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Organisational Culture

Cultivating a responsive environment that fosters innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement for transformative success.

Exploring how culture shapes agility, responsiveness, and transformation.

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https://nkdagility.com/resources/organisational-culture/

Overview

Organisational culture encompasses the shared values, beliefs, and behaviours that shape how teams operate within an organisation. It is a critical element that influences decision-making, collaboration, and the overall agility of teams. A strong organisational culture fosters an environment where innovation thrives, enabling teams to respond swiftly to changes and challenges. This adaptability is essential for delivering value predictably and sustainably, as it encourages a mindset of continuous improvement and learning.

The long-term impact of organisational culture is profound; it creates a foundation for trust and psychological safety, allowing team members to voice ideas and concerns without fear. This openness leads to better problem-solving and more effective collaboration, which are vital in agile and DevOps practices. Unlike specific methodologies or frameworks, organisational culture is systemic and permeates every aspect of the organisation, influencing how strategies are executed and how teams interact with one another.

By prioritising a positive organisational culture, companies can enhance their ability to innovate and adapt, ultimately driving successful transformations and achieving strategic goals. This cultural alignment is not merely a backdrop but a dynamic force that propels teams towards excellence and resilience in an ever-evolving landscape.

Learn More about Organisational Culture

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Open Space Agile

Open Space Agile is an approach to organisational agility that applies the principles of Open Space Technology—a self-organising, agenda-free format for large group collaboration—to Agile transformation. Popularised by Daniel Mezick and others in the Open Leadership Network, Open Space Agile invites everyone in the organisation to co-create the change process, fostering psychological safety, shared ownership, and authentic engagement. Rather than relying on top-down rollout plans, it embraces emergence, letting those closest to the work define priorities and actions through open, iterative dialogue. This approach aligns with complexity thinking and honours the Agile ethos by enabling transformation to unfold organically, adaptively, and in response to real needs.
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    Beta Codex

    Embrace Beta Codex for decentralised, adaptive, and human-centric organisational design. Enable true agility beyond rigid hierarchies.
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    Cell Structure Design

    Cell Structure Design is an organisational design model developed by Niels Pfläging, rooted in the principles of the Beta Codex. It replaces traditional hierarchies with a decentralised, network-based structure composed of autonomous, value-creating units called cells. Each cell operates with end-to-end responsibility, enabling responsiveness, accountability, and continuous adaptation. Informed by complexity theory, Cell Structure Design rejects command-and-control in favour of dynamic coordination and transparency, empowering people to self-organise around customer value rather than roles or silos.
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      Ability to Innovate

      Ability to Innovate is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management that gauges organizational capability in terms of innovation. It is composed of a group of measures that assess how effectively an organization generates, implements, and sustains innovative solutions. Rather than a single metric, this group may include indicators like the frequency of experiments, innovation throughput, and learning cycles, offering a broad view of the organization’s capacity to innovate.
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      Agentic Agility

      Agentic Agility is the ability for humans and AI to take intentional, adaptive action within socio-technical environments, enabling continuous improvement, value delivery, and organisational resilience. It transforms Agile, Scrum, and DevOps from passive execution into deliberate evolution, ensuring agility remains a living capability, not a hollow label.
      Videos

      Cultivating a Culture of Quality: Lessons from Boeing and Volkswagen for Engineering Excellence

      Explores how fostering a culture of quality and engineering excellence prevents failures, using Boeing and Volkswagen as examples, and highlights the impact on software development.
      Blog

      Create your own path to Organisational Agility

      Learn how to achieve organisational agility by tailoring change to your unique context, building a guiding coalition, and engaging all stakeholders in continuous improvement.
      Videos

      Empowering Teams to Tailor Their Processes: A Path to True Agility

      Explains why empowering teams to adapt their processes boosts agility, reduces waste, and fosters innovation, using real-world examples and practical steps for organisations.
      Blog

      You can't stop the signal! But you can ignore it!

      Explores why teams ignore clear signals from Agile and Scrum, highlighting how culture and fear hinder continuous improvement and effective problem-solving in organisations.
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      Continuous Improvement

      Continuous Improvement is the ongoing practice of relentless reflection and adaptation, driven by empirical evidence, aimed at consistently enhancing processes, products, and team effectiveness. It embodies a commitment to incremental and measurable advancements, fostering a culture of proactive experimentation, rapid feedback, and learning to achieve sustainable and strategic business agility.
      Blog

      Does your company culture resemble Survivor?

      Is your company culture a ‘Survivor’ game? Discover how fostering collaboration can enhance agility and team success in your organization.
      Videos

      Does Your Team Truly Understand Your Product Vision and Goals?

