Cultural Requirements for Agile Success

Larry Senn, a pioneer in corporate culture, concluded, ‘Culture is not an initiative. Culture is the enabler of all initiatives.’

Agile approaches require a culture shift from traditional project management.  So, how do you know if your corporate culture inhibits your organization from adopting agile practices?

Here are four major factors to consider:

First, look at your organizational structure. Traditional hierarchical organizations are vertically oriented with clear reporting lines. In these scenarios, managers can view agile as merely a tool for speed rather than a comprehensive shift in work culture. Agile requires work to be done horizontally across departments, teams, and expertise. The risk is having too much emphasis on vertical alignment and insufficient horizontal cross-team activity. In this case, the required employee empowerment, autonomy, and accountability are inadequate, and the collaboration Agile requires falls short.

Second, assess the organization’s preferred leadership style. The way your executives, managers, and middle managers lead has a significant impact on your agility. A leader’s directing style can hinder people from working better and developing new ideas. Leaders in agile companies are there to help and guide their teams. They act as visionaries and coaches, empowering competent individuals to lead, collaborate, and deliver exceptional results. Leaders directing work without understanding and endorsing agile values and practices keep teams from collaborating and developing new ideas.

Third, evaluate your organization’s view of Agile. For organizations to embrace the agile mindset, buy-in must come from all levels. Agile is not just a methodology; it’s how people work and interact daily.  It requires a holistic alignment of culture, leadership, and governance. The Agile Business Consortium identifies seven elements that constitute the DNA of an Agile culture, offering a Development Matrix for Agile Culture to help organizations assess and enhance their agility across these dimensions. The seven elements range from organizational alignment and leadership to collaboration and innovation. When those seven elements are misaligned, Agile will struggle to come to life.  (https://www.agilebusiness.org/resource/video-seven-elements-of-agile-culture-dna.html)

Finally, learning and innovation must be embraced. Running regular retrospectives to learn from successes and failures is a core principle in Agile. Reviewing and improving performance is key. Suppose your organization seeks to find the guilty or struggles to review performance objectively, learn from initiatives, and incorporate lessons learned in future initiatives. In that case, your likelihood of succeeding with Agile isn’t great.

This article is based on my and Christina Charenkova’s LinkedIn Learning course entitled AI-Powered Agile: Strategies for Modern Project Managers