Culture eats strategy for breakfast
It doesn’t matter what tools or processes are in place, if you don’t have the culture to support them, people will work outside of those processes and tools.
- Culture is either intentional, or unintentional
- If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then it is too important to be left to chance. It is important to be intentional about the culture you want to adopt and then foster in your organization.
Understanding cultural ingredients
Some of the key cultural InnerSource ingredients we see are:
- Transparency, both terms of process and participation
- Engagement, contributors are highly engaged, often resulting in productive conflict and creative abrasion
- Communication, enabling organization wide participation
These cultural ingredients produce a freedom to contribute, central to the success of InnerSource (since, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow).
Linus’s Law
Linus’s law is a claim about software development and named after Linus Torvalds. The law states that, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. Meaning, given a enough people to test and review the code, issues and bugs will be characterized and fixed quickly with someone knowing how to fix it.
To understand how to introduce new cultural ingredients, it may be helpful to review the five dysfunctions of a team, these are:
- Absence of trust
- Fear of conflict
- Lack of commitment
- Avoidance of accountability
- Inattention to results
The Emperor’s new clothes test
Applying this cultural mindset of trust and transparency within an organization, we see the importance for feedback to come from anywhere, as well as the importance of receiving feedback well. Receiving feedback is a gift.
Are there ways in the organization that allow a novice (e.g., an intern) to publicly call attention to the emperor’s (i.e., the expert’s) lack of clothes (i.e., to raise quality issues), or does all internal communication addressed to a larger audience have to go through gatekeepers?
Questions:
Does this feel achievable, or insurmountable? Has there been any situations, positive or negative, that revolve around this situation? How does this style fit with your current culture? What resistance is this likely to be met with? Do constraints exist that limit openness?