Behavior as a medium for change

Culture > Process

Continuously evolve your processes

Matt Lane
Matt Lane
Jan 17 · 9 min read
Source: Ken Wilber; AQAL Matrix

Culture is the stuff people do without noticing it


Culture reveals itself from the values and attitudes of people. Ok, so what are the values and attitudes we want to shape and how do we achieve a set of desired cultural artifacts within our organizations? This is what I will briefly focus on in this article.

NOTE: The following synthesized ideas and concepts discussed here are relevant for individual contributors, managers, leaders, founders, board members…humans. More specifically, the readers I have in mind here are innovation/product leaders working in a professional setting, i.e. technology as a service (TaaS) enterprises (aka IT).


I’d like to start by stating how important it is to continuously create culture, not just consume it, otherwise it becomes an engine detached from the interests of the individual (or small groups, e.g. teams, or other affinity groups) that perpetuates a pattern — that others made — to prevail, which may not allow you, the individual, to claim your best self.

An organization (enterprise/company) is a human system, an aggregation of cultural values. That is the most important thing to understand (at least, when reading through the rest of this article). Culture never exists separately from the social, or the behavioral, or the intentional dimensions (see Wilber’s AQAL Matrix; Figure 1) of existence. And so because we are talking about culture and organizational processes, it is important to remember that everything is interdependent and that we must maintain a holistic view of the enterprise if we hope to, for example, increase profits and market share.

So, where do we begin…?

We begin with the self. That is because you have to improve yourself before an approximation toward a change of culture can occur. That means to have influence among others, you must adapt, evolve, and be trusted.

Let’s start by looking at Carol Dweck’s two mindsets model below.

Interesting tidbit: In the initial stages of Steve Job’s career at Apple, he exhibited a fixed mindset and expected (and valued) others to have a growth mindset. Interesting…

Dweck’s research has uncovered that individuals who maintain a growth mindset develop greater self-awareness, can more effectively advance their career, and generate a positive influence across an organization, no matter its scale.

Consider having your team members periodically fill out these 4 columns and review it with them. This template, developed by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, should help them track and reflect on their development.

See https://www.executiveinspiration.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Immmunity-to-Change-Guide.pdf for more information on how to use this framework.

Work on yourself first, work on developing your skills and personal growth. That is a requirement before the following concepts in this article can be effectively applied in an organization.

You will be better situated for growth if you understand one thing very clearly:

You are the observer of your social identity, of what you call yourself. Now, when you realize that all those thoughts about yourself are simply observations through, what sages throughout history have called, the seer, and this is not only understood but felt, it should become easier to develop, to self-actualize, i.e., you understand you are not just your thoughts— and so, you can remove needless barriers that impede self-awareness. Being aware of this ontological reality may in fact help prime an individual’s psychology to adopt a growth mindset quickly, as they are no longer attached to all of the ideas about what they call themselves, or how others wish to understand them. Then, the individual becomes willing to engage in personal development, to actively improve, to change where change is needed, to see things as they really are, and to become more aware, more skilled, hopefully gain a better sense of humor, and, last but not least, maintain trust from your colleagues, friends (and strangers), and family.

This is important because we want an organization, we need leadership, to trust and empower teams; and so, to do that, employees should be competent and trustworthy (this goes both ways), and managers need to find better ways to staff, coach, and get the most out of the team-level objectives.

Moving up a level…

Now, let’s take a look at John Shook’s model below. Arguments can go both ways regarding the effectiveness of the old and the new model. I think there is, like in many theories, a bit of a fallacy here, i.e., making dichotomous judgments. At the end of the day, these things are really just scaler, not binary. There are tradeoffs— there are no right or wrong answers here.

That said, Shook’s model is rather helpful in the context of understanding how to influence organizational culture in that it is easier to leverage environmental (external) artifacts to influence change rather than to effectively reprogram everyone’s “operating system” (minds) directly (which most likely results in an outcome that resembles that of a cult).

So, what is the optimal way of changing the behaviors of individuals to influence a culture for the better?


Given we are focused on TaaS organizations, I will pull on research that has implications for people working in similar environments, i.e., software product development, and continue to point to well received research that demonstrates how changing processes is a great first step to influence organizational culture.

