A Radical Culture of Culture Building

Do you ever wonder what sets incredible software development organizations apart? Perhaps you have created teams that are empowered and psychologically safe and ship constantly, and yet things still aren't clicking.

Many organizations struggle to collaborate across organizational boundaries. This talk puts forward a solution: invest in a Culture of Culture Building.

Often when we want to collaborate across departments or functions we are presented with a choice between structurelessness or hierarchy. We either rely entirely on informal relationships, with all the directionlessness and cliquishness that results, or we attempt to centralize cadence, planning and decision-making, with all the problems that come from removing context and substituting metrics for relationships.

This choice between two bad options felt familiar. Searching for an alternative, I went back to the radical roots of the Agile movement and discovered a tool for emergent governance: building Cultures of Practice.

These self-organizing structures incentivize participation with natural rewards. They invite rather than alienate, and experiment rather than plan. They require radical trust & a sense of sufficiency, and in exchange, they result in skilled, trustworthy organizations. They can create value no extrinsic system can rival. They are, in short, Agile.

Culture Builders incrementally engineer the social processes that let secure, reliable, valuable, delightful software emerge at scale. This talk will offer concrete examples of how to achieve a company-wide goal with an up-front investment in those facilitators. It will also address the pressures that can lead this technique to fail, and offer strategies for resisting the commodification of our cultures.