Agile Habits Part 2

I've now finished reading Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit. One idea that has stuck with me, and I think can be used to analyze what makes a company successful, is the idea of culture. In The Power of Habit, Duhigg discusses the idea that changing just one habit, a keystone habit, of a company can have such wide reaching effects that it has a cascading effect that alters other habits. Now to me what it means is that it's clearly possible to change the culture of an established company, and to have some say in how that change goes! I genuinely think that's an amazing conclusion!

That brings me to my next thought on this matter. Since as I established in my last post, a lot of Agile practices are about getting to choose which habits you replace or reinforce. But there's one part about Agile that I think goes underappreciated. Google figured out something recently that I believe a lot of people have known intuitively for a long time: the best teams deeply trust each other. The thing about trust though, is that in order for it to exist, we have to share a bond with our teammates somehow. And I'd posit that a key feature that allows teams to develop this trust is a shared culture. But I don't mean all growing up in the Bronx or Berlin.

Instead I think it's up to the team to define their own culture, and to do it explicitly. Let me give an example: Duhigg talks about the world famous aluminum manufacturer Alcoa and how a corporate-wide focus on safety changed the culture of the entire company. At such a scale it seems to be the defining characteristic of a successful company that you could reduce the culture, the driving goal of their routines, to a single word. For instance, Google is widely known (and mocked) for its ephemeral "Googlelyness".

However, I think on the team level we can do much better. I think it's possible for a team to sit down and discuss what they want their culture to be like and refine it into a few sentences or bullet points. And I think with that done they'll have a better feeling for where they want to use Agile to take them.