Often it is necessary to clearly evoke the difference between “doing agile”: applying certain practices, and “being agile”: having integrated the culture, the agile mindset. And often it is necessary to recall that practices have no meaning when disconnected from the culture they are supposed to convey.

In fact for an organization it is absolutely necessary to understand this culture and to want to integrate it because the practices proposed by Scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban or others are often limited to fairly reductive operational aspects for a company. Naturally you will be able to, want to, reproduce project or product practices like the retrospective to a larger set, more encompassing: for example departmental retrospectives, organizational ones, with several dozen people, every 3 or 6 months; or you will be able to, want to work on the vision, the expression of needs on a fairly macro level in the organization, etc. It’s possible and even recommended.

But the closer we get to the organization as a whole (versus the project, the product) the less clear the practices are, the more obvious the importance of culture becomes.

Governance

Now let’s not be mistaken, as far as my experience is concerned, it is indeed first and foremost governance issues that we are confronted with: so whether agile or not doesn’t matter, whether it’s real agile, or show agile, or sorcerer’s apprentice agile, or something else, and XP rather than Scrum, Kanban, or Lean, CMMi or PMI, who cares!

Once again: the issues I am confronted with are governance issues. That is to say that the companies I encounter don’t clearly know where they are heading, why they are taking these directions, what is important to them, what are the challenges they face, how to clarify them, how to respond to them, how to prioritize, and once again: why. This can be broken down: not everyone has the same vision, not everyone places the same meaning behind the same words. Now if my clients, prospects or contacts are reading me they think: “he has some nerve evoking our situation in veiled terms”. If it can reassure you: I evoke thus many of my clients, prospects, contacts.

Recently again at the end of a seminar someone asked me: “but ultimately we mostly talked about organization, meaning, vision, challenges, and little about agile” (implied: sprint planning, tdd, flow management, estimates, planning, product owner, etc.) Think again! This is indeed the very essence of agile culture: this quest for meaning (“why?”). Everything else is just the execution plan: the practices. And this execution necessarily comes only a posteriori.

Meaning, challenges, coherence

I could push the envelope further and say that even the question of agile culture comes only after: first find the challenges, the meaning, the why of your organization. Then governance is the coherence that we organize around this meaning. It’s up to you then to decide whether this governance should be agile or not.

However where agile comes into its own is that this search for meaning is part of its culture. Agile culture which inherits from post-war Lean thinking (Deming, Ohno) is based on respect for people*, continuous improvement, the quest for value and meaning (why). Continuous improvement thus implying an ongoing quest and ongoing questioning (that’s the difficult point of agile).

So when organizations realize that before all else they must question their quest for meaning and value they are at the heart of agile culture (and acquiring agile culture is the best way to respond to it).

The essence of agile culture is meaning

When we talk about governance, what I therefore associate with the application of operational coherence relative to the organization’s vision, we evoke in my eyes the application of an agile culture: we have a vision, let’s be transparent about its application, let’s have the courage for its application, let’s communicate to everyone about it, let’s inspect the results of this application (feedback), let’s adapt ourselves to follow this vision, let’s focus on this vision without straying, let’s stay simple in this objective, etc. and beyond the “operational” practices of agile that thus “implement”.(That’s why I am at the opposite end of necessarily associating agile and code. That may have been the case historically, they are above all coders who bounce off Lean thinking, but today we are beyond that, agile code practices are just one emanation among others of practices related to a broader culture, beyond “software”).

Hence also sometimes, often, the difficulties of “bottom-up” agile: teams implement an agile culture but these quickly clash with the company’s culture, they highlight the inconsistencies of the organization’s vision and governance.

There is no clear path to agile culture. Sometimes it’s the application of practices that make meaning emerge. Sometimes it’s a psychological, cultural shock that convinces, a revelation, sometimes it’s a slow maturation; chance, or natural elimination Darwin/Lamarck style: only organizations that make sense will survive.

* I remind you that you can have a philanthropic reading of this statement, as well as cynical (let’s empower people, let’s respect them, it’s good for performance, it’s good for business).