Redesigning a People-First Culture From Scratch Takes Courage, Passion, Tech and Experts

Something happened last week that gave me pause. Many other dialogues made me think and consider angles I hadn’t even noticed before and for that, I am very thankful to both our team and our clients and prospective clients but this interaction, in particular, left me pondering for a long while.

Here’s why it matters. Because if the titans of the topic (Alistair was one of the initial signatories of the Agile Manifesto y’all!) are this tentative regarding designing and executing on safe, sane and high-performing cultures and if someone like Cockburn himself presents the possibility of assisting with this creative act from scratch as a novelty, not the bulk of his work, then who is out there advising the companies that so desperately need the hand-holding regarding the topic?

Maybe the sad answer is “no one” it certainly seems to be “no one of value”. How does any FTSE 1000 company justify not observing the state of their HumanDebt enough that they would need to throw their hands up in the air and say “Right, this looks complex but essential, let us get EVERYONE of value in to tell us their perspective on how to redesign culture fast!” and then busied themselves with parading the top 10-20 influencers and thought leaders (hated as those terms are) in both People and Culture and Agile end DevOps to learn from them all?

Part of it is because it’s so difficult to separate true value from mere noisy chaff and ensure the best minds are at the table but most of these experts have either written books that can serve as a preview of the philosophy they subscribe to or what framework they have invented or perfected or if not, they are active enough on LinkedIn or blogging enough to make their point of view clear. Perhaps the IT/DevOps/Agile Culture crew is too modest and we need some lists, after all, I give an informal one of who all are must-reads to all our new team members -and God forbid any isn’t impressed with a Kent Beck or a Gene Kim interaction!:)- because some people just have the answers.

In FinTech you can’t move for Influencer lists - top people in digital, in transformation, in FinTech, in crypto, you name it. An absolute smorgasbord of “top names” and a few of these people are household names and resident acts on the conference circuit and we have “seen” and “lived it all” but not even we are being called to preach our “change or die” privately to an eager-to-learn executive audience.