Culture and Process: Making Change Happen

John Schrag at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfB9ZPlv2Ug

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why culture matters when you change your process

[00:00:01] As Catherine said, my most recent job was leading all the UX team for the media and entertainment division of Autodesk. I'm an independent consultant now, I just retired from full-time work, but in the years of my career I've been a developer for like a decade, I've been a designer for a decade, I've been an agile coach, so I've had a lot of roles in that. Today what I want to talk to you about is why it's so important to pay attention to your culture, to your corporate culture, when you're trying to establish a good product process. Well, that's pretty much it.

[00:00:42] I'm going to start with a story. 21 years ago, just after the Agile Manifesto came out, the company I was working for at the time decided to go agile, so they brought in a trainer, and that trainer trained all of our developers and everyone on agile. Now, unfortunately for the design team, which I was a member of, the version of agile we were trained in 21 years ago did not in fact contain anything to do with UX or design. It was just: developers write code, you show it to the clients, if they like it, good, you're done. So that totally screwed our process at the time.

[00:01:13] So I got together with my colleague Desirée Sy and my boss Lynn Miller, and we worked to try and figure out a way to make these standard processes, the UX processes of the time, fit into an agile development framework. That was later called dual track agile, so some of you may have heard of that. It's evolved a lot since then, that's another story, but dual track agile became really popular after we started to teach it at UX conferences and agile conferences, and for about five years my colleague Desirée and I were running sold-out seminars at all different conferences, and we taught hundreds of people from hundreds of companies how to do that kind of work.

[00:01:49] And of course, over those years we started to hear back from those people. What had worked perfectly for us, we found, sometimes worked for people but sometimes it didn't. They'd come back and they'd say, we tried this and it's not working out for us, what's going on? And I would ask them how they were trying to use the process, and what I would hear is that the process they had implemented was not what we had taught them. There were distortions or additions or deletions that meant, again, that the process they were doing wasn't what we taught.

[00:02:17] So my stupid response to this was to blame the user, like I used to do as a developer. It's like, well, they're doing it wrong, that's why they're not having the success they wanted. But we came to realize over time that the problem wasn't that they were doing it wrong, the problem was they couldn't do it right. Somebody actually cornered Desirée at an agile conference and said, I wish you'd never published that paper in the Journal of Usability Studies, because now our management expects us to work this way but they won't let us work this way. So we started to realize the problem wasn't the process, it was the culture. It wasn't the seed, it was the soil.

[00:02:53] I went on to my next job, where I led two different agile transformations, first just for the little team I was working in, and then I was asked to do it for the entire media and entertainment division for Autodesk. We had like nine products there and I had to transform all the teams to start working agile and dual track. So I got to see how different teams reacted, in different geographies and different kinds of backgrounds. In some teams it flourished and in other teams it faltered, and I came to understand more that it was about the local cultural conditions in those teams. Teams that were feature factories beforehand would just be feature factories after, and that wasn't how it was supposed to be.

[00:03:31] So when I say culture eats process for breakfast, what I mean is this. When you introduce a process into a culture, that process will warp itself to fit the culture that it's in, and most specifically it tends to preserve power structures. Implicit and explicit power structures tend to be preserved. So if you're trying right now to introduce a new process that you want, and that process shifts the locus of power, you need to really pay attention, because that's where you're going to run into problems.

[00:04:00] Now you may be saying, isn't this just about change management? So yeah, I'll say change management is super important, all these kinds of things you'll get out of any good change management book. You still have to do all that stuff to drive process change at scale. But my claim is that if you have a process-culture incompatibility, this will not be enough. You'll have to do more.

What culture is, and how you can tell what yours is

[00:04:23] So I want to talk about what I mean by culture. Many of you have probably heard of Westrum's culture dimensions, or Hofstede's culture dimensions. There's a lot of them out there and there's a book on culture mapping, you may have heard of all of those, but I'm just going to stick to the basic Wikipedia definition: that culture is the set of shared values, attitudes, goals and beliefs that characterize an institution or organization.

[00:04:51] Note that all these things kind of go together, they all fit together, so when you want to pull one of them it's going to pull on all the others. And because values and beliefs are hard to change, what tends to happen is that when there's a conflict, it's practice that changes, that adapts.

