirror when you are thinking about doing agile To really understand your culture Take one good look take a second look if necessary take 100 looks and Get to understand the culture of your organization and My contention is as I mentioned with respect to the strengths of the control culture That whatever your culture is a Gile can succeed within it Now let me make one crucial differentiation here I Do not doubt for a minute that certain cultures are better fit for certain endeavors for example, if you want to wage war at least the classical answer is that the control culture is very effective So take the US military Probably I don't know for sure, but I guess that they are a control culture Within this control culture a lot of wonderful things can be done by agile methods in their various data centers And those data centers are the things that the drive where the bombs go and where the artillery fires and which tracks You know the tank steak So you have a control culture? Who is all geared to launch war? Then they're fitting in a very significant manner from agile within its IT infrastructure so endeavor May require specific culture However within this culture agile can be extremely effective in Supporting what you are trying to do there is another thing That I would suggest in this context and this is if you please a behavioral aspect And I do not pretend by any stretch of imagination to be an expert on behaviorism that I am not However, I would suggest to you my experience with Twitter as an example of how behavior changes I Started Twitter magic just because it was fun and it seemed to be interesting and was experimenting a little bit with it and Little by little as my network grew. I have found that it completely changed my behavior the way I go about data collection and to some extent at least the way I go on data analysis days is First of foremost based on Twitter It gives me the richness of information and the diversity of information That would have taken me a ton of time if I was scavenging the world wide web without my network So here is an example of a tool Which I took out of some curiosity. I never invested it more than adding another person I follow or You know or looking a little bit who is there who is not there? And what I found over time that my behavior has been completely transformed through this kind of tool My contention is that a good agile tool when it spans a few Constituencies can have the very same effect and that you can change behavior of various functions Without getting into big pushes about cultural changes So in summary What are my suggestions or what are my principles for the timeless principles of the manifesto? first one is to know your search We are all exposed to various discussions about the fine points of one agile method versus another Important those discussions are I would contend for somebody who is planning to start rolling agile They are of very little value Where you will run into obstacles are not in the fine points of scram versus Kanban But in the fine points of how your culture operates so after a Fairly a small amount of investment in understanding what agile is about Shift your attention into understanding your organization and understanding your culture Second You need to be true to yourself when you roll agile Don't try to assimilate the way our sales force did it or the way BMC did it or any one of a number of other companies Because there is no reason to believe that their culture is similar to the culture that you are dealing with and Trying to emulate them blindly would not get you what you are hoping to get Instead once you understood your culture To take the time and the effort to understand the weaknesses of the cultures the strengths of the culture and Develop your agile rollout strategy building on the strengths third When you want to change the way things are being done Tools or if you please serious games are the easiest way to change behavior So if you can find the tool which for example would tie together the issues which are important to Revenue recognition together with the issues that are important to the guys who are doing a sprint You are making tremendous progress You would be able to get them together or at least closer to one another In much easier way than being explicit about trying to change culture Force and perhaps the most important here You have a mirror in looking into your organization, of course But you have another mirror which is a feedback that you get from other cultures The guys in revenue recognition might drive you nuts in terms of how they go about their business however They are doing you and your culture a great service in making you aware of your blind spots and Very possibly protecting you From excesses and vulnerability of the culture within which you operate So consider the cultural feedback from other cultures to be part of your mirror and Pay a lot of attention to it If you do so, I am very very confident. Then it's the next agile roots conference I would be sitting in the audience and people who are listening to me now Will be reporting about their successes with a guy Thank you very much. I doubt that everything was clear. So I would like to hear some questions Yes, please Since they can change Culture Whether agile tools are a culture neutral namely whether they can be used Equally well in any of the four cultures that we have described And I would say yes unless you have a pathological Situation in your corporate Namely if the excesses within a certain corporate culture are such that sensible things Not being heard then Tools might not be that helpful However, if you assume a reasonably healthy corporate culture, which is usually the case Then I would say yes If you take a rally tool or version one tool or any one of your favorite You don't find any strongly encoded cultural assumptions there you find Ways to collect data ways to share data and as those tools do more of a job portfolio management Ways to reach out to other constituencies Diana I'm interested in what you're saying about building on the strengths of a current culture and a number of folks me and Can't that get some other folks have been talking lately about Incorporating some of the principles and theories of appreciative inquiry Into into how we introduce that will into organizations and that seems to me to be a really