Agile

HT – Influencing culture change using OrgScan

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a famous and powerful statement from Peter Drucker and today, more and more organizations are becoming aware of the importance that culture plays in change initiatives.

Client

Excited by the promise of delivering more value to customers, higher quality, and more engaged employees, many organizations take on a large Agile transformation. Leadership is committed to seeing the change, they’ve given the message to the team and scheduled professional training. Jump forward a year and the momentum is gone. The teams all say they practice something like Scrum, but they struggle to do it well.

Nataša Dereta - Agile Leadership team at Hrvatski Telekom d.d.

Things have improved, but it’s not what everyone imagined at the beginning. It’s just another way of working – not much different than the last way of working.
This is what happens when an organization tries to force practices into a culture not well suited to them. When we are building the house, to make it stable, you have to do the ground-work first. In any type of organizational transformation, tending to culture is the ground-work that lets your new structure succeed.

The biggest difficulty with culture is knowing where you stand. We all have an intuitive sense of the culture within our organizations, but to carry out a complex change, you need more than intuition. I have positive experience with using OrgScan to collect information directly from employees and build a map of our culture across four key dimensions: Leadership, Orientation, Effectiveness, and Value Drivers. When we make culture explicit, we can agree where we stand, and where we want to go. We can make informed decisions about where to start with change initiatives and track the impact of changes while they’re happening. With this tool it’s much easier to identify what are the principles we have to start with and create powerful levers to make changes stick.
If we tackle the culture, we have a chance to enable business agility.

Case study

Today’s markets are becoming more competitive and complex each day with change cycles faster than ever. Organizations are increasingly aware that traditional approaches they used are not fit to cope with those challenges, so they search for ways to be more innovative, continuously change and thus become more agile.

Hrvatski Telekom d.d. embarked on the journey towards agility and growing a more agile organization for some time now and recognized CROZ Agile Team as the best partner with knowledge and experience to guide and support them on that journey. Journey to agility presents many challenges, changes introduced affect many parts of the organization and should be long term and sustainable. One of the key factors to ensure success on that journey is changing organizational culture to support business agility.

Working with CROZ Agile Team, through provided education and coaching, Hrvatski Telekom clearly recognized the importance of organizational culture and the role culture has in their efforts to become, as a company, more agile. Main challenge for the organization was understanding what their culture is, how to “measure” culture and build awareness, how to increase cultural coherence and influence it to support the change?

CROZ Agile Team introduced OrgScan, a unique tool developed by our partners agile42 in partnership with Cognitive Edge, the leading research and development company in the area of understanding complex adaptive systems. OrgScan collects and provides data on how employees interpret and feel about decisions made in the company, their context and various other information, which is used to effectively assess the current organizational culture. With this data, we can build awareness of where the organization is at the moment, make more informed decisions on how to move it in the desired direction, track and measure in real time the impact those decisions and actions have on the culture (enabling shorter feedback loops between cause and effect) and use empirical data to increase the chances of success when introducing changes in the organization.

After initial training and workshops, almost 200 employees provided information about how decisions are made in the organization. CROZ Agile Team interpreted the results, looked for patterns that emerged, formulated hypotheses from those patterns and provided recommendations on how to proceed. But the process doesn’t stop here – employees are continuing submitting the information about “how decisions are made” what gives HT the possibility to continuously inspect and adapt actions driving this strategic organizational change, thus increasing chances of success on their path to agility. And the CROZ Agile Team is there to help and support them.

Interested to learn more? Feel free to contact us.