[00:05:10] Now, how do you know what your culture is, what the culture of your business is? It may be obvious to you or it may not be obvious to you. Many businesses make statements about what their culture is. They will say, we are this kind of a company, or we do this. But those statements are largely performative, as you all know. In preparation for this talk I put it on my social media, a question. I asked my followers, what statements does your company make about their values which is just not true? And literally five minutes later I was inundated. These are some of the ones I was inundated with. So everyone seems to understand that what a company says about their culture is not necessarily the real culture.

[00:05:51] The real culture is what happens day to day. So, individual actions, the little things, what goes on in meetings, what people are allowed to talk about and not allowed to talk about, who gets promoted, and how you do appreciation. These are all things that are reflective of the actual culture.

[00:06:08] Now, I just want to take a little moment to talk about toxic culture, because of course that's been in the news a lot lately. By toxic culture what I mean is a workplace that enables or tolerates people being terrible human beings to one another, engaging in really psychologically damaging and harmful behaviors like gaslighting, bullying, racism, sexism, homophobia, fat shaming, all these other things that dehumanize other human beings.

[00:06:36] I'm not going to focus on that today. There are many people who have done a lot of work in this area who know a lot more about it than I do, so today I will touch on toxic culture but I'm not going to focus on it. It's a super important topic, though. I'm not saying it's not important, it's critical, because of the impact it has on humans primarily, and secondarily because it actually ruins your bottom line as well. But I'll leave it today. I want to talk more on things that aren't necessarily toxic but that can cause incompatibilities or problems when you're trying to adopt a new process, or adopt the process that you want.

[00:07:08] And this is the next question: what is the process that you want? Well, I don't know. I think you probably all have your own answers to what would be your ideal product process. But for the sake of argument I'm going to assume — or maybe you've come to UXDX to figure out what the right process is for you — but again, for the sake of having an example, I will assume that as a UXDX attendee you probably think that the optimal product process involves having autonomous cross-functional teams who are aligned on the outcomes they want to create in the world and not on a feature list, that are continuously learning from the market and making changes and adapting to it, and that are held accountable for the value that they are delivering. You want to get the full value out of your investment in design and product management and development. So that's what I'm going to go with for today.

[00:07:59] So what I'm going to do is go through this list and see what kind of culture we need to support a process that's founded in this.

Autonomous teams need respect for expertise

[00:08:07] So let's start with autonomous. To have an autonomous team, you need the company to value empowerment. They have to trust the leaders of the team, or the team itself, to be able to take risks and to make changes and to make decisions that don't necessarily need to be approved at the highest leadership level. Already this can be a real sticking point right away. This is one of the first sticking points you run into, if the culture of your company is very command and control, very run from the top. This is the first thing you'll run into, and I've seen this kind of thing happen before.

[00:08:44] So the cultural value we want here is respect for expertise and research that the team does, over just the seniority or the power of the highest paid person. I always love the HiPPO expression. And I can tell you all kinds of stories where things go wrong because of this sort of thing. I've seen an agile team, a supposedly agile team, that was being managed off a fixed feature list — you know, this is what you're going to deliver. So of course, if they ever wanted to be agile and change course, this turned into a big fight with management, with the upper leadership. So they couldn't be agile. They were expected to be agile but they were not being permitted to be agile.

[00:09:20] Similarly, I was talking to another person I know in the field whose team spent three months building a feature that they didn't see a need for, because their CEO's golf buddy asked for it during a golf game. It turned out they did analytics on the feature afterwards, telemetry, and found that it was used like less than 10 times by any of their customers. So the opportunity cost was enormous.

[00:09:45] So how do you know if your culture actually has respect for expertise? Well, you can look for cultural signals, these day-to-day things that happen. So number one: in your company, is decision making routinely delegated, or is it the same three people at the top who are making all the decisions for everyone? When people delegate decisions, does leadership just override those decisions, or do they support them? Does leadership support the decisions made by their staff? And does your team ever build golf-based features?

