Thursday night after introductions, speeches by the mentors and some exercise to help people to get to know each other, it was pitch time.  I wasn’t really planning on pitching anything, but about half-way through pitches I decided to anyway.  I’m in no way shape or form a salesguy so I’m sure my pitch was pretty lame but mine made the top 15 based on votes from the crowd.  The idea was came from when I was a consultant, I experienced companies that sucked.  They had one other thing in common.  Good people worked there.  My idea was to help figure out how to get exceptional people into companies that didn’t suck using the theory that myself and Don Gray are pitching for Agile 2012.

After some networking, 3 other people joined.  Nikolai Bratkovski, Oleg Melnikov and Lily Samerkhanova.  Nikolai and Oleg co-founded HealthAware.ca and Lily is studying design and architecture.

Here’s the quick version of what Lean Startup is.  Start with a problem hypothesis and figure out a solution hypothesis.  After that, come up with your set of assumptions and identify your riskiest ones.  After that, “get out of the building” and go talk to who you think your customers are.  As you get information you’ll either validate or invalidate your assumptions and you can decide what to do, stay the course or pivot. The key is to validate your customer by getting them to give up something of value.   That can be money or something else of value.

After Thursday night we had already decided to pivot, we figured the original idea was too hard of a problem to solve because it involved helping people overcome fear and software can’t really do that!  I wanted to go ahead with trying out my theory of using MBTI and culture models to match employers/teams with people but it sounded like building a time machine.  That’s something everybody wants but knows isn’t possible.  You’re looking to find a balance between feasibility, desirability and viability.

As we interviewed and showed paper prototypes to 20 or so possible customers the idea evolved from finding better jobs for good people to allowing companies to quickly find the best possible candidates quickly and efficiently by some organizing and filtering of applicant information.

On Saturday we got our first paying customers, based on paper prototypes, and an explanation of what our differentiator was.  Saturday night at about 9:45pm Trevor Owens came up to us because he had the problem we were trying to solve.  He offered us $50 to go through 60 resumes and find the 10 best candidates for an Event Coordinator.  I wanted to go home, we’d been there for 11 hours already but the sweat shop started rolling and by midnight we ploughed through 60 resumes and had our top 10.   He called the candidates the next day and If he hires one of them, he owes us another $150!

On sunday we fine-tuned our presentation and findings and all the teams presented.  I was completely shocked that we won!  The winning team is the team that executed the method, demonstrated learning and generated evidence to support how they went through the process.  Getting $950 helped too.

Of the many learnings I took away, these 3 stood out the most:

1. Let go of your fear: Max Cameron’s workshop was awesome.  At LSM Boston he mentioned he felt that same fear of going up to strangers and asking them for money for his idea.  The rush comes from that first customer that is willing to give you something of value.  Trust is so important and you need to know how to earn that trust quickly by using the right language.  I had a customer hooked really early and chickened out asking for money.  I didn’t make that mistake again.  Max’s story was inspiring, from the language he used to how passionately he spoke about building trust and listening to customers, understanding their pain and finding something to stop that pain.  Worst case, the customer says no and you move on.  Well, one team won the ‘almost-got-beatup’ award so maybe ‘no’ isn’t the worst thing that could happen.
2. Let go of your assumptions: They told us this would happen and sure enough I still fell in the trap.  Your ideas and assumptions will be wrong.  Deal with it.  The first couple of times when mine were wrong, I was mad.  I couldn’t let it go.  How could me, the smartest person ever, be wrong?  Had to be a mistake.  One of the mentors said many people with the next million dollar idea come in excited and leave with a crushed ego.   Make your assumptions, design tests for them, pivot and if you can’t validate them, move on and let it go.  I learned that by Friday night and it was a hard lesson to learn.  Your assumptions are worth ZERO until you talk to your customer.
3. Do Whatever It Takes to Deliver Your Service:  Eric Ries joined by Skype to answer some questions.  When people asked for advice he would ask “how many customers do you have?”  The answers were all sorta like “uh, well, we have 9 people that love it, but we don’t have any software to show or….”  Eric replied with “that’s entrepreneur speak for ZERO”  If your service crashes you have demand and that’s a good problem to have.  One tweet isn’t a conservative way to get feedback, it’s useless.  Write a bot and saturate twitter.  If you service crashes, you have demand.   One of the teams, Printify, had an idea to provide printing services in the cloud.  Upload your doc, they’ll print it and you pick it up on the way to where you’re going.  Eric’s advice was “start printing!” Tell students and anybody on the street you’ll print their document and bring it to them.  That’s the measure of whether or not the service is valuable.  We stayed up until midnight churning through resumes, finding social network information for 60 people all in the name of a paying customer.  That’s validation and that’s what’s going to work.
4. MVP = Experiment: This was a biggie for me.  I always figured MVP (minimum viable product) was an actual product with a minimal set of features that are valuable.  That’s how I approached using Lean Startup where I work now.  An MVP is nothing more than an experiment.  It can be a landing page, poster on the street with a phone number, paper mockup, a survey or a hacked together service.  Make sure it’s an experiment that is testing one of your assumptions.
5. Beware of Confirmation Bias: During Max Cameron’s workshop, he talked about the danger of confirmation bias.  Basically it’s the phenomena that happens when you have what you think validated.  Remember, because you read something on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s true.  Stay honest with yourself.  I’ve been guilty of this many times.  ”See!!! I’m right!!!”  It’s not helpful.

