Show Notes
In the final part of this three-part series on Culture, Mon-Chaio and Andy delve into the forces that promote as well as resist cultural change. They share one of their own failed cultural change initiatives and uncover what Egyptian pharaohs and Spanish fire walkers can teach us about creating long-lasting cultural change.
Opening quote from “Rituals are important to human life — even when they seem meaningless”.
References:
- Two Views of Communication: Transmission & Ritual
- Rituals are important to human life — even when they seem meaningless
- Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Analysis
- The Role of Metaforces in Cultural Motion (Greg Urban)
- Move to Akhentaton
- Shifting the Patterns (If Price, Ray Shaw)
- Agile Conversations
- How are rituals and religious beliefs interconnected?
- Espoused Theory and Theory in Use
Transcript
Mon-Chaio: So as we study rituals from both a humanistic, but also scientific perspective, we come to see that even if people engage in those rituals without any explicit purpose, there is no particular causal connection between the actions they undertake and that purpose.
But even so, just because ritual does not have any direct causal effect in the world, it does not mean it has no effect in the world at all. In fact rituals play very important functions in human societies. They help individuals through their anxieties, connect to one another. They help people find meaning In their lives
Andy: Welcome back to another episode of Tactics for Technical Leadership, where we’re gonna be talking about culture again.
Mon-Chaio: Again?
Andy: Again. We told everyone we’d be doing this, and so you shouldn’t be that surprised. So let’s talk about culture again.
I’m gonna give a quick recap of what we have talked about already. In our first episode, we worked around and got a definition of culture that we put as “the rituals and symbols that are transmitted between individuals in a group. And those are the ones that govern their behaviors and beliefs or values.” And from that definition, then we discussed: is it really that important? And we came to the conclusion, yeah, it’s pretty important. And I think it’s hidden in that definition, it affects your behaviors and the sum of all of your behaviors or more than the sum of your behaviors is what then the organization does. You can say your culture determines what you can do.
And then we had the, I think, slightly trickier question of: is it something you should hire for? And there we said, I think I would say it for myself, as it’s something that you can’t not hire for. It’s intrinsically there. So your best bet is to pay attention to it.
But we also value diversity. At least culturally we do. And if you value diversity, then what that means is you need to allow for aspects of your culture to vary. You want that variation to get new ideas. But you also don’t want to just let everything be different, in which case there’ll be clashes and misunderstandings and things that can’t work.
So you want to identify a small core, the smallest core possible, that you don’t want to vary, and let other things vary in your hiring. So you actually wanna be very deliberate about this, about how small you can make that and still have a group that can work together, that their behaviors and values are governed in a way that is additive rather than just subtractive.
Mon-Chaio: Or random.
Andy: Or random. Yes.
And then in our second episode on this topic, we asked the question of is there such thing as better culture? Because quite often people are like, oh, you need to improve your culture. And we wanted to dig into what exactly does that mean? What could that mean? And what we came to in that was that better culture is culture that is more closely aligned within the organization between what they will espouse is their values and what their behaviors are, which you can say you can derive their true values from those behaviors. And the more aligned you can get those things, the lower the gap between what we termed the espoused theory and the theory in use, the closer those are, probably the better culture you have, because people can agree, they’ve lost that mismatch between what they do and what they say. And we tied that to a possible source of burnout, if those are too far apart, then you’ll encounter issues there.
And we also tried to touch on, within the audience that we want to be talking to and where we spend our lives, which is in tech, is there such a thing as a universally better culture? There’s probably lots of variation, which is good to hear. But we came to a few basic things that we think probably should be in there. One of them was curiosity. The culture that values curiosity and has behaviors that aid curiosity. What you termed a market culture, which is customer focus. This idea that you are doing your activities, you’re creating your product for that outside world, for that market. And the last one that we came up with was compassion. The ability to understand those differences and work with them, which kind of you could say fits back onto our first thing about should you hire for cultural fit and we said let as much vary as you can, you need the compassion to make that work.
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely.
Andy: So that’s where we are now, Mon-Chaio, where do we go now? What’s next?
Mon-Chaio: I think there’s really only one part left. Oddly, I think this might be the most difficult part, but I think we needed everything we talked about previously to set the stage for that. And I think what’s left is, okay, culture is important, you should hire for it. We know what good culture looks like, so now how do we get there?
Either how do I start fresh and build the culture I want, or probably more common, I don’t have the culture that I want, how do I get there? In order to start that conversation, we actually have to agree that culture is changeable, is malleable, right? We’ve touched on this a little bit. It, but maybe I’ll start with that question. Why do we believe culture is malleable? Why isn’t it just, well, you gather a group of individuals together and whatever exists, exists, and man, you can’t really change that. Or you shouldn’t, how could you, are you playing God?