Cross-functional teams need respect for diversity

[00:10:22] So, moving on. We have autonomous covered there. I want to talk about cross-functional. Now, why do we want cross-functional teams? Well, it's pretty easy. The really basic reason is that when you have more perspectives brought to a problem you get better decision making. More perspectives leads to better decision making, that's the fundamentals of it. And I've seen problems happen when there's not the right voices in the room. They'll make a mistake, they'll predict wrong about capacity, or they'll make mistakes going to a foreign market, all kinds of things can go wrong.

[00:10:53] So to allow cross-functional, the cultural value you need is respect for diversity, because having different perspectives really is just another way of saying diversity. And when I mean respect for diversity, it's not enough to have diversity, you have to respect it. What I mean by that is that everyone involved in decision making has to really understand, really believe, that other people involved have valuable things to contribute to the conversation. Everyone else knows things that I don't know.

[00:11:22] And there are times when that doesn't happen, when some people or groups believe that their opinion is just sort of better or more valuable than others. Sometimes that will work out in terms of their position, like the HiPPO I talked about, and sometimes because there could be role chauvinism in companies, in some companies, where the decisions or the opinions of developers are regarded more highly than anyone else's, or the opinion of sales staff.

[00:11:48] And I've seen that happen. I've seen cases where one development manager excluded the design team from any access to his project until the very end, because he believed that design was there to make things pretty. So he wasn't doing it out of malice, he was trying to save the design team time. The result at the end, of course, was a completely unusable but pretty feature.

[00:12:13] I saw the development team's contribution ignored in one particular project. The development team had assessed some software that was being acquired and had a lot of warnings about it, but the acquisition went ahead anyway, because of the sales target that needed to be met, or the sales team wanted it. So we did make a little bit of money in the short term, but the long-term cost of maintaining that terrible piece of software was far more damaging than the short-term goals.

[00:12:41] So how do you know if your culture respects diversity? Well, here's a few signals you can look for. Number one: are key perspectives solicited when decisions are being made? Are people thoughtful about who needs to be in the room to make that decision, or again is it the same three guys? Is there facilitation of the meeting? Because that's really important, not just that the perspectives are there, but that you have a way to draw out those different perspectives and consider them. So if you're at a place where facilitation is considered an important skill, that's a good sign.

[00:13:15] If you look at your company, who's getting promoted? Do promotions add diversity to your leadership team, new ways of thinking, or are the people getting promoted the frat buddy of the guy who's already at the top? When you're hiring, is diversity explicitly considered? And I don't mean that in a shallow way, like people just looking at ethnicity, gender and that, but in a deeper way, when you actually ask your hiring teams to consider questions like: look at each candidate and think, what perspective or skill or whatever could this person bring to our team that our team does not already have? Those kinds of conversations really can change the way you think about hiring.

Psychological safety

[00:13:58] All right, so we've got our diversity, yes. We've got respect for diversity, yes. Is that enough for good decision making? No, you need something else. You need psychological safety. Now, psychological safety is a term that was coined by Dr Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School, and she describes it as the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

[00:14:22] I could do four hours on this. I'd like to work on this, this is something I think is really important, I do workshops on it, but I'll just give you the quickie, the stages of psychological safety. You can think of it as broken down into four parts. This is from a book by Timothy Clark. The first stage of it is people feeling that they belong in the team, like they have a right to be there, that they don't feel like an outsider. The second is that they feel safe to make mistakes, that they can ask for help, that they can learn stuff and they won't be ridiculed or put down for it.

[00:14:51] Once you've got that you can move on to the next one, and they can feel that their contributions will be welcomed, that the team actually wants to hear what they have to contribute, and again won't punish them or shame them for it. And the hardest one of all is that they feel safe to challenge the status quo, that everyone on the team feels they can say to everyone else, I think you're doing this wrong. Because that takes a lot of courage. So you want to foster this sense of safety. And by the way, any kind of innovation involves challenging the status quo, so if you don't have psychological safety you do not have meaningful innovation happening.

[00:15:25] So how do you know if your company values psychological safety? Again, there's signals you can look out for. First off, when you're trying to reach a decision, are contrary opinions solicited? Is it just to get this groupthink thing going, or do people say, you know, I think this is the right idea, but who can tell me why this is a bad idea? So people show the willingness to listen to outside opinions, so that's a good thing to have.

