culture

Man in a suit pointing his finger 3 Ways Leaders Can Change a Blame Culture

If your organization has a blame culture, team members get discouraged and mistrust leaders. It focuses on pointing fingers, not coming up with solutions to move forward. To increase trust, inspire creativity, and nurture a generative culture with your team, here are three things leaders can do instead of placing blame.

Owen Gotimer's picture
Owen Gotimer
Agile team member expressing intention Don’t Ask for Permission or Forgiveness—Use an Agile Alternative

Some teams get around bottlenecks by taking a “better to ask forgiveness than permission” approach. This may be expedient, but it doesn’t provide a path to changing the organizational dynamic, and it can lead to wrong decisions when wider input is advisable. A more agile way is to take an “I intend to” approach.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Team member pointing a finger to blame someone Is Your Culture about Responsibility or Blame?

When things go wrong, it can be helpful to understand what happened and who was involved. However, all too often organizations (and the managers within) confuse responsibility with assigning blame. The former is essential for improvement. The latter works against an effective, collaborative, productive culture.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
IVOW illustration of AI testers Building Culturally Inclusive AI Models

For us to build the most effective technology, we need to learn from our past and build our future with more comprehensive data sets with cultural intelligence. This means AI that recognizes your story, chatbots that speak to you more authentically, and smart assistants that have inclusive data about your ancestry.

Davar Ardalan's picture
Davar Ardalan
Light bulb hovering over a person's hand 5 Actions to Create a Work Culture Safe for Innovation

People tend to thrive in environments where they feel safe. Company leaders have the opportunity to help engineer a generative culture, where team members feel secure, supported, and trusted to think creatively and innovate. Here are five actions leaders can take to create and nurture healthy working environments.

Owen Gotimer's picture
Owen Gotimer
Hand drawing connections between multiple site locations on a map Creating a Cohesive Culture in a Distributed Organization

When organizations are distributed across multiple locations, it brings questions about how much each location should have a unique identity relative to the larger company. While a theme of “we are one” is common, it’s better to embrace the differences and work toward being a cohesive group that celebrates diversity.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Agile team all putting their hands in the center, photo by Perry Grone Creating a Company Culture Where Agile Will Thrive

A so-called generative culture has all the characteristics necessary to support self-directed teams, shared responsibility, experimentation, and continuous process improvement. But what about the rest of us? Most large organizations don't have a culture where agile will take hold so easily. Here's what needs to change.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
A two-lane road heading toward a mountain, photo by Jamison McAndie The Importance of Goal Alignment in Agile and DevOps

For agile and DevOps teams to succeed, there must be a common vision that strives for detailed customer-focused outcomes. There’s never a magic bullet to address goal misalignment, as the challenges are context-specific, but here are some approaches that help move organizations and teams toward better alignment.

Michael Sowers's picture
Michael Sowers