Andy: Playing God. Isn’t that why a lot of us got into programming though, to play God? I used to explain programming to people that way is I love this because I get to play God.
Mon-Chaio: I would agree with the programming part of it. I think a lot of people get into management for that reason, which I think is quite a bit less appealing or valid .
Andy: I would say yes, if I had that mindset as a manager, I don’t think things would end well.
Mon-Chaio: But getting back to the question, though, why do we believe culture is changeable?
Andy: I would start from the very first thing that you said. Do we hire a group of people, just throw them together, and you get what you get. If you accept that putting that group of people together will create some culture, what you’re saying is that culture you get will depend upon what those people have coming into it. Which means if you change the members of that group, you’ll get something different.
Mon-Chaio: Agreed.
Andy: So I would say right there, we have the idea that culture is in some way something we can affect. Now, purely that hiring and just whatever happens is a little random, it’s a little uncontrolled, but I think it does set that base level that yes, we can affect it in some way.
Would you agree with that?
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. I would say the other thing is just gut feel, right? Because culture just doesn’t exist in companies, it exists all around the world. We’ve talked about it invades everything you do. And if you look some more understood cultures, national cultures we might call them, of countries and ethnicities and people, we could see that over time they change, they don’t look the same. I think maybe that’s the less interesting question, they absolutely change. But maybe the more interesting question is should they be thoughtfully changed or is that dangerous?
Is it responsible for someone to say, look, I have a view of culture and I am sculpting it, versus letting it take fold more naturally and saying obviously culture changes, but it’s either irresponsible or nearly impossible for me to control it, and so I shouldn’t
Andy: My take on this, because I start from the premise, the culture is the thing that determines our behaviors, as a leader or as a manager, I see my primary responsibility about making sure that we’ve got the right behaviors to help us be effective in what we’re supposed to be doing.
So I would say that my primary role as a leader or manager is to shape culture.
Is that the way you view it, Mon-Chaio, or do you see it as something different?
Mon-Chaio: No, absolutely. I would say I view it exactly the same way. The whole point of culture is to gather a group of people together to do great things, to be more than a sum of their parts, and that does not happen randomly. Random collision does not make that happen.
Andy: But it also gives a useful guidance, back to our thing about hiring, you want to aim for influence in creating the most high leverage things, that small number of very important things and let others vary a bit. So this isn’t like controlling every aspect of how people think or how they behave. This is about choosing a few very specific things that will have that big, highly leveraged, high impact network effect across the entire organization.
I’m not gonna say it’s easy to do, but it is, I think, within the realm of what the lead and the manager should be doing, paying attention to that and always reflecting on, do we have that right bit? How can we influence it to get that more strongly? Or I’ve been emphasizing the wrong thing, now I need to shift that.
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. And I’m glad you referenced that hiring point because as we talk through influencing culture, I think it is really important to keep in mind that concept of core values. We didn’t define the number, but we said the lower the better. That’s not always true. You can have too few and then you get randomness. But you should really focus, like you were saying, on the leverage points, of making sure the core things are emphasized over and over again and get built very strongly.
Andy: And I think right there we have possibly one of our first tactics for how can you influence culture. You can simply referenced those values and those behaviors again and again. You’re gonna feel like a broken record. And in fact, one thing I’ve heard people say is “if you’re not bored of saying it, people haven’t heard it enough.” You have to say that message again and again.
I remember at one place I worked, we had a kind of a value that was said all the time. It would show up in discussions constantly. And that value was don’t drop data. We were a data company. So our big value was don’t drop data.
And that, you could say, became one of our cultural touchpoints. And this came up as like how we would make decisions, how we would evaluate the trade-offs between different approaches to an architecture. “Which one of these would cause us to drop data?” If one of those causes us to drop data, that’s not the one we’re doing,
But it came up so much, the CTO would bring it up again and again, to the point where we’re just like, yes, we know. Don’t drop data. But that’s the point at which, we’ve got it.
Mon-Chaio: I think that is an interesting example because a lot of times when technical people think about saying things over and over again until you’re tired of hearing them, it’s unnatural for folks. And I think one of the reasons it’s unnatural is because it is not a natural style of communication. If you look at research around communication, there’s this type of communication called transmission communication, which is everything that we are used to. You say things in order to transmit information. This is why we’re doing this podcast, right? We’re taking information that we know or think, and we’re transmitting it out. It happens at work. We have a meeting because we need to tell people something or they know something and we need to hear it, right? Transmission of information. But when we’re talking about what you were just saying, this repeated again and again until you get tired of hearing it, that’s not about transmission of information, is it?
