Changing mindset and culture
As seen in the preceding model, the ecosystem of mindset and culture is highly complex. In terms of changing mindset and culture, the key takeaway is that it is extremely difficult to establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the variables that influence them and also to what extent they influence them. Given how deeply culture is entrenched in every element of an enterprise, changing a company's culture is difficult and also takes a lot of time. Among all the changes which a business needs to make to enhance agility, culture change, by far, is the most difficult one. According to the 11th State of Agile survey [xi] "company philosophy or culture at odds with core Agile values" is the biggest challenge faced by companies attempting to adopt and scale Agile.
Given this, the best that companies can do is to introduce interventions to the variables that are likely to cause an impact on mindset and culture. Like any complex system, the system of mindset and culture will respond to the "disturbances" caused by the interventions and this will lead to a new state of mindset and culture, based on emergence. The interventions may need to be changed, if the system is not responding as per expectations. To summarize, the approach to changing mindset and culture is a "trial and error" approach, as is always the case when attempting to change a complex system. The change can be put into effect only through influence, and not through direct impact. According to the model, there are three areas of intervention that can lead to impacting mindset and culture: employee behaviors, working environment, and leadership and mindset behaviors.
It is important to clarify that leadership in this context means any person or group of people which has an influence at the enterprise level. This is especially true if the leader is the founder of the business. The reasons for treating leadership mindset and behaviors as a separate variable are that leaders perform the following:
- Play a significant role in defining and shaping the vision of the organization. This is especially true if the leader is the founder of the enterprise.
- Are seen as role models, which implies that people tend to emulate them.
- Have the authority to incentivize and discourage specific behaviors.
- Define what a crisis is and may exhibit and expect a different set of behaviors during the crisis. This can send positive or negative signals, depending on how leaders react to a crisis.
In this chapter, behavior and working environment interventions will be discussed. The leadership-level mindset and behaviors will be discussed in Chapter 5, Leadership.