Change the Culture, Not the Process

Typically, when people think of business agility, processes are what comes to mind.

It does not have in mind that the culture is changed on the way to transform itself.

Here begins the conversation of how Scrum or extreme Programming or some other IT methodology can solve all our problems.

But business agility is not a process or a methodology.

It is a way of thinking. It is about continuous learning.

That is why we frame business agility as a way of thinking, the values??and principles behind what we do.

If you're approaching agility as a process, that's the only place your journey will take you, just another thing to do. Something from a book, like a cooking recipe.

But when you focus on business agility with agile coach online training as a set of cultural habits, your organization's agile transformation journey can change everything.

This is the difference in how culture is changed.

Culture vs Process

To get more into the matter, I would like to compare culture and process:

• Process change against Cultural change
• Focusing on processes and technology versus Focusing on people
• Cascading decisions against shared vision
• Training against Educate
• Communication against Acceptance
• Compliance against Commitment

So how do we transform the culture of our organization?

The culture is the result of all your organizational ecosystem.

First, think of culture as the result of your entire organizational ecosystem: the sum total of your leadership, people, strategies, processes, and structures.

Culture is determined by these elements and shapes them. It is the container that keeps these elements in balance with each other. And an aligned culture is where this ecosystem works in harmony. Let me insist on the concept of ecosystem.

Let's say your organization's leadership style is command and control and that this approach aligns with your strategies and measures of success.

So those structures are designed to promote this style of command and control. Your policies, procedures and processes support you. They also encourage it.

The people in your organization believe that a culture of command and control is best. Everything is in harmony: your culture is aligned.

Now let's say this command and control culture tries to embrace agile as a process.

Teams embrace agility by introducing more collaborative processes and practices: daily meetings, group estimating, collaborative planning, and team rooms.

But they are only changing the process. This puts your organizational culture out of control.

The processes are driving collaboration, but the remaining elements of the culture remain in command and control.

This usually happens when leaders' values??and habits do not change to become more collaborative.

Those systems do not encourage new collaborative processes. They don't help when the culture is changed.

Either way, any change that doesn't affect culture is unsustainable.

Eventually, people's cultural behaviors will roll back these new processes and align with the other elements.

conclusion

If we try to change one or two items but it doesn't bother to change everything else except the same results.

Your culture is like a rubber band.

That culture that is born will regress against any unbalanced pressure that is exerted on it.

Successful transformations are cultural.

The culture of your organization must change and can change.

The only way to do that? It changes all the elements that make up the ecosystem of your organization, together. As a shared ride. A journey that is done on foot.

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/cambia-la-cultura-no-el-proceso