Andy: No, because we all know exactly what’s going to be said.
Mon-Chaio: And there is another method of communication that they call ritual communication, or some people call it cultural communication, where the purpose is not transmission of information, but it’s what some researchers say “draws people together in fellowship and commonality.” And I like that statement because fellowship and commonality flows very closely with how we define culture, this bringing the group together for a central set of values and behaviors and beliefs.
Andy: Yeah. And to go back to my example of don’t drop data, that became a very cultural thing, especially when that group came in contact with other groups that didn’t have that same value and behavior, where we could see how much it had become part of the way we thought. Because in that difference, we could see that ritual of saying these words again and again had really changed the way that we thought about things.
Mon-Chaio: That’s a great segue into rituals. It’s not the first time that we’ve mentioned it because it’s in our definition of culture, but we haven’t really talked it through. We haven’t said, what is a ritual? Do you think this is a good time to dive into that?
Andy: I think so, ’cause if we’re gonna talk about cultural change, we gotta talk about rituals. So now is as good as time, as any.
Mon-Chaio: And again, I think rituals are challenging for a lot of folks because it’s not something that you’re used to doing. And I would say, especially as we move towards more asynchronous work, the value of each time we come together has to be higher and higher because the cost of coming together is higher and higher, right?
Every Zoom meeting is more difficult than a hallway conversation. Every physical gathering where you fly people into a central office is more expensive than gathering over lunch. The barriers are higher. And so you start to say is it worth it to gather these people together? Should I call this meeting? And I think oftentimes, especially in the tech world, value is only seen for transmissive communication. If I’m not communicating information to one another, it’s not valuable to gather people together.
But rituals are a completely different thing because rituals aren’t necessarily about communicating information. In fact, often they aren’t. But then what are they? Can we say what they are and why they’re important to building culture?
Andy: I think rituals are important because, rather than the information being transmitted, they reinforce the behaviors of how information will get transmitted , or what information should be transmitted, as well as the values and beliefs about what is important, what’s not important.
So, for instance, if you have the ritual of a daily standup and you follow the standard three question pattern, then you are reinforcing the value and belief that what you did yesterday, what you’re doing today, and what any blockers are, are the most important information to be discussing. You’ve set up this ritual of every day, that is probably the one thing that brings everyone together.
The transmission of the information is almost secondary to that ritual setting up the way you want people to think.
Mon-Chaio: I’m glad you used the standup example because so many people think about standup as transmission of information, and you’ve seen, especially in remote working, people will say why do standup at all? Can I just send out a daily status report instead, can I just type my standup messages into slack? And all of those transmit equal amounts of information, but they’re unequal in the ritual aspects of it.
Andy: Yeah so I think the answer is absolutely you can, but you’ll create a different culture from it.
And so I think in terms of change in your culture, as the leader, as the manager, you need to think about what is that new culture that creates? Is that the one that you want? Is that closer to the values that you want people to have?
And so let’s talk about how people can think about selecting rituals, or selecting ritual communication, that can help them change their culture, because I think simply changing your ritual may not work.
Mon-Chaio: I think it’s really important, we do want to get to that, we wanna spend time on that. I wanna spend just a little bit more time reinforcing why ritual is so important in culture
Andy: Yep.
Mon-Chaio: And I wanna bring some research. So we talked about rituals often not being about transmission of information. So what do they do? And a lot of research says what rituals do is they help connect people. And that connectedness helps people work through their anxieties and manage their emotions.
So an interesting study, for example, is a fire walking ritual in Spain. Some researchers, probably anthropologists, went out and they noticed that during the fire walking ritual, everybody’s heart rates were synchronized. Not just the fire walkers, but the audience’s as well. Which is really interesting, right? You would not expect that necessarily, what they said was they think rituals … let me just read the quote from this paper. They say “rituals play a role in bringing the emotional reactions of the members of that community into alignment. And by aligning our appearances, aligning our emotions, those rituals can actually lead to social alignment.”
And of course, as we’ve stated, while we don’t want a hundred percent social alignment, we need some good portion of social alignment in order to be more than the sum of our parts.
Andy: Can you think of some rituals … because I doubt that we’ll be asking people to do fire walking, can you think of some rituals in software development that might lead to similar things? We’ve said the standup, I think the standup can act as a bit of that. What are other rituals that could exist that would set a particular alignment of people’s beliefs and values?
Mon-Chaio: And emotions, right? And anxieties I think.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: I think things like demos, weekly demos …
Andy: An anxiety inducing things sometimes.
Mon-Chaio: Right! But it also I think, reduces the anxiety, right? Everyone gets together and they can see something working, something that’s built. There’s a celebration built in of progress.
