Three levels of Agile culture

Edgar Schein describes 3 levels of culture:

Artefacts are visible organisational structure, processes, and behaviour.  They are what you see and hear.  For example,

• people are sitting at rows of benches
• the room is well lit from overhead lights and windows all around; one side has blinds closed and is darker
• there do not seem to be any personal effects on one side of the room but a lot on the other side
• the room is generally quiet besides the infrequent metal clang of a cabinet, muted discussion between a couple people, someone blowing their nose

Artefacts are what you see and hear but do not tell you why you are seeing and hearing these things.

Espoused values are the official statements, documents, presentations, etc. that supposedly communicate the values, principles, ethics, and vision of the organisation.  For example:

• Do the right thing
• Attitude, aptitude and integrity
• Service to others and society over self
• Solidarity over charity
• Serve holistic goals over achieving targets
• Personal and organizational transparency
• Curiosity, creativity and passion
• Fail fast and publish our mistakes
• Intolerant of intolerance
• No jerks
• High values alignment, loosely coupled

Culture stereotypes such as "command-and-control", "democratic" are another form of espoused values.

What you will typically notice, especially with larger organisations, is that the espoused values will not be wholly consistent with the actual, visible behaviour.

I have taken to describing espoused values and culture typologies as typically "culture theatre" in that they provide the sense of communicating culture without actually doing so.

Underlying, shared, tacit assumptions are the actual essence of culture.  These are the jointly learned values and beliefs that are taken for granted.  For example,

• The "right thing" is not defined by consensus but rather the views of the leadership, and mostly the founder
• Working a lot of extra hours means you have the "right attitude"
• Some people are talented, others are not.  So there is no use in reserving time for people to develop their talent.
• Utilisation and public perception are the most important goals.  Customers are a necessary evil.
• Transparency is valued for projects but not for general management processes
• Passion is valued, as long as it is related to technology
• Mistakes should be published as long as it's not publicly embarrassing to the leadership
• Beliefs are tolerated as long as they don't conflict with that of the leadership
• No jerks who are not in management roles
• Sites are expected to be self-managed until they don't do what they are expected to do by the central leadership

It is not always the case that unspoken shared assumptions are unflattering but given that unflattering assumptions are typically not officially acknowledged, I've found that there tends to be quite a number that end up that way.

Schein describes culture for an organisation as being like personality to an individual.  This means that, as with personality, observed organisational behaviour should not be wholly attributed to culture as there are always situational forces at play.  Instead one could say that culture (aka underlying assumptions) generates behaviour in response to situation.

So what about Agile culture? What is the Agile Manifesto and Principles, if not espoused values?  If we look at the actual behaviour of Agile teams and organisations, is it consistent with stated Agile values and principles?  Agile itself essentially started with the idea that there is a common culture between all the lightweight methodologies of the 1990s.  How much of that is true?

If we looked more closely at the unstated assumptions of Extreme Programming culture, of Scrum culture, of Kanban culture, how much would be common?  How much would be different?