[00:15:49] Are there topics which you never talk about in meetings? Maybe you talk about them around the lunch cooler or whatever, but if they're never talked about in meetings, that's a sign that maybe psychological safety doesn't exist. Are bad meeting behaviors tolerated? If you see meetings happening and people are bullying or insulting or mocking or talking over or hogging the floor, those are all signs that your company does not really value the fostering of psychological safety. And once again, meeting facilitation, if that's valued, because that's something a facilitator can help with.

[00:16:18] And this one I think is rarely done, but it's something I think is crucially important: are managers held accountable for creating psychological safety? It's quite easy to measure psychological safety. Amy Edmondson came up with an instrument, a small survey instrument for measuring it, which means there's no reason why you couldn't measure it on teams and then hold your managers accountable for creating those conditions, to get raises or promotions, because it's a critical skill.

Do you actually respect teams?

[00:16:47] So we've got our diversity, so we've got good decision making down. But I'm still going to finish that autonomous cross-functional teams sentence. So what am I going to talk about here? Well, everyone talks about teamwork, that's a great thing, teamwork and all that, but I don't think all organizations really respect teams and teamwork.

[00:17:09] What I mean by that is this. A team is not just a group of people. It starts like a group of people, but by working together they develop team norms, they develop relationships, they develop trust, they develop expectations, and it's this emotional labor, these connections, that actually make a team amazing. When you've got a really good team, that's the part that makes it work, it's not the individuals by themselves. And a smart company will respect that investment in creating that.

[00:17:40] I see teams often literally undermined, or teamwork undermined, by the incentive systems at a company. When you're working in a team it's very frequently the case that somebody on the team, or many people on the team, will have to subsume their own local goals in order to support larger team goals. Somebody has to do this in-between work, that might be less interesting or more supportive, but it's critical for the team's overall success and doesn't make that person look great individually. And if you are measuring people just on their individual effort, or the visibility of that, and not on the team results, you are actively undermining teamwork. You are turning cooperation into competition, and that's going to reduce the output of your teams.

[00:18:28] So here's some signals to look for to know if your culture really rewards teamwork. First off, are your teams held jointly accountable for team outcomes? That means that everyone on the team should be accountable to all the outcomes of that team. That approach will foster people working together and help people to do what they need to do to make the team work.

[00:18:50] I saw a case once where there was this cross-functional development team, or product team I should say, where the designers were held individually accountable for the usability of the product, but the developers were held accountable for feature delivery and bug fixing. The trouble is that the designers couldn't be successful without the developers implementing their changes and recommendations, but when they had those recommendations the developers would deprioritize them, because they were not considered bug fixes or feature delivery. So the incentives for the team pretty much guaranteed failure of the overall team effort. If they were held jointly accountable, then the developers would be motivated to make sure those fixes went in as well.

[00:19:32] Second: do high performing teams get kept together? If you've got a great team, do you bring new projects to them, or are your teams constantly broken apart and reformed and broken apart and reformed, throwing away all of the work done to build those team relationships? When teams are praised or rewarded for success, are they praised as a group, or does leadership pull out one person, just the leader gets all the praise, or just the developers, or just the designers, or worse yet just the rock star on the team?

[00:20:04] I think the existence of rock stars is super toxic for teamwork. Not the existence of them as human beings, but I see it often that when someone gets a reputation that way, leadership will tend to give them credit for a lot of stuff that wasn't entirely them. They don't see all the other work that other people did to support them and hold them up. And in the very worst cases, when someone develops a rock star aura around them, it can enable them to get away with toxic behavior with impunity. And that's my last point there: if you see rock stars on the team who are doing crappy things and they're being allowed to get away with it, that's a good sign that your company does not really value teamwork.

Outcomes, innovation and risk tolerance

[00:20:47] So I got through our first sentence. The next thing we want is our teams to be aligned on outcomes. That is to say, you want your team to accomplish something in the market, or deliver certain value. It's not about here's your feature list, that's what you're going to be doing. You want to be continuously responding and learning.