There’s also ritual built in about what are the types of things we want to show. If you regularly show, for example, things that you do on the command line, you’re like, oh, well, I could type like 800 commands and this produces a result, and in two weeks I’ll have a UI, that informs your culture versus if the only things that are shown are things that are ready for customer consumption, ready for review.
Andy: That’s a very good point, even within what might appear to be the same ritual in different companies, different organizations, what they select to be part of their ritual informs what it creates.
Mon-Chaio: And I don’t know if I could say that during a weekly demo, people’s heart rates are synced, but I can imagine that people’s emotions are more synchronized after that sort of a ritual, that maybe some people come in anxious, some people come in burnt out, some people come in worried about the progress of the OKR, some people come in, whatever. And at the end, people have focused and perhaps are happier, have gone through that celebration and said, oh, this is really neat what we were able to accomplish this week, are more energized.
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And again, I wanna remind listeners, I’m gonna harp on this again and again. This isn’t about transmission of information. Yes, there was information transmitted, but perhaps the bigger and maybe much bigger part of that daily demos or weekly demos, ritual is getting people into emotional alignment every week.
Andy: Yeah I would agree with you.
Mon-Chaio: And what about you? Do you have a software development ritual that you can think about?
Andy: I think a ritual would be a planning cadence, the ritual of planning your work, and how you set that up, and how you talk about it. So the ritual may be everyone getting together and looking at a Jira backlog, and that could be one ritual, and that sets up the idea that this backlog is what matters in grooming the backlog.
But you could have another ritual where your planning is, and I’ve done this on teams, your planning is basically open up an empty document and everyone thinks and puts down on the sheet of paper, what do we wanna work on next? And then you start working on that and the next time you plan, you start again.
Each one of those transmits different things. They’re different rituals about what you value. I would say the backlog ritual says that those individual tickets are precious and that you want to really control those. The other approach says that the understanding and intuition of the individuals putting all this together is very valuable.
Each one has a different message about what you value and what you don’t.
Mon-Chaio: I agree.
So I think I’m done with my segue about why rituals are important and the studies behind it. Andy was gonna dive into a really important part, which is how do you select these rituals?
How do you decide which ones need modification? How do you decide which ones are okay? I think that’s where you were were going, right?
Andy: Yep. Yep. That’s what I was thinking about. And I think for this, I want to touch on a few different models about how culture exists and how change comes about. An old one, one that’s existed for a number of decades is by a researcher called Kurt Lewin, and if you look him up, it’s not L e v i n, it’s L e w i n. He’s a German American. So his name is pronounced, actually it’s /ləˈviːn/, looks like Lewin. But he came up this idea of force field analysis. And his basic idea is that you have forces moving your culture in one direction or moving your behaviors in one direction and forces restraining them from doing that. And his idea is basically do some brainstorming, do some thinking about what’s the direction you want that to move? Where do you want that to go to? And then write down what are the forces that are pushing it in the direction you want it to go? And what are the forces that are holding it back from that? And his insight was, for the most part, increasing the push in the direction is not what you want to do. For the most part you wanna remove restraining forces.
What do you think of that Mon-Chaio?
Mon-Chaio: When I read about the force field theory, it made me think about why certain cultural change sticks and why certain cultural change doesn’t. I imagine that many folks listening to this podcast, and perhaps you too, Andy, have at one point or another tried to instill a cultural change, which while you were there, seemed to be great and people were working well, and you are like, this is a great culture, and then as soon as you left, something happened. It didn’t stick. And so I think a lot about that from the force field theory, because I think another thing he talks about is that there’s this concept of velocity, right? Or momentum for culture. And if you’re introducing cultural change, you have to fight the prevailing momentum of culture that exists. And so thinking about that and thinking about why culture doesn’t stick when you leave, I think is really important.
Because one thing I talk to my leaders about all the time is, you know you’ve made an impact when you don’t have to be there to see that impact continue to play out. And I think culture’s a really big part of that.
Andy: Absolutely. I think that’s a really good point.
Mon-Chaio: So I’ll tell a quick example, at one place I worked years ago, it was a larger corporation, I introduced pair programming to my team of, I think it was around 15 at the time, maybe 20. This was one of those examples where I didn’t solicit team feedback, really. I said, look, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do this for three weeks, and if at the end of three weeks you all wanna stop, we’ll stop.
But during these three weeks, we’re gonna do it a hundred percent of the time and we’re gonna do it by the book. And so they did it and after three weeks, they all wanted to continue doing it. But when I left, they didn’t continue doing it.