This experience was life changing.  It changed my whole perspective about how I approach problems and ideas.   I used to get annoyed with all the hoopla and tongue-in-cheek “you’re wrong!” snarkyness that comes out of the lean startup community but once you really experience that feeling of validation and invalidation with face-to-face (or phone) conversations with your customers, you will get it.  I get it now.  I “knew it” before, but now I get it.  Really.

Other Notes and Highlights

Alyssa Richard showed how they collected metrics to find out what messaging worked best for RateHub, where people were coming from and what keywords drove the most leads.  She also talked about calling hundreds of brokers in the early days to get off the ground.

Carlo Perez from Uknowa went into a ton of detail about how they organized their site, language tests for landing pages and how it was frightening to call contractors out of the blue to offer them business.  He talked about how he and his team used 30 minutes of their lunch hour at their day jobs to call people.

I want to thank all the sponsors, mentors and attendees, the energy and passion in the room was simply staggering.   Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get out of the building.

1. You’ll learn to stop saying “should” and “just”: I worked with a company that had a problem with too many bugs.  When a doozy would pop-up the usual all-hands-on-deck emergency meeting happened.  The output was “we should do X to make Y not happen again”.  Everybody nodded and felt great about this new epiphany!  Shame nothing actually got done.  When you say “we should do X” you remove all sense of responsibility on you and everybody else.  It’s an action-less modal verb.  I “just” thought this point would be valuable.  Did you feel the power of this paragraph dissipate?  ”I just through this point…” means I have no confidence in what I “just” said.  Stop saying “should” and “just”.  PSL will help you figure out how.
2. You’ll become more self-aware: Self-awareness leads to improvement.  I had many of my patterns reflected back to me during the week and PSL gave me many tools to figure out how to recognize those patterns and more importantly how to work on fixing them.  Other people aren’t the problem, understand how you intake and process information and you’ll be much more self-aware.
3. You’ll learn how to spot problems: Well duh, it’s called PROBLEM SOLVING LEADERSHIP, what did you expect?  Seriously though, I get criticized for being too negative because I do not, nor will I ever, accept the status quo.  PSL taught me how to do this, diplomatically and brutally.  I usually prefer the brutal truth yet I realize the need for telling the kinder truth sometimes.  If you cannot challenge the status quo and treat every problem as it’s own unique set of circumstances, (which they are, but generally humans use that as an excuse to not dig deeper “oh, it was an anomaly…it won’t happen again”), you’ll struggle with developing a problem solving attitude in your organization and you’ll be doomed to mediocrity.
4. You’ll Have Fun!!! PSL was a blast!  Intense learning, strong relationships were formed with people I never met before and it was extremely fun!  I do have another problem though.  The title of this post says ’3 Reasons’, yet I have listed 4.  How can I solve this problem?  ;-)

PSL will sell out fast, go sign-up now!

Then I went to Bank #2 and their bank machine prompted me if I wanted a receipt (which I said no) and they had a notification that prompted me to press continue when I had my deposits in the envelop and was ready.  The roller thingys started when I pressed continue.

So my observation is, how much operating cost does Bank #2 save in receipt paper as well as the process for refilling it?  Being a bank I will assume the process is heavy and costly to refill the receipt paper container in the machine.  I wonder how much Bank #2 saves over Bank #1 every year by saving paper and process in re-filling the machine.  How much extra power do those little roller thingys use on a yearly basis for Bank #1?

