Agile = Culture

One of the common themes in Scrum — and its agile siblings Lean, Kanban, and DevOps — is that success is really founded in attitude and culture. The Scrum Guide defines Scrum as a lightweight framework for working on complex products and problems that is simple to understand and difficult to master. I take issue with the idea that it is simple to understand — for reasons I’ll elaborate here; although those issues are entirely consistent with the intention of Scrum.

The Heart of Scrum

To understand the issues I am taking with the idea that Scrum is simple to understand, we need to delve more deeply into what scrum really is. In one sense, the Scrum Guide is perfect for this — it describes scrum as three roles, four events, and three artefacts. It also describes Scrum theory in terms of three pillars of empirical process control and five foundation values. The value of scrum — and thereby its measure of success — is founded on establishing the empirical process which, in turn, is built upon the underlying values. In this view, the material aspects of agile — such as the scrum roles, events, and artefacts — are superficial. Mastery of scrum — or agile — demands a culture of empiricism. To put this another way, you can introduce scrum and not be agile. The reason I am arguing that scrum is not easy to understand is that while the specific practices of scrum are well defined, a genuine understanding of the cultural foundations of Scrum and why that foundation is so important is much harder to grasp — and is the reason why scrum is difficult to master.

The idea that agile is cultural is a rich and complex topic for discussion that it gels with my own experiences of scrum and agile. I’ve been in businesses that have adopted the practices of scrum without the culture and it is, at best, of limited value and at worst, destructive — introducing anti-patterns, generating resistance to change, and potentially instilling very different values and norms to the team and the organisation.

To explore this topic in more detail, I’ll start this post by looking at the cultural foundations of agile — illustrated with three well-known examples. I’ll then shift attention to the content of the core values of agile. These ideas will lay the foundations for future papers in this series that draw on a wider range of ideas to explore culture, leadership, change, and drawing those explorations into lessons for an agile coach.

Cultural Agility

In a sense, Agile came into being with the creation of the Agile manifesto in 2001 produced by a small group of developers who met to talk and discuss approaches they were already using for software development. The manifesto describes agile through a set of opposing concepts — drawing four lines by describing the end-points and clearly staking the agile tent at one end of each line. This wasn’t the first time the term “agile” was used and the family of practices that were included in agile had been emerging for around 20 years. But the agile manifesto brought these practices together and gave them a name and a definition. The psychology and sociology of naming and defining is profound — and would make an interesting digression — but for now, I think it’s worth drawing your attention to one point: the organising concept for the manifesto is value: “we have come to value…”.

To understand this idea and its implications, we go back to the godfather of it all: Toyota. The NUMMI case is well known in the agile community, with the case being described in the Poppendicks’ book in the early 1990s. A badly underperforming GM plant was closed then re-opened as a joint venture with Toyota’s management introducing the Toyota Production System. They rehired the same staff but introduced the Toyota Production System and NUMMI plant was producing vehicles at the same rate and quality as Toyota’s Japanese plants. If this were the whole story, it would be interesting — but there are a couple of codas that add a fascinating twist. Firstly, GM: they had failed to replicate the success of NUMMI at other US sites 15 years later. Secondly, Toyota started seeing quality problems in their other US plants — leading to recalls. Their President, Akio Toyoda, attributed these problems to growing too fast, too soon and to ignoring the underlying principles of TPS. These codas speak to the broader critique of Lean: that the specific practices were developed to solve specific problems faced by Toyota but were not the essence of their success. And to genuinely adopt Lean means to adopt the philosophy and culture of Lean, rather than just the tools and methodologies: the success of lean stems from its philosophy and culture.

We see the same idea in DevOps: Patrick DuBois, who coined the term DevOps, describes it was a human problem; John Willis and Damon Edwards introduced the term CAMS (Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing) to describe the core values of DevOps; the most recent State of DevOps report highlights the importance of transformational leadership to establish a culture necessary for high-performing teams. While its easy to get trapped into thinking that DevOps is about automation and measurement, a real differentiator between high and low performing IT teams is having a ‘generative culture’: that is a culture that supports novelty, innovation, and creativity. That’s not to say that it’s all culture: successful DevOps and high-performing teams need good technical practices. But neither culture nor practices are sufficient on their own.

These three cases show that the agile manifesto was a statement of value; Toyota’s success is founded on the philosophy and culture of lean (and failures due to losing sight of that foundation); and that culture , created through leadership, is a necessary element of successful DevOps. Together, they make the argument that agile is, at its core, culture.

Common Values

If we take a look at the values of Scrum and the central ideas of the generative culture espoused by The State of DevOps — with a few references to the agile manifesto and principles thrown in for good measure.

Scrum (from the Scrum Guide 2017 on scrum.org)

• People personally commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum Team
• The Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing and work on tough problems
• Everyone focuses on the work of the Sprint and the goals of the Scrum Team
• The Scrum Team and its stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work
• Scrum Team members respect each other to be capable, independent people

Generative Culture (from A typology of organisational cultures)

• Performance-Oriented
• High co-operation
• Messengers trained
• Risks are shared
• Bridging encouraged
• Failure leads to inquiry
• Novelty implemented

While these two lists are not the same, they’re highly compatible: it is easy to see how an organisation with a generative culture would have a team operating in accordance with the scrum values; and both are compatible with the agile manifesto and principles. These lists are different because they’re talking about different things: common values shared by a team compared with the cultural norms of an organisation. One possibility is that the team level values are a manifestation of the organisational level culture; or that both are manifestations of a deeper underlying set of cultural dimensions.

Digging Deeper

I started this post by talking about scrum and highlighting that the success of scrum is built in adherence to the scrum values. I’ve elaborated that this is consistent across other agile methodologies and concluding that organisational culture is essential to agile. I’ve then looked at the content of the cultural statements for DevOps and Scrum — emphasising their compatibility. While this is an interesting discussion, nothing here should be particularly surprising to anyone who knows agile.

If we take seriously the notion of agile as being an organisational culture then that raises a series of questions that warrant further thought.

The first question is to delve more deeply into understanding what culture is in general — and to translate this back to the foundations of agile. The second is to look in to approaches to organisational change — particularly ideas of behaviour-led culture change. A third is an extension of this — the relationship between leadership, culture, and change. Lastly, I will look at how the ideas of culture, change, and leadership shape agile transformation and the role of the agile coach or scrum master.