The Professional Agile Leader: Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations

8. Aligning the Culture

Changing the organization’s culture is the final and ultimate challenge that all agile leaders face. An organization’s culture acts like a gyroscope that keeps it pointed in a consistent direction, even through disruptions and deviations that might otherwise threaten to throw it off course. But this culture gyroscope also works to prevent agile change, and many organizations that fall back during their agile attempts find that their cultural gyroscopes are too strong to change without a tremendous effort. Most organizations simply don’t experience enough pain to cause them to need to change quickly and to expend the energy that cultural change requires.

Changing the culture of an organization requires leaders to apply ...