Andy: You were the driving force, but those restraining forces were still there. You were overcoming the restraining forces, but as soon as you’re not driving anymore, it just moves right back. Finds its equilibrium again.
Mon-Chaio: That’s right. And so I certainly did not think about what the restraining forces were. I didn’t even have the language at that time to think about it. So it wasn’t until very recently that I realized a different way to think about that situation if I were in that situation again.
Andy: It actually is a good point to bring up another aspect of Kurt Lewin’s model, which is that you kind of need to do what he, I think he called it unfreezing. The idea is that you need to not only do something to the system to get it so that things are movable and then you need to remove those forces to let it move, and then you actually need to put restraining forces back in place to now hold it into that new equilibrium, to keep it there.
That was his way of thinking about it. But I also noticed a few of the things you were mentioning touch on another model of how to think about culture and movement of culture. And this one is from another author called Greg Urban There, I’m pretty sure of how to pronounce his name.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: And he took Kurt Lewin’s ideas and expanded on them a bit more, I think. And he said that what you have is that you have some cultural ritual and what moves it around, what changes it, is individual’s interests. So individuals have their own agency and they’re going to make changes to it, and they’re gonna want to make it fit with something else that they believe, so they’re gonna try to change things on their own. But there’s also this what he termed cultural inertia. There’s this inertia that kind of keeps it moving or holds it in place just because of the weight of it. Sometimes that this is applied to things like religion, where religion, the way it’s practiced, has a particular inertia, which makes it hard to change.
But then you also have what he called entropic forces. And this is just randomness. This happens because me transmitting an idea of culture to you, Mon-Chaio, it’s going to appear in your head a little bit differently from how it is in my head. And as you do those transmissions again and again, little variations start to crop up. And the actual practice and the actual value kind of wanders over time. That’s he called entropy.
But then, this is the one that we have the most control over, and this is what he called the meta-cultural force. So in his language, when you said we are going to be doing pair programming, you were putting onto that system a meta-cultural force, a decree, a policy, a methodology. And what you’ve done is, through sheer force of will, pushed that culture from one place to another, but you’ve still got all of those other things acting on it.
So for a while, your meta-cultural force could push it to pair programming, but the inertia kind of always held it there. You probably always felt this like little bit of pushback. There’s always this inertia that was holding it back and wanting to bring it back to where it was. And people’s interests. People’s interests would wander and they’d move away from pair programming. It wasn’t something that was necessarily their interests were aligning them towards pair programming.
And then when you left, that inertia took back over and moved it back into place. Their interests moved it back into place. And entropy, I’m betting after you left, a few people kept doing it. They had wandered there. They had been moved there a little bit and so now they’re wandering around a new point of behavior. So that’s his way of thinking about it, that your primary thing is what he would call a meta cultural force, setting a policy, saying a statement again and again, setting up a new ritual, that is your control over things.
Mon-Chaio: And I believe Urban’s example that he used was around the Egyptian sun god, or something of that nature, right?
Andy: Yeah. I don’t know if it came from him. I definitely got it in a course that taught me about this. But yeah, the idea that an Egyptian Pharaoh wanted to change the religion. And he was able to do it during his lifetime. But as soon as he died, it all went back to exactly where it was before. So It sounds a little pointless then, doesn’t it? ‘Cause if everything just kind of moves back, what are we supposed to do?
Mon-Chaio: So what are we supposed to do? We touched a little bit about restraining forces that you put in place. Maybe that’s it. But tactically, what are we supposed to do? We have this culture that’s not quite what we want. We all know that we can just jump in as a meta-cultural force and say, no, we’re gonna do this or we’re gonna do that, but how do we get it to last? Can we get it to last?
Andy: I think getting it to last is hard. I think that’s very difficult. And this stuff explains a little bit about why. I think, however, since we’re not talking about trying to change the religion of an entire ancient civilization, there are a few things that we can do on a more personal level that does allow that new thinking to transmit, and I’m going to reference two more things that I think give us a playbook of what to do.
So one of them is a book called ” Shifting the Patterns” by If Price and Ray Shaw. In that book, their overall theory, you could say, is that, very similar to our definition of culture, that the way that people behave is due to what they call patterns of thought. So they have particular patterns of thought that creates particular patterns of behavior. If you want different patterns of behavior individually or organizationally, you need to somehow instill different patterns of thought. It’s very much related to like memes, not the internet stuff, but the idea that there are these thought viruses that can move from person to person and change what we think about.
Their idea is you have these patterns of thought, so how do you change them? You wait for a point when their pattern doesn’t work. You have to find that point in a person, see that their pattern isn’t working, help them understand that it’s not working, and then at that point you can give them a new pattern of thought. And that’s your best chance of instilling that new thought pattern.