natural fit with the idea of building on the strengths of the existing culture and So I was wondering if you have any Many other reflections on on techniques to build on the strengths that you've used Oh Diana's question was about whether appreciative inquiry The chi and Kent Beck and others have been discussing recently as a way to introduce a child But those are consistent and fall within the concepts that we have discussed here My answer or to be more precise my intuitive answer is I think they would be a wonderful fit. I Have not done enough or work in this area to be able to tell you or anyone else are Solitatively so that I would very much welcome the opportunity to work with you in order to Enrich the set of tools that we have so gut level reaction. I think this would be 101 percent consistent synergetic and helpful Yes, please Wrote this book was that he called it the re-engineering alternative because he was trying to into dope people using the wrong method Process wise for a given culture. He was seeing everybody using Re-engineering and saying, you know, that's not the answer to everything So I think it's a huge fit with appreciative inquiry This approach I would recommend as I thank you for bringing this work to this Environment because it can be very useful for people to understand their culture and to try to implement Agile in a way that's consistent with their culture instead of, you know, trying to afford their culture You know, there's a huge bias I think against neutral cultures in our world Understandably so but still not usefully so The goal that was made was that a Appreciative inquiry probably would be very synergetic is what we have discussed and second is that Schneider when he developed his framework in the 90s was Paying a lot of attention and due attention to the ways that you can't really go really nearly about the way you try to change your culture and That his concepts indeed seem to be quite relevant to what we do as agilists So thanks so much for the comment Jeff You use the term serious games. I mean the other person I've heard use the term a lot is Luke Holman. Can you say a little bit more about what you meant by serious games? If you take a look at Luke's way of we are talking about what's the name of his tool? It's Basically not really very very different if you please from playing chess or playing bridge or playing any one of another of a Some kinds of games that we all play from time to time just for fun And what happens is that the fun element in working for example on prioritizing on backlog is in large enough sample is Good enough to overcome the tedious nature of oh my gosh, I have got 77 stories or 77 requirements. How do I? How do I? Make the decisions. I would say that to me and this may be an idiosyncrasy Twitter is of the same nature of a game a serious game Obviously, I don't do Twitter for game I get a lot of fun of it, but I thought that this would be an effective channel to interact with people and While it might have been designed as a way to change my patterns the fact of the matter is the fun element Let me to invest sufficiently in it and invest is writing a tweet here a tweet there To the point that he has become a very serious tool to me So particularly in this era of web 2.0 and possibly getting into web 3.0 There are a lot of tools where the initial investment is pretty much zero Where it's very very enticing we can get into it extremely easily and once the network effects kick in That change on behavior could be immense so for example the use of various social network tools in The context of doing a child particularly distributed a child I think is an area of a great promise and many of the tools to me are in the realm of serious games In a child 2008 Andrew here. I don't remember with whom who had died. He has done it but as he was co-coding together with one of the stars that were there at the time and And Andrew came and told me afterwards it changes behavior as a developer, you know for the timing of the session So here is a tool which any developer if you're she chooses Could start to use and I think it's open source if I remember correctly There's two people don't have a cursor on the same document. There's a couple of the project That's to me is a very serious, you know very serious game Particularly when we are talking in the context of agile, which at least in part is about the fun in programming so The comment the quote you started off with from Ken Schwabers where he talked about 75% of the failing and the culture is changing from in this case to something that was not agile how we tell the difference between that and the changes that I introduced to scrum to adopt or adapt to the culture should I care I Think you should care because there is a line Beyond which you might unintentionally saw the baby together with the water So not being dogmatic is certainly something that I would highly recommend to everyone here And if I look at my own experience for example with BMC I Think that the fact that we were flexible about how we applied scum was a big part of our success Having said that at a certain point in time You might be taking too much of it by successive adaptation Basically when you look at scrum It's three roles three processes and three artifacts. That's simple So any one of the three that you might take out as part of adaptation out of the equation you have taken 11% So to speak out of scum So you need to be careful about it I would again suggest the mirror particularly if you are working with a seasoned consultant What is sensible to do in terms of adapting scum or any other method and What is not sensible to do you would get some very real feedback very fast with the next demo So I would definitely experiment in not only in doing the software but in doing the software method And I would pay very close attention to the feedback because this is the best way by which we You know, we know what is right and what is wrong as I think it was Alistair yesterday mentioned here You can look at Kanban as putting scrum on its ear So here is an example of quite a change However, there is a lot of feedback that in certain cases the change is working very very well So I would rest my automatic pilot and try to see is this change working is this change not working What am I doing wrong, etc? Any other questions? Thank you very much