Does Building an Agile Culture Matter?

A few months after starting Scrum or Kanban, many organisations face the same question: “We hold the meetings, we have boards, so why hasn’t anything changed?” The answer is usually culture. Agile methods offer a way of working; culture is what keeps that way of working alive.

What is agile culture?

Agile culture is a set of shared values, beliefs and behaviours that support adapting quickly to change, delivering value to customers often and learning continuously. In practice it shows up like this:

• Teams own their decisions. Decisions are made as close as possible to where the work is done.
• Transparency is the norm. The state of work, problems and risks are visible to everyone.
• A mistake is a chance to learn. Small experiments are run, and lessons from failures are learned quickly.
• The customer is at the centre. Success is measured by the value that reaches the customer, not by the amount of work done.
• Collaboration comes before silos. Different specialisms work together towards a shared goal.

Applying a framework isn’t the same as an agile culture

Running Scrum events or setting up a Kanban board doesn’t change culture by itself. A picture we often see in the field:

• Daily meetings happen, but they turn into status reports to a manager.
• Retrospectives happen, but the real problems aren’t discussed.
• Teams are told “manage yourselves”, but every decision goes up for approval.

In these cases the problem isn’t the method but the culture it’s applied in. To understand the fit between culture and method, see our article on the Schneider culture model.

Why does agile culture matter?

1. Speed of adaptation. If the culture doesn’t support change, every new priority meets a wave of resistance.
2. Sustainability. When consultants and coaches leave, culture is what keeps the methods alive.
3. Employee engagement. People who have a say and see the results of their work are more engaged.
4. Quality and learning. Where problems are raised early, defects are caught before they reach the customer.

How do you build an agile culture?

Culture can’t be changed directly; as behaviours change, culture changes. Approaches we find effective:

• Start with leaders. How do leaders react to bad news, how do they make decisions, what do they measure? Culture is learned mostly from these behaviours.
• Change what you measure. Measure delivery time, customer satisfaction and team results instead of utilisation and individual performance.
• Make work visible. Transparency is a precondition for trust. You can’t manage what you can’t see.
• Move forward with small experiments. Start culture change with small experiments whose results can be seen, not with one big programme.
• Share successes and lessons. Talk openly about both the experiments that went well and the ones with unexpected results.

Conclusion

Agile culture is both the goal and the means of agile transformation. Methods can be one way to change culture, but only when leadership behaviour, measurement systems and structure change in the same direction.

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Related: Why agile transformations fail, Leadership in Scrum. To plan your culture change together, have a look at our agile transformation services.