Culture and Agile Transformation with Marc Danziger and Pete Turner

Marc Danziger writes crazy things about Agile at wickedproblems.substack.com. This month's topic will come out of one of these pieces in which he asked how we understand and change culture as a part of agile change.

Marc sees the Agile community as splitting between 'procedural' and 'behavioral' subgroups, each trying to find ways of driving change deeper into organizations. The barrier we face is organizational culture, and in his experience, we don't yet have reproducible, scalable methods to define and change organizational culture.

Marc's oldest son served in Afghanistan for 2-1/2 years, and for 1-1/2 of those years he did work in trying to bridge to local culture with SOCOM. This led to Marc's reading and learning a lot about what is being done in the military around these things - some of which is not working and some of which appears to work.

Marc Danziger met Pete Turner and they've spent a lot of time discussing how to see, understand, and shape culture - and they thought it would be good to broaden this discussion out and see what others think of it.

Your Speakers:

Marc Danziger uses and teaches Agile in software and business delivery. Marc has used (and according to some abused) agile development practices since the late 90's, making him not quite old-school - but close. Right now Marc is focused on enterprise agile transformations, at the delivery, operations, and executive layers.

Pete A Turner is a former Army combat spy with over 1000 missions in conflict zones in a variety of countries, including Bosnia, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan. His daily missions took him off-camp and out to find the people, information, and secrets that enabled commanders to win. Ultimately Pete succeeded because he learned to earn the trust and work within the culture of the most dangerous and evil people in the region. This trust and cultural capacity allowed Pete unique access to the “Ground Truth” illustrating the realities that exist below the tactical level.