[00:21:04] So what do you need for that? Well, first off, empowerment, which we've talked about. Secondly, you need innovation. You want the teams to be able to innovate, to try to find new ways to solve the problems you put in front of them. Innovation means you have to have risk tolerance, because you don't always get it right. And a learning mindset: you have to think about always growing, and what you're learning for. So that's a lot there.

[00:21:27] So what are some of the signals that your culture actually values these things? The first thing I look for is the strategy. I ask teams what their strategy is, and I cannot tell you how many times they give me a feature list. Our strategy is we're going to build A, B, C, D, E and F. I'm like, that is not a strategy, that is a feature list. So that's a good sign that they don't really have the right mindset for this.

[00:21:50] The other signals I look for are really about what people do with risk, if they try to avoid it or pass it off. So for example, when an experiment doesn't pay off, if you try something and it doesn't pay off, is that seen as, what did we learn from this? Or is that seen as, you failed, why didn't we deliver that, why did you think of doing that? You can see that kind of response from leadership tells you a lot. If you see people trying to shift blame, that's a sign that they understand they're going to be punished, which again means that they'll be much less willing to take the risks that you need for innovation.

[00:22:25] The other thing you'll see people doing is going to their boss before they take any risk: I'm going to get someone to sign off on it, so it's not my fault. And just think of all the extra psychological labor that adds to a team, if they're constantly having to do this stuff to protect themselves. When you have actual metrics, are people choosing real hard metrics, metrics that will really tell them the hard truth, or are they picking metrics that are going to look good because they have to report them upward and they want to make sure they're looking good? So that's another one.

[00:22:55] And I'll put up a good sign rather than bad things. This is a thing I think is good: if you hear leaders talking about their risks as a portfolio. We're going to take these risks, these are the big risks I'm taking, these are the small risks, and the payoff for them. Because if leadership thinks about this as an investment and not a failure, that's a good sign.

[00:23:15] The last thing here is about being accountable for delivering value, but that's actually related again to empowerment and other things I've already talked about, so I'm going to move on from here.

Values that matter whatever your process is

[00:23:24] Now, there are some cultural values that I believe are important no matter what your process is. I have three of them down here. The first one is employee engagement. Employee engagement is important because engaged employees are happier at work, they work better and harder, they stick around longer, they produce better quality work. Now, employee engagement comes from a whole bunch of different things. Number one is psychological safety, that's super important to get your employees engaged, so there it is again.

[00:23:53] Another one is the relationships they have with other people at work, so you can see where a good team dynamic's important there. And the third one is the meaningfulness of the work itself. Perhaps somebody whose job is saving lives might get a little more than someone whose job is selling ads, I don't know. It depends how people are internally motivated there.

[00:24:14] Employee engagement is limited by some things. One other thing that limits it is the energy people have left after the rest of their life happens. So if you have something going on at home, some tragedy in your family, or some other thing, or you've got 15 kids or whatever, you're not going to have as much energy left to bring to work. And so for that reason I think it's also important that companies value work-life balance, because if you give people the space they need to take care of the stuff they need at home, they will be more present for you at work.

[00:24:46] I think it's a foolish manager who thinks that by trying to get every hour out of somebody, getting them to work late and getting them to work weekends, you're actually getting more productivity out of people. I think you get more hours, but the productivity actually tanks, and if you destroy the employee engagement that kind of brings all your numbers down across the board. So it's very short-term and foolish thinking.

[00:25:08] The last point is ethics. Ethics are super important. There's a number of signals you can look for to see if your company values ethics. Hopefully it's pretty obvious. One of them is, do you talk about ethics at work? That's a good sign if you do. If the topic's avoided, that might be a warning sign. There's other things: are you ever asked to ignore rules or regulation? You know, I know we're supposed to go this way, but we can get away without doing that. Are you ever asked to do something like that?

[00:25:34] Are you ever asked to use dark patterns? You know, if we use these dark patterns in this design we can hit the numbers, whatever numbers we're trying to hit. If you find yourself being requested to do things like that, maybe your employer is a bit shady on ethics. I think ethics are really important because, again, not having them, people know if they're doing the wrong thing, it's going to kill engagement, which will bring your work down. Your best people will leave, because frankly nobody wants to work on the Death Star.