So, for the pair programming one, you might try to kind of watch your team and probably even find someone influential, someone who helps set the pattern of thought for others, and find them at that point where their pattern of work that doesn’t involve pairing doesn’t work very well. And then you give them a new pattern of thought that does involve pairing and show how that resolves the issue. And then they can pick that up. Now, they won’t be completely adept at it at the beginning, but they’ve now got it in their head. You’ve got that hook to instill a new pattern of thought into their head.
Now you might say, but how am I supposed to tell them that? And that goes to the second thing that I wanted to reference, which is the book Agile Conversations, which is about how to have conversations to find this level of agreement and find this level of understanding between people. So it’s got instructions about how to have conversations about trust, about commitment, about accountability.
But in the end, a lot of it really comes down to this idea of transparency and curiosity, informed choice. So you notice, and they have, I think I’ve talked about it before, TDD for people. This idea that you can move up this ladder of what’s called the ladder of inference. And for the pattern that’s not working, you can say something along the lines of, “so I saw that you were working on that problem and you’ve just been stuck for the past few days. Are you seeing that as well? When I say stuck, what I see is that at the standup for the past few days, you’ve been saying the same thing. You’ve said this set of words again and again. Is that what you’re seeing?” And they’re like, “oh yeah.” “Now I think, or I surmise from that, that you’re probably frustrated by that outcome. Is that right?” “Yeah. I’m tired of working on this.” “Now, I assume that you believe that you can’t really work with others?” ” Not really, but I don’t wanna interrupt them.” “Okay. Well …”
And you can work your way up to this and figure out, is this a point at which their pattern isn’t working? And you can bring in your new pattern. Now that does one person. So if you are dealing with other managers, training them up on these kinds of things, because that’s gonna be their leverage, to get more people doing it as well. So I would say you can do it, but it’s about finding those points where you can grasp it.
And in Lewin’s way of talking about this, this would be the point of unfreezing. You can find that point where suddenly, oh, they’re open to change. You remove the restraining forces, you kind of let the whole thing move. And that restraining force may simply be something that they believe. You let the whole thing move and then you try to put forces back in place to hold it there.
Going back to an actual example, you could say, and I think we’ve talked about this before, about how we started pair programming. You could say that the pattern wasn’t working, and a new pattern was put in place is exactly what happened there. And from that point on, it actually became the culture of that entire company, or that entire development organization, I should say. From then on, we had instilled that pattern of thought and then anyone else coming in, that was now where we were. So inertia was keeping us there. A new person joined and they had, using Greg Urban’s model, different interests. But the meta-cultural force of our rituals, and the kind of inertia of where we had gotten the organization, held us as a pair-programming shop for a very long time.
Mon-Chaio: And if you’ve heard that episode a couple episodes ago, my interest definitely did not align when I joined. And so it was very much of the ritual and the meta-cultural force, and that was the culture of the company I had joined, that allowed me to get into pair programming and really see its value.
I’m gonna push back here a little bit, Andy, I think this stuff is really valuable. And the example that you gave shows how valuable it is. I think there’s some challenges around here in my mind though. I think number one, in some ways, you all got lucky that there ended up being a problem that your fellow engineer couldn’t solve. That was so intractable for that person that they were to the point of falling apart.
And I think you mentioned that the book says you have to get to that point, in some ways, you have to get to that breaking point. And if you don’t, then you don’t have an opportunity to exercise this change of thinking, of patterns. And so I think that’s a challenging part. A second challenging part is the example you gave worked really well. You all were an engineering team of two.
Andy: Yes. Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: And then when I joined, we were an engineering team of three and that engineering team never got bigger than eight, even at its largest. And so I would say, for small groups like that, it absolutely can work. I think there are challenges to getting into work, but it absolutely can work. I think the pace of change, the randomness of introducing breaking points, and the fact that it’s necessary for each individual ends up making this less of a tactic for broadly community cultural change. And I think it’s a better tactic for small pockets of cultural change.
Andy: I agree that it has to start in the small pockets, but here’s the way I would think about it. Say you’re a manager of managers of team leads, so like you’re several orders removed from the developers.
First of all your concern probably shouldn’t be about pair programming,
Mon-Chaio: Probably not.
Andy: So your concern should be more around the behavior of the leadership and management team. And there you are gonna have a smaller group to be working with and a more immediate group. So you’re gonna have your direct reports of your intermediate managers or your team leads depending on your structure. And with that group there, you can have those individual interactions and you can talk about that new pattern of behavior. And watch them for where their old pattern isn’t working anymore.