The Science of Lean Software and DevOps research, as seen below, is one model I have found that clearly explains how to drive enterprise-level transformation for TaaS organizations. Take a look at the overall research program map. I recommend reading Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim to understand this research in greater detail.

Boxes represent the constructs measured, while arrows signify a predictive relationship — meaning, a construct that points to another construct can be said to drive, affect, or impact the other construct, significantly.
Source: Westrum organizational culture

What I would like to do now is provide a few more templates that you, as a product leader, can use to get started on this long organizational transmigration.

So, steal these now:

  • You can use the questions in these transformational surveys and populate its contents into whatever survey software tool you happen to use at your company. Send it to, for example, the product development organization regularly, especially after enough changes have been implemented so you can keep a pulse on their effects, i.e., if those decisions are helping or hurting organizational and/or noncommercial performance
  • The next template is specific to product leaders. This assessment template can help you coach and develop talent. If you are outside of the discipline of product management, you should still be able to take away things that you can apply to your specific function, such as the value of communicating success criteria and defining the roles and responsibilities across your teams, clearly, and at each level. That said, this template assists in communicating to your product team what success looks like. I do caution that using the following coaching plan only in the context of annual performance reviews will lead to over-indexing on the individual and away from a focus on evaluating the individual as a unit of a team (assuming you have formed teams around products. If not, fix that ASAP). Instead, ACTIVELY manage talent via the 1-on-1 meeting. Annual reviews are generally for the benefit of HR compliance and allocating compensation, not individual growth to enhance team performance
  • This last template is for product leaders managing disaggregated, dedicated (independent), vertically sliced, loosely coupled, mission based cross-functional product teams who are building separate parts of the product experience (within product portfolios/lines) and where there are only asynchronous dependencies to other teams (not real-time dependencies, only collaborative ones). Sorry for that mouthful; nevertheless, it is important you, the leader in a technology organization, understand all of that. The following calendar template (thanks to Tom Chi) is an aid, a blueprint, in how to make practical changes by augmenting the schedules for, especially, swarms of self-steering (frontline) customer facing teams, i.e., what their work week should look like. This is a starting point, so configure it, adapt to it, and evolve it; but, understand where not to go astray. Maybe one week the team deviates and want to run a design sprint or a hack week event. That is more than fine; however, when you complete your sprint(s), you should then move back to this cadence

Let’s quickly breakdown how to read this user-centered team calendar:

  • The blue slots, or entries, represent time when we actually do work, e.g. aligning on opportunities and solutions, building prototypes, and then moving a successful prototype into version control + placed under change control (using small feature branches that are short-lived) for a live-data prototype release/rolled out new feature
  • The red slots are mandatory meetings where retros every Friday can be replaced with bi-weekly demo days (retros 1 week on, then 1 week off)
  • The green slots represent changes to the prototype’s visual and UX design
  • The yellow slots are when to test our prototypes with customers (micro RITE studies and ethnographic research)
  • The pink slots enable teams to generate a share understanding about changes to make to the prototype and what to share with the rest of the product portfolio teams

At the beginning of this article, I asked two questions: what are the values and attitudes we want to shape, and how do we achieve a set of desired cultural artifacts? Hopefully it is now a bit clearer how a performance-oriented culture can be driven by transformational leadership and the subsequent constructs those changes influence thereafter— and that the artifacts are not only the practices and principles of establishing a proper software and team architecture pairing for the business. We saw that it is also the individual qualities of the employees and leaders of the organization themselves that must undergo continuous improvement, where everyone embraces learning how to learn, where they are focusing on personal development, and work hard to visibly track individual growth, actively.

I touched on just a few things you can do to optimize your organizational culture. Thats said, I do hope this article helps you to get started and interested in digging deeper into the research referenced here, which I believe will support your TaaS organization achieve greater market share.

At the end of the day, it is good economics and a sound business strategy to adopt these practices. So, uncover the opportunities to change processes in your organization to positively influence the behaviors and values of people and their work, for the better.


Matt Lane

Written by

Matt Lane

As a product leader, I course correct the product development process and empower product teams. Here, I write about product and innovation.

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