Many companies I’ve worked with as a consultant and regular ol’ employee have a hard time grasping the concept of constant improvement in small increments.  I’m usually met with “It’s useless to not do the whole thing…” type of mentality.  Companies that really get it know how to have Kaizen events and understand taking on small and incremental improvements yields great results over time.  The flip side is the perception of progress instead of actual progress because so many (and usually large) improvements are talked about which makes people feel good.

How do you approach improvements in your organization?

Hypothesis: Is there a way to increase the odds of a successful change by understanding your organization culture from Schneider’s culture model and how the MBTI (temperament and function pairs) of the people involved in the change fit into each of the four culture types.

Here’s how I ran the session:

1. Brief introduction to MBTI so people can become familiar with the model.  I use my type (ISTP/INTP) to describe the model.  For this session we feel function pairs (how people process data and make decisions) are better suited than temperament.  The four function pairs are ST, SF, NT, NF.
2. Exercise to help people figure out their MBTI function pairing.  I assumed most people wouldn’t know their type so 4 statements were given and people decided what statement most closely defined their stance.
3. People split into 4 groups based on their function pairing and created a mission statement and described what a successful ‘agile adoption or transformation’ would look like.
4. Each group de-briefed
5. Each person wrote their function pairing on a sticky note and posted them on the Schneider culture quadrant where they felt most reflected the type of organization they would want to work in.  The culture types were not given, only descriptions of them.
6. Group discussion

Overall the goal of this exercise was to see how MBTI function pairings and temperament related to organizational culture.  The exercises were planned to not introduce bias by giving participants the labels of the function pairs and organizational cultures.

Here’s a picture of the Schneider culture quadrants and each participants function pairing sticky (click to enlarge):

Observations:

1. Crowd bias: given this was an XP Toronto meetup, the group agreed crowd-bias came into effect where most skewed towards Cultivation and the ‘possibility’ axis.
2. During the exercises, each function pairing group seemed to come up with a mission statement that aligned with the values of their function pairing.  For example, the NF group’s statement was “am someone who is guided by my passions and beliefs, has a sixth sense about people, and works to ensure harmony in the workplace”  Their mission statement was “In our organization we work to common goals, make the best possible work environment to maximize our people’s potential“
3. The “NT” group didn’t finish composing their mission statement.  The NT pairing is all about ideas and it’s common for lots of idea generation without a firm decision compared to other groups.
4. The “ST” group had the least number of ideas and they were more firm and concrete.   The ST group also finished all the exercises much quicker.
5. The “ST” group debated about having highly specialized people vs more general specialists.

Virginia Satir Change Model:

We also mapped temperaments to the Virginia Satir change model and discussed how different temperaments are affected differently by change.  SJ (sensing/judging) want to remain in the status quo to protect the group.  NT’s (Intuitive/Thinking) tend to want to progress through the change as fast as possible and react with more ideas to changes that have yielded no results yet.  SP’s (Sensing/Perceiving) want to move through the change as fast as possible to find the next problem to solve.  NF’s (Intuitive/Feeling) want to make sure everybody is ok while the change is happening.

Combining the Schneider Culture model, MBTI and Virginia Satir change model can be an effective way to create awareness around an organization and it’s people to increase the odds of a successful change.  I’ve often heard the Agile community say things like “change is hard”, “culture is important” and “one-size-agile doesn’t fit all”.  I think the intersection of the these models is the “why” behind those statements.

I want to offer this workshop again to collect more data, if you are interested, please contact me!

1. the data may have been entered correctly
2. the data input screen may have made the data entry person believe they entered it correctly  (perhaps there was validation that wouldn’t allow the operator to enter “25.00″ so they entered “25″ and there was some error that transposed the zeros incorrectly
3. maybe the person entered “2500″ and forgot the “.” and there wasn’t a check to say “are you sure you want to add a “$2500 fee”?
4. maybe once the item was scanned, the fee being displayed was being rendered incorrectly
5. maybe the person entering the data was working on 12 things at the same time and simply messed up
6. Maybe the data was added with a bulk script and there was no test to validate it
7. maybe there wasn’t a test in place that could have caught the error before it was deployed
8. maybe there wasn’t a conversation that a clearly out-of-boundary error wasn’t a big enough deal to worry about (I’ve never heard of a $2500 fee for electronics before!)
9. maybe it was the data entry person’s last day and he really wanted to mess up this company

There could be many more possibilities, my point is there is much more going on than “the idiot who entered the fee incorrectly”.  There could be numerous causes and a possibility for a large loss of sales revenue.