But you also have another lever. You can inject things that stress the system and might induce a pattern break. Now you don’t wanna do this simply to break their patterns. You wanna do it actually to achieve something. Because I don’t think it would be very kind or very defensible to them if they’re like, but you’re doing this to me just because you don’t like the way I work.
Mon-Chaio: You has to be authentically trying to solve a problem versus this is a person that’s always causing problems for me.
Andy: Yeah. And looking at the book, Shifting the Patterns, it may not be that you have a crisis as they call it. But it says that perhaps it comes about because you or someone else wants a greater result than is possible from the established order.
Going back to the challenging goals, the challenging goal, setting that properly, may create that point at which the current pattern of behavior doesn’t produce the desired outcome.
And so at that point now you’re in a position of more of a one-on-one, coaching relationship and you can instill the new pattern. And now you’ve got that kind of multiplicative effect, that once you’ve instilled it in them, they can instill it in their team and then those people can instill it in their team and it can fan out from there.
But you have that control over, just to be a shorthand, creating the crisis.
Mon-Chaio: You do.
Andy: Do you think in the situations you’ve been in, is that something that could have been done?
Mon-Chaio: I think it absolutely can be, and sometimes you do, right? And without even knowing the language sometimes you say, okay, but we’re gonna release weekly now.
Andy: Yes.
Mon-Chaio: You’re all telling me it’s not possible, but that’s what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna release weekly. And that’s creating the crisis and stressing the system to affect a behavior change and have them more open to solutions and ways of working that might allow them to release weekly.
This is a very valuable thing to do, and I think it is not an “either/or” with what I’m about to suggest. It is an “and” and it needs to happen. I would also like us to consider that there may be ways of changing the culture more wholesale at a faster pace. Not from below, but from above.
And I think I wanna bring us back to this concept of rituals. I was reading this article and this researcher said, “symbols and rituals sustain unity because they completely transcend the individual beliefs of members.” Okay … we know that we don’t want to be this unified, blah group that all believes in the same thing. So this concept of like completely transcending the individual beliefs of the members, I don’t think that should be our goal. But I think if we do dig into it, it does require transcending the individual beliefs of members in some way.
What you are stating is simply we’re gonna wait for them to have a break in their pattern and then we’re gonna change their beliefs. But I also think that we could affect it at a much larger scale using symbols and rituals.
So for example defining a team motto that has words that you care about, right? Let’s say your team motto is “We Work Together.” You could say that as your motto, even if your entire team never works together, even if you’re scatter gather, right? Everybody does their own part, then they come back together to integrate. But there’s value in that team motto. Now, let’s say you put a logo behind it. Now, let’s say you put it on a flag in your team area. Now let’s say you have a team ritual where you gather every Friday and you show examples of us coming together. Let’s say you give out little awards that people show on their desks,
I think it’s very important for folks to realize the power of these symbols and rituals in affecting cultural change, wholesale cultural change, and the speed at which it can happen.
Now, I would say it’s probably less sustainable if you don’t pair it with what you were talking about, the pattern breaking. And if you don’t look for examples of pattern breaking, I would say it’s much less effective. But I also think that there’s a lot of value in that. Instead of saying I’m gonna wait for each individual and I’m gonna work at a very individual level and hope it trickles down.
Especially if you’re a CEO hired into a 5,000 person organization, and the board is saying, this organization has a terrible culture, we hired you to fix it. You’re not gonna tell them gimme five years and we’ll see where we are. Right?
Andy: Yeah. And it fits with the what we’re talking about in the challenging goals and all of that, setting the expectations will change how people behave. And if you’re setting the expectation, through constantly stating it, that we work together, there’s gonna be some point, and also this is about bringing your espoused theory and your theory in use closer together, there’s gonna be some point where that discrepancy is hard for people to maintain. And that they will start bringing it closer together.
Mon-Chaio: Or they might self-select out, right to the point about hiring for culture and …
Andy: Exactly! And that was gonna say let’s bring it back to that last one, that’s somewhat undiscussable, which is, there is one more way, and you touched on it at the very beginning, but just in passing, there is actually one more way, which is that if you decided that these are the behaviors that you need …
I wouldn’t suggest doing this as the first pass, but you can get rid of people who are just uninterested in doing that and you can view that as, this is not only better for this organization, but it’s better for that person. You don’t want to put them through all that pain of working in an organization that keeps telling them values that they don’t want to believe in.
And then also the hiring. Making sure that when you bring people in, they are interested in that culture and in that way of working.
Mon-Chaio: And I think the collorary to that, which I completely agree with you, there are people that are not gonna be a cultural fit. And it is humane both for the organization and for that person to let everyone align to their interests as best they can instead of putting them through that stress and pain of that culture change that they don’t want.