How do you actually shift a culture?

[00:26:03] Okay, so let's say you go through this whole exercise. You think about the process you want, you think about the culture you need to support that process, and you can do a gap analysis by looking at the cultural signals from your own employer. Once you get there, how do you actually shift your culture? How do you make these changes happen?

[00:26:22] Well, I wish I could say at this point that I could give you a list of five handy tips, you know, do these five things and you'll shift your corporate culture. But it does not work that way. Culture is fundamentally set by the expectations and the belief system of your leaders. So any kind of culture change requires leadership buy-in, and it may even require more than that. It may require leadership training.

[00:26:47] For example, if you're in a command-and-control kind of situation where the boss doesn't want to empower the teams, you may ask why. Why are their bosses like that, if it's not a good way to work? And there's a few reasons this can happen. Sometimes bosses are like that because they themselves are being micromanaged from above, and that micromanagement tends to go down layer by layer. In fact, when I was prepping for this talk I was talking to a senior exec who says that this can happen even to CEOs of companies, who can be micromanaged by the board, so we can go way up there.

[00:27:22] Sometimes bosses are inexperienced or they're new, so they don't know how else to manage. Or sometimes they just think they're the smartest person in the room because they get paid the most, as I mentioned earlier. And notice that none of those three things can be fixed by change management. All of those things will require either leadership coaching, leadership self-change, or leadership being changed out.

[00:27:48] But if you're the boss and you want to make culture change happen, I've got to say, this is all on you. You can control to a large extent the culture in your organization. I recommend starting with psychological safety. If you establish it in your own team it will also tend to flow downwards, and once you've established it in your own team, your reports will tell you where things are going off the rails, where things need to be fixed. So that I think is a great place to start. Be open and willing that you may have to change, that you may have to learn how to manage new kinds of processes. And be very deliberate, and talk about the kinds of changes you want to make to the culture. Make it obvious what you're doing, and walk the talk. At the end of it, you're the person who can make this happen more than anyone else.

[00:28:31] If you're middle management, you can still make a lot of change. You can change the culture in your own team, but you can't protect them where they interact with people outside the team. But what you can do is you can start talking about this. You can take these kinds of ways of thinking that I put here, or other ways, and talk about culture and how it affects process, and where decisions are actually being made, and make these things, which are largely unconscious, conscious in your work. Have that conversation going on. You can model best practices, which hopefully will improve stuff on your team.

[00:29:05] If you're in a toxic situation, if you're a middle manager and your management is toxic, you can protect your team from quite a bit of it. You can be like an umbrella. But I will say this will take a heavy strain on you personally if you do that. It's very, very stressful to do that, and I hope you don't ever have to do that.

[00:29:23] If you're an individual contributor trying to make culture change, my first recommendation is, don't panic. It's not easy, and it's not an easy thing to do and it requires a lot of work. Again, I think the best thing you can do is start the conversation, just sort of point out where things are happening, feel around it a bit. If you're an individual contributor and you are in a toxic team, my advice is get out if you can. I don't know how many of you have been on a toxic team, but I think a lot of people stay too long thinking they can fix things, and the damage it does is just not worth your time.

Two options: surgery, or braces

[00:29:58] Okay, so let's say you know what you want to do. So what will work if you're the leader, if you're in a position to make change? I think there's kind of two schools towards culture change. A few years ago I was speaking to a VP at a company who had been hired specifically to deal with a culture problem. They had been in the news for some toxic cultural situation, and he told me he was dealing with it, and I said, well, what was your method, how did you fix the problem? And he says, I took the fast route, I let go 75 people.

[00:30:30] I call this the surgical option, and honestly I think it is the correct thing to do when the problem is toxic people. People who dehumanize others, who belittle, you know, racism, sexism and homophobia, all that kind of stuff, that is unacceptable at work. You get a warning, but you need to remove those people, because they do so much damage to employee engagement and teamwork and everything else that it's just not worth keeping them around. It really is not.