It gets worse.  The people in the store didn’t add that fee, it was added automatically when they scanned this item.  The people in the store cannot correct the environmental fee price.  The people in the store called head office and “the guy was on lunch”, which is where we would have liked to have been.

So in my brain I see software doing something the user didn’t intend for it to do (add a fee), wouldn’t allow the operator to correct it and gave the operator no course of action to correct the problem with a customer who was prepared to plunk down a few hundred dollars right there.    Were other stores affected? This was a chain store  so I will assume their POS devices are accessing a centralized system.  How many items do each of these stores sell that have this fee and how many customers would have been turned away until the problem was fixed?

And what really happened anyway?  Was it a data input error? Was it a system problem?  Who knows and it’s un-likely we’ll find out.  All we know is we need to go back and pick up the item in a pain-in-the-ass-area of the city to get to and we wasted our lunch.

I’m probably nuts but I know how I would handle this problem, what would you do?

Some of the symptoms included not finishing the sprint work, disagreements about what done meant to the developers, testers and business people, struggling to finish regression, missed deadlines and releases.  It’s always tough to gather enough context in a short amount of time to offer some advice.  I could see the main challenge was getting the team to buy into a shared goal and removing the silos.   Having said that, these guys seemed quite collaborative, I think they were simply having problems adjusting to Agile given they’ve only been trying it for a couple of months.   I think they’re on the right track and seem committed to improving which is just great.  Anytime people want to give up their own time to learn is a good thing in my books.

As we talked about ideas about how to find balance I suggested one way to help manage these symptoms is to pull less work.  Of course every action has some impact and I mentioned that this can create idle time, especially in cases where “the development work” is low effort but the “testing work” is high.  You could have developers idle! Nooooo!  I could see an adverse reaction to that suggestion so I made a joke about making sure “resources” are 100% utilized!  The reality is, people need slack, especially to learn a new process and move forward.

I asked the product owner flatly that if they are missing releases now.  He said yes.  I asked if they have quality problems as a result of in-sufficient testing.  He said yes.  I then asked what’s the harm of slowing down?  Your missing releases with lower-than-desired quality now.  You’re only fooling yourself if you think slowing down is going to cause problems because you already have those problems now.

I could feel a bit of shock from a couple of people in the room after I said that.

The point is, when you are looking for a coach or consultant, they’re not there to be your friend.  They are there to help you figure out how to solve, manage or cope with your problems and you are not going to like some of the answers you get.  A good coach is going to tell you either the brutal or kind truth and the best you can do is establish personal safety by having an agreement and shared understanding about what is expected from the coach from your perspective and the same from the coaches perspective.  Once you can get that agreement in place what unfolds can happen in the name of progress.

• organizational culture type
• type and temperament of the influential people or ‘change sponsor’
• flow of power throughout the organization

I am still learning about this and refining that theory.  Here’s a quick example, suppose you, as a change artist, are brought in to transform an organization to Agile.  Suppose this organization is a control culture (likes rules, process, stability, hierarchy and power) and the change sponsor (VP or Director or whoever brought in Agile, let’s call him Rick) has MBTI preferences that lend themselves to align with the attributes of a control culture.

Rick may be more likely to see ‘Agile’ as a set of processes and practices over a set of values and principles.  As a change artist, an Agile Adoption approach may make more sense.  ’Adoption’ and ‘Transformation’, IMO, are different.  Transformation is transforming an organization’s culture to build a learning culture or Agile mindset.  Adoption is adopting Agile practices and processes for perceived benefits that are (or at least seem) concrete.

As a change artist providing a less ‘fluffy’ and values/principles approach in favour of a more pragmatic approach of a list of processes and practices with benefits, possible outcomes and an implementation plan increase the odds of a successful change.

Today at AYE we had a small open space session and talked about MBTI and temperaments, how each temperament (SP, NT, SJ, NF) are affected by change using the Virginia Satir change model and how those temperaments may naturally fit into the different organizational cultures.  Susan Davis brought up using MBTI function pairings instead. (ST, SF, NT, NF).

