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I must confess that my Twitter knowledge and expertise is limited. I'm even skeptical of its value. But after July's Agile2016 conference in Atlanta, GA, I found that engaging via Twitter enriched my overall event experience. I learned quite a bit from the real-time chatter and continue to draw new learning moments from the pile of #Agile2016 tweets that amassed throughout the week. There is an overwhelming amount of content, so I sorted by the "top" tweets to see which moment might have resonated the most. What do you think it was?
The Most Retweeted Moment from Agile2016
Credit: Shane Hastie (tweet) and Joshua Kerievsky (speaker)
At last check, this one slide from Kerievsky's mid-week keynote had been retweeted 361 times (and growing). To put into context, the keynote focused on the proposed 4 principles of Modern Agile, one of which is Make Safety a Prerequisite. The website offers some clarity within this principle:
Safety is both a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. We actively make safety a prerequisite by establishing safety before engaging in any hazardous work. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. And we endeavor to make our collaborations, products and services resilient and safe.
Why is this?
A reasonable level of engagement was fueled by this moment. Why might this be? Do many of our talented knowledge-working professionals still work in a toxic culture of fear in their organizations? Are people just embracing the obvious? Was it just 'conference crowd bias' kicking in?
What do you think?
The impact of a fearful company culture is nothing new.
In the world of Agile and Lean Thinking, the impact of a 'culture of fear' is well understood in practice, and a quick Amazon search turns up thousands of books on this very subject. A common use case is when a company attempts to enact and grow Scrum within a software Product Delivery organization. Since Scrum is an expression of empirical process control, it requires transparency so that inspect & adapt interactions will result in informed decisions based on reality rather than fantasy. In a company culture that promotes transparency through courageous communication, I've often seen it lead to some amazing business outcomes.
Is your organization attempting to scale using SPS/Nexus, SAFe, LeSS, etc.? If so, all of those frameworks are empirical as well, so to maximize the business and economic benefits, all arguably require that the organization Make Safety a Prerequisite.
Why do I feel so strongly about this?
Each of us has a professional story that is emerging each day we enter our workplaces. I've been fortunate that, in my 23+ year career, I've only lived in a couple of organizations that promoted an aggressive culture of fear. In both cases, the outcomes of the work were a mess, the people were miserable, the environment drained my soul, and success was defined by something radically different than a shared team goal.
I'm hopeful that these toxic situations are a rare exception, but I imagine that they will always exist to some extent.
What does the future hold?
The tweet is chock full of insight. Without an open, honest and respectful company culture, people struggle to tell the truth and create a shared understanding of tough problems and solutions. That said, I've seen situations where some implementation of Agile & Lean practices garners a small benefit, even in companies that have a culture of fear. And lastly, I've also seen situations in transparent and healthy cultures where people made incorrect assumptions and placed the fear on themselves. So although the tweet sounds simple...it's actually more complex than we might realize.
In my mind, the real benefit is when Agile & Lean shine a light on the issue, so that an organization can acknowledge a culture misalignment and choose to solve for it.
In Closing
To tie this back to empirical scaling frameworks like SPS / SAFe / LeSS, the following is another popular retweet from the conference. Is your "Agile" operating model helping illuminate the culture of fear in your organization?
Credit: Paul Wynia (tweet) and Ryan Ripley (speaker)
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What do you make of this? Have we largely solved this problem in the Agile space, or is it a widespread issue that needs to be addressed at global scale? I hope you'll consider engaging with this post by sharing your views in the comments section below.