Organizational change

Welcome to Definitely May Be Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of season two of Definitely May Be Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you doing today, Dave?

Peter, it's been a great end to the summer. I'm really doing very well. We've had a chance to catch up. I think the feelings mutual, right?

It is. It is. It's uh it has been a very uh busy time, but I've uh I've definitely been enjoying it. It's uh I'm uh sorry to see the summer grow, but uh I'm excited by all the opportunities ahead.

What is it we're up to today? I think um we really started this season out by looking at digital transformations, and we'd highlighted four different types of digital transformation that are talked about or elements to that digital transformation that are talked about. And I think today we're touching on the last one, the cultural or organizational transformation.

Yep, that's right. We're gonna we're gonna go through uh this, which and as I think uh we were chatting about just before this, um, the it's it's one that if you're doing any of the other types of transformation, you are going to have to go through an organizational or cultural transformation. It's it's just implicit in the fact that by changing the uh your technology, by changing how you go to market, by changing your business models, your organization is going to change.

It's knowledge work, right? So the bulk of, you know, with the value in your organization is disproportionately tied up with the individuals. And those individuals are working together in that culture, the way the organization works. So any any of the other transformation types that we've discussed kind of dovetail or come partnered with an organizational cultural transformation.

I I completely agree. It's uh so where do you think we should start this conversation?

Well, I think uh I I find there's there's two things that come straight to mind as as we're hinting at, one of them is it's there whether you like it or not. We can call it an organizational transformation, we can not call it an organizational transformation, but it's there because if we work with knowledge workers and we try to change how those knowledge workers interact with customers or their products and services or how they do things, you're generating an organizational cultural shift in some way, small or large. So I think the first thing to take away is you cannot ignore it, you can't pretend it's not there, you can't say we're not doing an organizational transformation because it's going to happen whether you like it or not. It's just really, is it going to happen in a directed, deliberate way, or are you just going to accept what happens when you try to make some of the other changes we've talked about? I think the second point is this is really the domain of leadership. In that in the other types of transformation, a bit of direction can be pulled together, and then many teams, individuals within the organization can group and implement some of those transformation goals. In the case of cultural or organizational transformations, it is uh like almost completely driven or owned by leadership.

I I think it's I think it's successes. Yeah, it's that to do it well, the you need everybody involved in deciding how how that's going to move forward. But the the success of that is going to be driven by the the strength of the leadership. Um and that's the I think this is this piece we were talking about around this like leadership will make it or break it type comment, right? It's the but it's not it's more phrases leadership alone uh can make it, can't make it, right? It's uh it's leadership of its own can't make it. You need everybody involved in this, it's a whole organization activity, it's not going to be just the leadership. Um, but they can break it. If you don't have that leadership, then you're not gonna succeed. So they're they are critical, yeah.

Or at least you don't know what culture, what transformation you will get on the organizational side. So uh and and I think this this so one of the hard things, I mean, the the really difficult bit about this is it's so difficult to measure. If I'm changing a business model, I can put metrics in place and structures and gates and so on, and we can look at it and see the changes. We can see the widgets being built in a different way, marketing, campaigns, channeling, activity in certain areas and so on. So it's much more visible and controllable. Cultural change is inherently difficult to measure. In fact, there are some sort of perspectives out there say you can't measure culture at all. And I think that's something that is it's you know what it is, but it's really difficult to put, can contain it in some sort of descriptive way.

Yeah, uh agreed. I mean this and when we talk about this as well, I'm just thinking of um something you could say, okay, I'm gonna work out, I'm gonna map out the value streams across the organization. Like what are the systems of work that create the particular value? I'm going to realign my organization along those. I'm going to take and adopt uh organizational structures that might support those value streams and look at long-lived teams aligned to long-lived value streams and align these nests, though, understand how products align to those and go through an organizational transformation, um, out of which my culture is likely to change. But it that's the that's the outcome of that, not the the the thing that you're changing.

Yeah, I mean it definitely. And I I always think that this is the the conversation that we often end up having with the leadership is that that changes as a leader, you're either intuitively changing culture around you because of the way you interact with your teams and your organization and and your peers, or you're deliberately changing it because you think about where you want it to go and you consciously guide the organization, reinforcing the changes that you're seeking rather than sort of hands up in the air and accepting or being frustrated by the changes that you're seeing. So I think that's a big difference between sort of bobbing around on the change in your organization like a cork on the ocean versus actually deliberately guiding that change in some way um through forethought and and and deliberate action.

Agreed. And the I think uh the other piece here is that it was worth talking about is uh evolutionary versus revolutionary change. Uh that this idea that we we come in and we're going to totally disrupt everything, um, we're gonna we're gonna adopt uh safe, for example. We're gonna reorganize into these different organizational structures and and we're going to uh bring in these new ways where can we uh everyone's gotta reapply for their own jobs and or or for other jobs, and they they've now new titles, and you've got to uh that type of highly disruptive revolutionary change can be incredibly damaging and very difficult to navigate through. And there's there's a chance you may not necessarily come out of it and you might lose a lot of organizational knowledge along the way, and so it's it's highly risky to do that. Yeah, we often see organizations taking that part.

