Changing methods is easy. Changing culture is hard

While IT delivery is typically seen as a technical discipline, Telstra’s CIO sees that it’s more about culture and attitude. Agile is more than a technical buzzword - it’s being woven into the fabric of Telstra’s IT operations.

I am going to make a very bold statement ...

“Telstra will be one of the most successful stories of enterprise Agile at scale in the world, and that will be more due to its culture than its Agile methods.”

I want to focus on this point - if you do not change culture, then it doesn’t matter what method you employ, because ultimately people are going to do the same thing they have always done.

Agile is a way of working. It’s a set of social, technical and management practices, principles and behaviours that drive a more productive and enjoyable experience. I have found over the last 10 years that most people who have experienced an agile way of working never go back.

An agile culture is underpinned by the values of courage, accountability and trust. Done properly, the benefits are many. They include ensuring business value is delivered, improving customer satisfaction, better risk identification and management, and higher quality.

All of which will see increased revenue and profitable growth. The inevitable savings in time and cost are happy by-products of that.

Why ‘go Agile’ now?

To have any hope of thriving in the 21st century, Telstra must be more adaptable and respond faster than our competitors to meet new demands, with the level of quality and service expected by our customers.

Telstra IT must deliver a source of competitive advantage. This is all in a world where the answers are not obvious, where the solutions needed are not straightforward and 10% year-on-year efficiency gains will not get you there.

The use of the internet from desktop computers is rapidly becoming marginal compared to mobile use. Global mobile data traffic is predicted to grow by 26 times over the next five years.

For Telstra, this means we need to provide continued network capacity to satisfy an ever-growing demand for new applications and e-commerce business models.

To meet these challenges we need to do things differently. Not just through adopting new methods, but also by adopting a culture that’s adaptive, ready to challenge existing constraints and ready to seize emerging opportunities.

But what is ‘culture’ …

Culture can be hard to define due to its many components that are not readily visible - rules, perceptions, values and beliefs. If ‘the way we do things around here’ is a culture, then I’d argue that Agile is also a culture.

In many organisations, we still see widespread symptoms of the industrial age way of working. Corporate planners value cost control over innovation and organisations are structured into functional silos rather than for multifunctional end-to-end flow. Mistakes hidden or forgotten rather than aired and discussed and delivering the plan wins over learning and adaptation.

We are now in the knowledge era - a global world linked more than ever and enabled through technology. Change is constant and relentless, and quickening. We need new ways of working, learning, collaborating and living.

So how do you change culture?

Choose a clear, safe path: People need to see a clear and safe path towards change. You need to explain why change is needed, what success looks like and how we get there. Most organisations fail to change culture because they expect people to arrive at a destination without having experienced the journey. We must remember that the existing culture is ‘trusted’, even if it is not always ‘liked’.

Tell stories: Stories of your prior successes, and more importantly, your failures, serve to show that change can be simple, well-intentioned and directed to build trust for its own sake. Stories are powerful in driving belief in change.

Learning and failure: People need education and experience, in order to internalise the learning and adopt an agile mindset. This can’t be forced and occurs at a different pace for each person. Creating a learning environment, where trying new ways is encouraged and failure is openly acknowledged, is a step to learning.

Breed a performance culture: Visibly support and trust people, invest in their development and show you want them to be successful. Then stretch, challenge and surprise them with what they can achieve. Their experiences and reactions becomes a force-multiplier for the culture change.

Walk the walk: If your organisation tolerates mediocre behaviour from its leaders, it is not going to achieve an agile culture. True leaders help their people to change the way they think and adapt to new ways of working - while managing their own anxiety about change.

Build up a trust culture: Integral to the building of trust is the exchange of feedback. This means hearing truths about yourself as well as delivering them. Upward feedback develops a mutual accountability and transparency between managers and the team for the sort of leadership behaviours you need in a performance culture.

Listen to the ideas that are coming from the people on the ground. They have relationships with stakeholders, see processes and know the strengths and weaknesses around them. Emerging patterns from feedback tell you much about the wider culture - where it’s risk averse, weak and where there are strengths. Encouraging shared goals makes the team a measure of success, not the individual - and this can go a long way to developing trust and collaboration.

Making it happen ...

Changing an organisational culture to an agile mindset is a complex undertaking.  All sorts of organisational blockers need to be addressed, but can only be addressed by those who have already embraced some of the change.

You need to move your partners and vendors with you. This can be helped by co-locating teams and changing your terms of engagement - remove contractual terms that drive undesirable behaviours. You are the one changing - help others to follow!

Invest in continuous funding to support iterative developments - make it known that it’s okay to not get it right the first time, but fail fast and recover quickly.

Update your traditional measures and metrics for time to value, velocity and agile maturity - what gets measured gets done, and old measures will drive old methods.

Keep training your people in Agile fundamentals, Agile roles, Scrum, Systems Thinking, Lean & Kanban. This is a journey and it will take time.

The culture change is starting to bite

Agile organisations get the balance between the hard and the soft elements right. The governance, processes and organisational structure are not incongruent with the core aspects of an agile culture - they are necessary and fit for purpose. Above all, they drive visibility and transparency, of performance, risks and value delivered.

The beauty of agile technical practices and processes is that they build and reinforce the behaviours that sustain an agile culture: stand-ups, retrospectives, pairing, time boxing, iterative delivery, showcases, retrospectives and sustainable pace.

The paradox for organisations changing culture is that it takes time - and the environment is ruthless, relentless and needs change now.

The exciting truth at Telstra is that as the results from cultural change start to flow, they significantly exceed expectations.