Now, I don’t think you can right off the bat say they don’t want it. You gotta give them a chance and you have to know the individual. But I think … absolutely.
Andy: Hence the importance of those conversations that I was talking about.
Mon-Chaio: Yes, absolutely. The other side of that is you can also bring in cultural brokers and you can use positions where people naturally look up or look for mentorship and use those people as cultural brokers. So, as an example, in the tech world, often junior engineers look to senior engineers for guidance mostly on how to behave and to teach them new skills, right?
And so if you have a mostly junior organization, hiring a senior person in is not controversial for those folks. In fact, oftentimes they’re aching for it, right? They’re like, man, I wish someone could teach me something about this, our tests suck and we haven’t been able to improve it. We wish there could be someone.
But when you hire that person, if they’re also a strong cultural broker, then that also helps, right? Because then you know, the weight of their rituals and the symbol that they represent, going back to symbols, will help speed cultural change.
Andy: Yeah. And I think you can do a similar thing without the hiring. If you have, taking the example of junior engineers, if you have a junior engineer who is presenting those behaviors that you really want to see as your new culture, elevate them to being a senior engineer and support them in being that role model for how others should behave.
Mon-Chaio: I think that’s a little bit more challenging only in so far as, if the others don’t agree with the culture, if their interests don’t align, and they see that person as being elevated only because of cultural reasons, that will probably reduce the effect of that cultural broker. And so there must be other things that I think align, so they’re like, oh, they’re elevated not just because of cultural reasons, because they’re awesome at communication …
Andy: Yeah, they are good at this and we can see that, oh, behaving in that way is part of what got them there. Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Or they have something to teach us besides culture. Oh, we’re really bad at communication. They’re really good at it. They could teach us that. They just happen to also be a cultural broker and it can infiltrate that way.
Andy: We should probably move towards a wrap up here.
Mon-Chaio: Okay. So this is part three of the culture episode. That means there’s almost three hours of content that we’ve talked about. It’s gonna be tough to summarize into tactics, right?
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: But maybe I’ll start. Given that culture is important, I think we’ll go back to the first episode. The tactic is figure out the core values that comprise your culture. Make that not too small, but as small as possible, and focus on that and hire for that.
Andy: Yep. And related to that, from our second episode, pay attention to those core values and beliefs and behaviors that you’re interested in, and pay attention to the way people are actually behaving and derive from that their current beliefs and values. And try to bring those closer, either by admitting that their current beliefs are the ones that are really what you want, and you might have misstated what you thought you needed or by talking to them and doing what we’ve been talking about in this episode, about bringing their behaviors closer to those, to that desired state.
Mon-Chaio: Another tactic that I will add is don’t underestimate the value of symbols and rituals. In fact, they are the key to creating culture.
Andy: Yep.
Mon-Chaio: Think about rituals and symbols, not just for the information that they can transmit, but also for the togetherness that they can build, and put into place rituals that are about building togetherness.
Maybe not at the expense of transmission of information, but sometimes you need to put together a ritual whose whole point is not about information. Think about a church sermon for example. No one goes to hear a sermon because they’re there to hear new information, right? They all know the content of what’s being said.
They’re there to build togetherness, and that part is so important to building culture.
Andy: Yep. And on top of that, I would say, choose your moments wisely to identify key crises or key breaks in current patterns of behavior that give you that really strong point where you can work a bit more, either through the thinking of Kurt Lewin on his unfreezing, that okay, now things are gonna be movable and you can change it. Or through the shifting the patterns that you can now provide that new pattern of thinking.
So look for those points at which their existing patterns of behavior aren’t working and jump on it when it does appear, because I think as we were both agreeing, they are probably the most effective on individual level that can then spread.
But also they’re gonna be rare and precious. So find them, really pay attention to them.
Mon-Chaio: Right. And two things that Andy said, I will just amplify there. Both of his tactics talk about observation, and noticing. And so much of cultural change is really noticing those moments, those super impactful, effective moments. If you miss those, you miss that opportunity and you’re not gonna have as effective a time building the culture that you want.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely. I think that might cover a lot of our tactics. A summary of three hours of discussion.
Mon-Chaio: I think so too. And of course there are, smaller tactics in each of the other episodes, but it’s difficult summarizing three hours. But I think that … I think we did it justice. And as always, folks that are listening, let us know what you think. Are we off our rocker? Did we just spend three hours talking about something where you’re like, this is not the way to do it at all? Do you have your own ideas? Or do you have examples of where things worked or didn’t work? We’d love to hear from you.
Andy: Absolutely Mon-Chaio and so for everyone out there, till next time, be kind and stay curious.
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