So this well, but and I can see why, because if I view things from a sort of a mechanic, mechanistic view where things, you know, this cog fits with another cog, and we're re-shuffling how the cogs interact with one another, but that really is a mechanic, mechanistic view or mechanical uh metaphor. There's no it's just restructuring how things are done. The challenge is the glue that kind of holds all that all together are the individuals involved, the teams involved, and they have many more facets to them, which make it much more difficult to make those changes stick. But we also have to bear in mind, and this is I think something that we're seeing a lot, which is a few years ago, sort of these big transformational changes were done slowly and cautiously in the sense that they really didn't know where they were going to go. And so there's that element of exploring and kind of uh taking smaller steps, the evolutionary approach that you're describing. But now there's a lot of organizations coming in saying, hey, we've seen it work over here. How can we accelerate that adoption so that we can either catch up or overtake? And so speed becomes a factor. And when speed comes in, that's when we sort of cut corners, or we we just say, look, we know what the end state should be like, we want it to be like that. Let's just kind of fill the gap in or cross that gap as fast as we can. And what we're not seeing is people need time to adopt and adjust, which is not factored in.

Yeah, it's the speed of uh unlearning, right? It's uh there's a there's a speed at which people can unlearn, and it's an individual speed and context specific to the what the nature of the change is and how much people have their identity tied to what it is that's being changed. All of these pieces tie into this. And when you're looking at that at a scale, and if you're if you see it as you put it as all the cogs in that mechanistic way, uh a lot of that uh becomes invisible to you. And you sometimes don't realize that the damage doing those gears are grinding, and you don't necessarily see that happening and uh the damage it potentially causes.

So, how do how do you go about solving some of that? We're just putting a bit of context in that piece, but how what do you look for in your leaders to do to make that difference?

Well, from my from my perspective, like when doing this uh in organizations, I mean it's start with it's the evolutionary piece, but start with one team, one area, one system, one place that you're going to change, and use that as like introduce the change there, understand what it's gonna look like there. Use that as the as the mini snowball that'll create the biggest snowball as it rolls down the hill. Like it's this we've got to find out that what's working. And if you're in a large enough organization, then you can try a few of those and see which ones are working in the different places and different areas and start to experiment and learn from that. Uh obviously coaching and guidance, uh uh enabling uh with teams with new ways of working and how to think about solving different problems is obviously a valuable resource to help with that. Um, but that's kind of like where I typically see um sort of the best way of going about starting that.

Yeah, I I love that it's it's a people thing, right? It's the narrative storytelling type of leadership that we often talk about in advance, you know, sort of um really experienced leaders will use narrative and storytelling and share experiences much more than they are going to be directive. Uh and um and this results pyramid, so partners in leadership work around the results pyramid, which argues that cultures change by changing the experiences, which in turn changes beliefs, which in turn changes actions, which in turn changes results. And I've always found that a really powerful model to discuss with leaders what the expectations are. Stop talking about the actions that we want them to change, talk about the experiences. And a really great uh sort of example of this is trying to get test automation on delivery teams. If I focus on test automation by telling people what we expect for them to do for test automation and providing the tools and training and so on, that's a little bit like interacting at the actions level, telling people what the actions are. But if anyone's done this with a team, they know that that really does not work. People aren't interested in changing that. Instead, we want to find those one or two developers on the team who have an interest in it, help them get a good experience around test automation using the tools and the practices that we're describing, but then allow that to seep through like osmosis through the development teams, effectively team by team or product by product.

Yeah, it's it's the in that specific example, it's this hey, we're going to install Sonarcube and we're gonna set an 80% requirement for all unit tests, at which point all the teams go out and they start creating tests because volume of tests is what the criteria that's been set is. And so now you've got people saying, hey, look at how great I'm getting at automating all of my tests, but there's no thought going into the quality of what it is and the quality of those tests, which means that you're you're not getting the result that you think you're getting as a consequence of this.

Well, and recognition that it's a learning experience, right? That you that the tests that you write in your first few months of doing that, you will throw away.

Yes.

Because you are writing all the wrong tests, but you need to learn how to how to execute different parts of your system, where to decouple things and inject certain certain tests and so on. And all of that comes with time and experience and tripping over your own shoelaces, basically.

Yes. And uh and the there's an understanding piece there too, that higher uh levels of code coverage doesn't necessarily mean that you actually have better testing. Yeah. These two things are two different things.

Um let's let's try and wrap things up. So I think we've kind of explained a little bit about various aspects of uh certainly how the two of us view organizational transformations. What's the two or three things you want us to carry away from this one?

The I think for me the criticality of leadership is is absolutely key. Your leaders have to be on board with the change, uh, and I and I mean really on board and open to the fact that they have to potentially change too in order for this to work. That uh all too often uh you can have leaders come in and say, Well, I'm not the problem. I don't have to change, everybody else does. So that's a that's a key piece of it. It's like the leadership, um you've got to have the right leadership to make this work. Simple as that. So I think that's probably one of the my biggest takeaways from uh from this conversation.

Um I think I'd I'd probably add two more things. One is it's there whether you call it out or not. That the glue that makes it stick. So um I think time has to be given to the fact that some sort of organizational change is happening as you do any of the other types of transformation. And I think it's important for it to be upfront and clear. And I I really liked how we were chatting about this as we came up with the phrase of intuitive or deliberate. There's a big difference between leaders who are intuitively changing culture versus those that thoughtfully change culture, sit down first and think about what the outcomes are that they're seeking and then take action to achieve that.

Cool. That was awesome. I love the conversation as always, Dave. That was uh fantastic. If if anybody wants to send us feedback, they can at feedback at definitely maybe agile.com. And uh look forward to next time.

Until next time, Peter. Thanks again.

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.