First we talked about temperaments:

NT: Rationals, Visionaries – use logic to make decisions, have grand visions of what’s possible

SP: Artisans, trouble-shooters – like to solve problems as quick as possible to find the next problem to solve

NF: Idealist, catalyst – want to make sure everyone in the group is ok and feels included

SJ: Guardian, organizers, stabilizers - like rules and plans, certainty

Of course these are paraphrased, there is a great wealth of information about types and temperaments, these descriptions will suit the purpose of this post.

Next we related temperaments to the Virginia Satir change model.

NT: see the vision of the change and want to progress quickly through chaos.

SP: want to move through chaos as quickly as possible to get to the next problem and adapt quickly

NF: want to make sure everybody is ok while they move through chaos and want to get to the transforming idea so people will be ok.

SJ: may question the need to change and move back to the status quo

Each person will move through the change model at different rates and intensities.

Next we looked at Organizational Culture Types:

Control: rules, process, certainty, power, hierarchy.  ”we succeed by establishing and maintaining control”

Collaboration: teamwork, synergy, interaction.  ”we succeed by working together”

Cultivation: purpose/faith, creativity, let things evolve.  ”We succeed by growing people who fulfil our vision”

Competence: efficiency, craftsmanship, expertise.  ”We succeed by being the best”

For a fantastic description of culture types, check out Michael Sahota’s post here.

Next we talked about how some temperaments may have a more natural fit in certain cultures.  For example, NF’s may fit more naturally in a Cultivation Culture which emphasizes people and possibilities.  This culture is in direct conflict with a Control Culture and people who relate more to Control Cultures may have a hard time adjusting to a Cultivation Culture or they may not adapt at all.

What clicked for me was when Susan Davis brought up mapping MBTI function pairings with organizational culture types.  Quick side note on MBTI, my type is ISTP:

E/I: Introvert/Extrovert (Energy – Attitude)

N/S: Intuiting/Sensing (Data  - Function)

T/F: Thinking/Feeling (Decision – Function)

J/P: Judging/Perceiving (Action – Attitude)

My temperament is SP (Artisan).  My function pairing is ST.  I am a 50/50 split on N vs S so my temperament aligns well with the NT temperament.  I like solving problems, I like inflicting help, I like stuff that is awesome and in the end, it’ll all work out, whatever it is!  You can read more on function pairing here.

I will make a better diagram, here’s what we drew up.  On the Y axis of the organization culture type, “Reality Focus” for organizations aligns well with people with “S (sensing)” function while the “Possibility Focus” aligns well with “N (Intuiting)” function.  On the X-axis, “People Focus” aligns with “F (Feeling)” while “Company Focus” aligns with “T (Thinking)”.

I’m sure that sounds confusing.  Here’s what clicked, which is my theory.  If you as a change artist understand the culture of the organization and the teams (organizations will have sub-cultures on different teams, departments, social circles etc) and the MBTI preferences of the change sponsor and people in the organization, you may be able to come up with an Agile Adoption or Transformation plan that as a higher chance for success.

The reason I theorize that is solely based on experiences I’ve had and the theory of culture types and MBTI temperaments. In a control organization where the change sponsor has an ST function paring (SJ for example), selling him/her “Agile” as a set of values and principles and creating a learning culture or Agile mindset might not be as effective as selling “Agile” as a set of processes and practices with tangible benefits.

These pieces started coming together during Don Gray’s ‘Reading the River: Understanding Organizational Currents to Get You Where You Want to Go‘ session.  It helped me understand how to find leverage points and how to ‘speak the language’ of change in the right way to the right people.  If you have a deeper understanding of organizational currents, you can use the knowledge of that organizations culture and people to help take you through the change more effectively than swimming against the current by using “Agile Transformation” approaches when an “Agile Adoption” approach may be a better choice.

To wrap up, no culture is ‘better’ than another, same for type and temperament.  Agile-ists will often say “once size Agile doesn’t fit all” and I believe the combination of organizational currents, organizational culture and type/temperament of the influential people in the organization are the keys to figuring out how to work through a change more effectively.

This year I haven’t figured out what I want to get out of AYE.  There are so many great sessions and so many areas of personal improvement I see that I haven’t widdled it down yet.  Blogging is therapeutic for me so I’m hoping I’ll figure it out before the end of this post.   As a consultant, I’d end up in more ‘coaching skills’ type of sessions to help me be a more effective coach.  This time around I’m going to be a bit more selfish and find sessions that are more personal to me.

