How to create an agile company culture
With only one change. It's easy to say, hard to implement.
Imagine this, and some of you won't have to use your imagination very much:
You're a technical leader or development manager in a corporation. You know the value of having an agile company — after all, agile teams consistently win against non-agile teams in direct competition — and you believe your company could benefit from a more agile culture. You come up with a plan to implement agile practices, and your plan is met with praise. After all, you're taking the initiative to create a fast and modern work environment.
In the executives' view, your fast, agile team will be able to quickly build exactly what they want you to build. Inevitably, that "build what I tell you" mentality leads to waterfall development practices, exactly the thing you're trying to escape! Now, you've introduced additional tension between an engineering organization that wants to be more agile, and everyone else who wants you to just fall in line and build what you're asked to build.
How do you actually make your company agile?
Here's a strategy to address the problem from one level deeper - the culture.
Suggest this one change, and you'll never have to even use the word "agile."
When anyone makes a decision, he or she must be solely responsible for the outcome of that decision.
This reasonable-sounding change can transform an organization. Make sure all executives are on-board and ready for a fight, however, as this won't be easy to implement. Entire careers are based on avoiding accountability. Before attempting this, you should think carefully about whether the prize for implementing this rule is worth the cost. Unless you have ownership shares in the company, it is likely a better use of your time to find an alternative source of income.
However, if this rule is implemented, a cascade of changes follow:
Defined metrics for success: To hold an individual responsible for an outcome means the desired outcome must be articulated and measurable. If a desired outcome cannot be measured or even articulated at all, the default response should be "We're not doing this." This will be the biggest fight, and it's why you need the full support of the executive team in implementing this strategy.
Personal investment: Decision-makers are now deeply invested in making sure they made the right decision. This will naturally lead them to conduct additional research, gather data, or conduct smaller tests before committing resources to large projects. Your organization is becoming more agile, and you didn't even have to ask anyone to read the agile manifesto.
Stronger meritocracy: Individuals who are comfortable taking personal accountability for their decisions, and who know they're capable of making good decisions, will emerge as the natural leaders of projects. Individuals who prefer making decisions without accountability will be filtered out.
Diminished office politics: When you don't value data, all you're left with is politics. There is less room for internal politics in an organization that values objective data higher than subjective opinions.
This cultural change has such significant effects because it eliminates moral hazard, arguably the biggest threat to any large organization. Moral hazard occurs when decision-makers are insulated from the consequences of their choices, incentivizing riskier behavior. Rapid feedback from reality is the only reliable way to make good decisions. When that feedback loop is broken, decisions are guaranteed to be sub-optimal. The larger the gap between the decision maker (managers, politicians, voters, etc.) and the person feeling the consequences of that decision, the greater the moral hazard and the worse the decision is likely to be.
This change won't naturally lead an entire organization into understanding agile software development, but it's the prerequisite cultural value for any organization that hopes to be agile in the future.