[00:30:58] But it leads to the question of why those people exist. By the way, the obvious thing usually is, sometimes those people are rock stars, or they're perceived to be rock stars, or sometimes they're dating somebody senior, or they're somebody's child or nephew, and they shouldn't really be there. People will say, you'll hear excuses made: oh, don't mind Bob, Bob's just like that, but he's really good, we need that. But there is no skill that any individual has that can make up for the damage. And I've seen, on so many occasions, a team where someone's believed to be the rock star, and when they're removed the team transforms and rises far above what they were doing with that one person keeping everyone else down.

[00:31:40] So now the question is about Bob. We've got rid of Bob, but what about Bob's manager? What about the person who was enabling this behavior or tolerating it? Does that person need to be removed? Timothy Clark, the guy who wrote The Four Stages of Psychological Safety, was talking about that. His belief was that you don't necessarily need to remove people like that. Often their problem is they don't think they can take action, because they wouldn't get management support. And often they're conflict avoidant, they're always just trying to de-escalate conflict rather than actually deal with the problem. So these people probably just need coaching, and they need support from above, and they need to start sending very strong messages that they will no longer tolerate anything like that.

[00:32:23] But okay, I said I wasn't going to talk a lot about toxic culture. So what about the non-toxic things, the behaviors that aren't quite right that you want to shift? Well, I think this is our second option, which is what I call braces. And the idea of braces is to support the new culture that you want from all sides, long-term, slow and steady pressure until you get there.

[00:32:43] So one thing to do is to talk about culture. Make it really clear exactly what you want to do and what you mean by it. It's just not these nice kind of high level, oh, we want to value diversity. What does that mean specifically? What are the specific behaviors that you want to see? How will you know when you're doing it right? And these are great conversations to have. So you want to establish, demonstrate and monitor those desired behaviors, and do this long term.

[00:33:07] The third thing you do, another support, is you align your business practices to it. That is to say, the behavioral needs you want should be reflected in how you hire, how you reward people, how you do people's evaluations, how you run your meetings, how you promote people. That should all reflect the cultural values that you have.

[00:33:26] And then you just keep it up. It's not a one-time project, it is not an inspirational poster, it's not a two-hour workshop. This is an investment that's done over a long time. Put it up there and keep it up, and what happens then, as your staff turns over, as things change, is new people coming into the organization see these new cultural signals and they absorb this as the way things work around here. This is the culture that you get.

[00:33:51] And I've seen this done, by the way, this is not me being theoretical. At Autodesk there's a huge amount of attention to culture, and there's a multi-year effort made to drive the culture to where we want to be, very specifically. So I've seen it work, and I've seen it work at scale, so it is very possible.

It was about people all along

[00:34:07] So I'm going to wrap up here. As I said, I've just retired from full-time work, from a company leadership position. I'm an independent consultant now, and just sort of thinking back over my career: I got my first programming job 38 years ago, writing a word processor in 8086 assembly code. That dates me. I took human computer interaction in university, it was a graduate course because that was only available as a graduate course in the 1980s, but I spent the first 10 years of my career trying to convince my fellow developers that they needed to pay attention to human computer interaction, or user-centric design, or what we now call UX, because I realized that technology needs good design to deliver value. It wasn't enough to have the technology.

[00:34:53] And then agile came along and I found myself becoming this methodology wonk, this process wonk, thinking about this stuff and trying to come up with new ways, because I was realizing that design and technology working together need a good process to make them work. And because of the things I talked about today, I came to realize, longer term, that process needs good culture. If you don't have the right culture your good processes can't thrive, and you can't deliver the value that we all want to deliver into the world to make the world a better place. So fundamentally, at the beginning of my career I thought everything was about technology, cool technology, but I came to realize that it was about people all along.

[00:35:31] And that's where I'm going to leave it. It really is people we need to take care of. Healthy relationships, healthy teams, are the foundation of good decision making, of meaningful innovation, of team health. You want to make sure you have that in place. If you're a leader, you want to create these situations. You're the one who can control this. You want to be deliberate in the culture that you're architecting. You want to be the place that everyone wants to work. And remember that when I say culture eats process for breakfast, that works both ways: in a healthy culture a bad process will not thrive, it'll get fixed. Thank you.