I think the biggest area of improvement I want to make this year is figuring out how to be a more effective communicator.  I have a tendency to bottle up my thoughts until they explode and sometimes I won’t really say what’s on my mind because I’m worried how the message will be received on the other end.  Then, of course, the blow up happens. PSL helped a lot with that, I feel I want to do some fine tuning though.

Jerry’s session on handling “awkward situations at work” also looks interesting because as a “resource” I have to integrate more deeply into the existing culture which I do not do very well sometimes.  As a consultant it was much easier, you kind of expect to be fired at any point and you’re being hired to disrupt the status quo.

As I was typing this, my co-workers wanted to chat about what to expect since it’s their first time going.  I told them a couple of stories from the last 2 I went to and hopefully didn’t spoil anything.  I remember not knowing what to expect and being nervous and excited at the same time so I hope they experience that same feeling.   It was funny when one of them asked about the credentials of the hosts and what he should expect to learn!  I think he’s in for a treat!

I think that helped me shape my goal this year.  There are a couple of great sessions about change, organizational mapping and navigating organizational currents which I am fascinated by.  We’ve been going through many big changes over the last few months and anyone who knows me knows I’m not shy about stating my observations so it’s nice to be a real employee and see the outcomes of some of the jiggles that have happened here.  Usually as a consultant you try and help and organization, they do or don’t listen and you’re gone before you really see the outcomes of the change(s).  I have the benefit of seeing this change and experiencing it.

I’m rambling.  Shocking, I know.

This year I want to bring back skills for better integrating into existing cultures, for me personally and also to help others understand culture and temperaments and how to adjust to complex adaptive systems.  I strongly push back against the status quo which isn’t always the right thing to do and sometimes come across as a know-it-all because I am never satisfied with doing things the way they’ve always been done.  Historically that approach has alienated me as an employee and I get fed up and leave feeling like I don’t fit.  Perhaps what I’ll learn is that sometimes I should just shut-up!

Either way, I’m really looking forward to going back and catching up with some old friends and meeting new ones!  Look for the usual post-AYE, uh, posts and check out my other posts from previous conferences if you’re interested.

“The #agile community is too closed. We are doing intellectual incest, and congratulating ourselves for it.” ~@mhsutton #ACCUS“

I can understand and appreciate the comment, I’ve posted many times about how I think the Agile community is disconnected from the reality that organizations are going through.  Having said that, I’d have to disagree with the statement that the Agile community is too closed.

There are numerous conferences across the world, user groups, study groups, forums, open spaces and local events that are easily accessible to just about anybody who’s willing to learn.  The key is that people need to be willing to learn.  I’m happy that 2 people I worked with when I was consultanting are speaking at the Toronto Agile Tour this year and the reason they are is because they were exposed to what the Agile community offers and they jumped at the chance to get more involved.  They’re dedicated to improving their skills and they have a desire to learn more.

I think the Agile community is awesome.   For starters, look at all the free advice through blogs and forums people in the Agile community give.  Look at the free whitepapers and experience reports the Agile community dishes out.  Look at how people in the Agile community give their time to the community through open spaces and other local events.  Most importantly, the people I know and have tremendous respect for are not content with being mediocre and being around that mindset is infectious.  We challenge each other, we question each other’s statements, we challenge the status quo in the name of building better software and improving the quality of life by living the Agile values and principles.

While I can understand the statement about the Agile community being too closed, there is responsibility on the shoulders of those who are not involved in the community.  Events and information are so easily accessible, there’s no excuse for anyone who wants to learn how to build better software to get off their ass and go learn.  Mediocrity is a choice, people and teams have more control over improving themselves more than they think they do and those who are content with where they are will likely never really get what the Agile community has to offer.  I pay for my own training, I give my time freely to help people new to the community, I am never satisfied with the status quo and my mind is always open to learning something new everyday.

The Agile community is about what’s possible.  The Agile community is constantly innovating better practices for building better software and making work more enjoyable.  People I know in the Agile community are using their knowledge to improve education for kids or improving government or making work fun by using games to teach techniques for building better software.

The Agile community taught me how to value my own skills, how to appreciate myself for the skills and experience I offer and most importantly, the Agile community taught me that no matter how much I know, there is a whole world of knowledge I’ve only scratched the surface on.  I am deeply grateful towards the people I’ve worked with and learned from over the years and I feel honoured that many of these people who are thought leaders in the industry consider me their peer.

