What is agile corporate culture
In agile environments, the outstanding importance of culture is emphasized like a prayer mill. Without a corresponding corporate culture, the credo goes, neither responsiveness nor adaptability are possible. In principle, I agree with this credo. However, it strikes me that the much-cited agile mindset focuses primarily on personal attitude, mentality and basic mindset. This suggests that corporate agility is essentially a matter of individual learning - which probably explains the massive use of methodology training and role training in many organizations. After all, to be able to work in an agile way, you need well-qualified ScrumMasters, Product Owners, Agile Coaches, Kanban experts or Design Thinkers.
There is no doubt that this commitment has its justification. Professional training and coaching is and remains valuable. However, its person-centered orientation in no way guarantees that the company will actually become more agile as a result. On the contrary: as long as we primarily try to move the role, title and function components of the organizational structure instead of focusing on agile processes, we can easily end up on the wrong track. This path keeps us on our toes, but leads neither to more responsive companies nor to more satisfied customers.
In this sense, I consider the individualized, to a certain extent personally taken concept of culture to be doubly dangerous: on the one hand, it trivializes the complexity of systemic contexts, and on the other hand, it tempts us to overestimate the changeability of corporate cultures. But how do we accurately grasp what tends to turn out to be the proverbial pudding we are trying to nail to the wall? In my opinion, it helps to stop reducing culture to those supposedly soft phenomena that we can then nurture with events, shape with Chief Cultural Officers and monitor via happiness indices. Instead, we should also focus on the hard part of culture.
Of course, that's easier said than done. What is the hard part of a pudding? In order not to make things even harder for myself, a few years ago I started comparing companies to spaceships that - as the illustration above shows - move enterprise-like through the infinite expanses of the market.
The figure outlines what this movement is all about:
Every corporate spaceship is fueled by a specific mission, that is, by what constitutes its primary purpose, meaning, and reason for existence. Agile organizations should be on fire for their specialty as well as for the value they bring to the customer.
The spaceship is aligned with a vision, a kind of guiding star or star system that stands for a higher purpose. Toyota, for example, uses its True North for this purpose: Zero defects, 100% value creation, end-to-end one-piece flow, absolute work safety and continuous improvement. It goes without saying that this is not a SMARTE objective, but a general orientation that gives direction to the pursuit of perfection.
The strategy defines the next stages of any enterprise. It includes the current product and service portfolio, the specific goals and the procedure to achieve them, the budgeting and prioritization systems, and much more. However, the enterprise ship is only on course for success if it succeeds in repeatedly docking with its most relevant environments: figuratively speaking, with as many customer planets as possible, which nourish it by exchanging goods and services for "fuel" in the form of money, recognition or recommendations.
The context-dependency of every Enterprise can be reinforced by pointing out that space is not only populated by customers eager to trade, but also by competing spaceships. Not to mention the legal regulations or political influencing factors that affect it.
Within these contexts, every company forms certain structures and processes. They answer the question of how the organization works and determine to a large extent what we experience on a daily basis. From the infrastructure to the various procedures and quality standards, to the written and unwritten rules that determine daily activities.
"This is how we work here! "could be the headline for those self-evident norms of behaviour that every organisation develops over time: from the way of dressing to all facets of verbal and non-verbal communication to the basic attitude towards colleagues and superiors, which incidentally - apropos respect, appreciation, empathy - is often congenially reflected in the attitude towards customers. These norms are to a large extent a guideline for action, since they feel quite normal, precisely as a natural form of working. Accordingly, it is difficult to grasp these norms accurately - a little like the fish that, even if it could speak, could not describe the water as it moves as a matter of course.
It should be clear by now that corporate culture is not a singular factor that we can view or even change in isolation. Rather, culture results from the unique interaction of strategies, structures, processes, and standards of behavior that every spaceship develops in its confrontation with the infinite expanse of space. Culture, therefore, can neither be reduced to one domain nor frozen ahistorically. Rather, it is itself constantly in motion.
All in all, my spaceship metaphor is intended to illustrate the complex nature of any corporate culture. It is influenced by many factors that are volatile but by no means soft. No serious change towards more business agility can escape the resulting complexity. Focusing only on the mindset is by far not enough. But a purely structure and process-oriented approach à la as many agile teams as possible also falls short.
Like any metaphor, of course, my little Enterprise reminiscence tends to over-simplify: neither do larger Enterprises act as one starship, nor is culture a uniform phenomenon. Instead, there are smaller and larger Enterprises, slower and faster ships, important and less important missions, etc. Nevertheless, I hope to have contributed a little to clarifying some myths and misconceptions, to which once again applies what I called in another blog post the False Money Principle. Because it's not the popular misconceptions about culture, agility and self-organization that are surprising, but that they remain in circulation for such an astonishingly long time.