Abstract: Can an organization's culture really be designed, engineered or installed? Why is it so persistent....and tricky? And where can a professional change agent turn when casual or superficial notions of what it means to "culture hack" do not seem to be doing justice to the technical excellence required by Agile principles?
This talk will draw upon the discipline of Cultural Anthropology to provide a few concrete examples of how experts talk about and study culture. Methods of fieldwork - living inside a culture other than one's own in order to observe it up close and describe it firsthand - will be broken down into an easy-to-use format designed to help you in your Agile practice.
Learning Outcomes: - Grasp that harm can come from cultural interventions based on change without understanding
- Prepare to take on the role of Participant Observer in studying a workplace
- Practice a few key field methods that reveal how a particular culture structures its own reality