The Agile community is too closed?  In my opinion it’s not.  Everyone has a choice to improve them-self, with so many easily accessible Agile events and materials to learn from there’s unlimited avenues to explore.

Thank you Agile community.

Michael Sahota has written some fantastic posts about organization culture and I’m excited to read this book to expand my knowledge about culture.

What I’m more interested is how those cultures develop, after all, it’s the people in your organization that create your culture. Schneider describes 4 major culture types (Collaboration, Cultivation, Control and Competence):

To describe this digram, Cultivation culture focuses on forward-thinking and being more people focused whereas Control cultures focus on here and now and are more process oriented.  Michael’s post goes into more depth about explaining those cultures than I will in this post.

Taking a very simple systems example, you can have an organization with a Control culture and have teams within that system that have a Collaboration culture:

I was working for a large organization that exhibited the symptoms typical in a Control culture, however the team I was working on fit into the description of a Collaborative culture.   An organization or team’s culture is not absolute, that is, if your organization is a control culture that doesn’t mean it can’t exhibit attributes of another culture type.

I have a theory that cultures are developed based on the types and temperament (and obviously other factors) of the people in those cultures.  Here’s an example, the MBTI temperament “SJ” (sensing/judging) has preferences that fit well into a control culture.  ”SJ’s” don’t like change, they like process, control and predictability, in particular the ESTJ type.  As leaders, “SJ’s” like to be in control.  My theory is that if you have leaders with an “SJ” temperament you are more likely to develop a control culture and the harder it will be to adopt Agile.

Similar to cultures, a person’s MBTI preferences are just that.  Preferences.  It doesn’t mean an SJ isn’t able to collaborate, it means that an “SJ’s” natural preference is order, control and process.  ”SJ’s” are also very hard workers who expect a great deal of themselves and therefore the people that work under them which can further strengthen the control culture.  SJ’s rely on past experience for decision making and generally are not forward, or “out of the box” thinkers.  You can read more about SJ temperaments here.

Assuming there’s some merit to this theory and an organization identifies as control culture and the leaders are “SJ’s” with a strong “J” preference (that is, they exhibit control freak type behaviour), Agile is most likely going to be seen as a set of processes and tools.  That means your approach to Agile is likely going to be more about “adoption” and less about “transformation”.  If you’ve heard from a manager that “we can’t do that because our process says we can’t” you’ve likely got an SJ on your hands!

In this scenario, values and principles and building learning cultures are more likely to be resisted and some processes, such as Scrum, won’t fit into that culture.  Scrum is what I like to call a “black box” methodology.  ”The business” puts some stuff in one end (ok, the team pulls it in…) and some stuff happens and then some software comes out the back end.   What goes on in that black box isn’t generally known from the outside.  Cultivation and Collaboration cultures would “get the spirit” of Scrum and it  may  have a better chance to deliver successful results whereas Control cultures wouldn’t be able to manage the disruption it causes.

Even worse if, in this scenario, you are using Scrum and NOT seeing disruption, you’ve simply adapted an iterative based process that you’ve labelled Scrum.  This is what us folks in the community call “you don’t get it” syndrome.  That doesn’t mean you’re bad, it simply means your approach to Agile will be different.  You may be better off not using the “A” word at all.

I wanted to write this post for a couple of reasons. One, to put a stamp in time with my thoughts before reading the book so I can come back to this post and compare my assumptions with what I learned from the book, and two to prove to myself how smart I am if it turns out there is something that relates cultures and MBTI!  I’m not aware of any material that has tried to link the two of them.

In my next post, I’m going to talk about the opposite scenario which would be Cultivation culture and “SP” temperament.    The biggest difference between SJ and SP when it comes to Agile is the J vs P preference.  J’s are the planners that like control and process.  P’s (which I am a strong one) are open-minded, free-spirited, creative, love change (because it’s exciting), like to keep busy and are action oriented.  Whereas J’s want to plan and have defined processes for everything, P’s want to try shit out and adapt.  The latter is more conducive to “transformation”.

I’m still developing my thoughts about this and would love to hear your thoughts.  Understanding your organizations culture and the temperaments of the people on your team or department can give you a significant advantage to being successful with Agile.  Once you understand where you are, you’ll be in better shape to create a more effective path to adopting or transforming to Agile.

Look for another post next week.