      Ensuring every team member understands and connects their daily work to the product vision and strategic goals is key to true Agile alignment, collaboration, and value delivery.
      Blog

      Evolution not Transformation: This is the Inevitability of change

      Change in organisations is a continuous, evolutionary process driven by experimentation and adaptation, not a one-time transformation or fixed end state.
      Videos

      Biggest contribution from a Product Owner that you know of

      Explores how visionary Product Owners at Microsoft drove Agile transformation, shortened feedback cycles, and reshaped product development culture and industry standards.
      Videos

      Unlocking Naked Agility: How Happy Teams Drive Exceptional Products

      Explores how team happiness, autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive engagement and lead to higher-quality, more impactful products in agile organisations.
      Videos

      What is the one thing that no Agile team can survive?

      Explores how a culture of contempt undermines Agile teams, its causes, impact on morale and productivity, and practical steps leaders can take to build a positive, inclusive culture.
      Videos

      Unlocking Organisational Value: The Transformative Power of Engagement in Agile Teams

      Explores how decentralising decision-making, fostering autonomy, and building a shared vision in agile teams can boost engagement and unlock greater organisational value.
      Videos

      The Strategic Imperative: Empowering Teams with Vision, Goals, and Direction

      Explores how clear vision, goals, and evidence-based management empower teams, improve alignment, and foster autonomy, engagement, and effective decision-making in organisations.
      Videos

      Unlocking Agile’s Core: Questioning to Create Value

      Explores how questioning, continuous improvement, and team empowerment drive Agile success, helping organisations adapt quickly, spot inefficiencies, and create lasting value.
      Videos

      What more needs to happen before traditional organisations consider Agile?

      Explores what traditional organisations must change—beyond adopting Agile tools—to achieve true agility, cultural transformation, and sustained competitive advantage.
      Videos

      The Power of Charity in Agile: How Helping Others Elevates Teams and Organizations

      Explores how practising charity—helping others without expecting rewards—strengthens Agile teams, boosts collaboration, and drives organisational success and motivation.
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      Empathy in Agile: Building Trust and Stronger Relationships for Success

      Explores how empathy, trust, and respect strengthen agile teams, improve collaboration, reduce bias, and foster continuous improvement in organisations and with customers.
      Blog

      The Urgent Call for Agile Organisational Transformation

      Explores why traditional hierarchical organisations struggle in fast-changing markets and argues for agile, decentralised structures to boost adaptability and innovation.
      Blog

      What is Taylorism, and why Waterfall is just the tip of the iceberg!

      Explores how Taylorism shaped modern management, leading to rigid hierarchies, bureaucracy, and dehumanising work practices that persist beyond Waterfall methodologies.
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      Working Agreements

      Establishing team norms and collaboration principles for effective teamwork.
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      Social Technologies

      Social technologies are systems of thought that shape collaboration, decision-making, and adaptability. Rooted in self-organisation and continuous learning, they enable organisations to evolve, innovate, and create sustainable value.
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      Organisational Change

      Driving transformation efforts to enable agility and resilience.
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      Company as a Product

      Company as a Product (CaaP) is an organisational strategy that treats the entire company as a continuously evolving product, rather than a static structure. It emphasises designing and refining the organisation based on customer feedback, measurable outcomes, and strategic goals—much like product development. Popularised by thought leaders in modern organisational design and continuous discovery, CaaP encourages cross-functional collaboration, experimentation, and alignment across all levels. Instead of optimising for internal efficiency or hierarchy, it focuses on delivering value to customers and adapting the company’s capabilities, systems, and structures as intentionally as one would iterate on a product.
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        Agnostic Agile

        Agnostic Agile is a movement that promotes ethical, context-driven agility by prioritising principles over rigid frameworks. Championed by thought leaders like Arie van Bennekum, a Dutch signatory of the Agile Manifesto, it encourages practitioners to adapt methods pragmatically based on need rather than ideology. Drawing from diverse approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and XP, Agnostic Agile emphasises professionalism, critical thinking, and value delivery over brand loyalty or prescriptive practice.
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        Empowering Teams for Success: The Key to Thriving Product Development

        Explores how empowering and engaging diverse software teams boosts motivation, collaboration, and product quality through trust, feedback, skills development, and shared goals.
        Videos

        Where Agile Went Wrong: Understanding the Competence Crisis

        Explores how early assumptions about competence led to Agile’s current skills gap, highlighting the need for continuous learning, better hiring, and deeper expertise in teams.
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        Training: A Bridge to Knowledge and Growth

        Explores how effective training, continuous learning, and a supportive culture help teams grow, adapt to change, and overcome skill gaps in modern organisations.
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        Empowering Teams to Maximize Value and Return on Investment

        Explores how empowering Agile teams to adapt their processes boosts flexibility, continuous improvement, collaboration, and maximises value and return on investment.
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        Asynchronous Development

        Enable seamless collaboration with Asynchronous Development. Improve efficiency, flexibility, and delivery across distributed teams.
        Videos

        Focusing Beyond "Agile": Building True Capability in Organizations

        Explores why building organisational capability, competence, and continuous learning is more effective than focusing solely on Agile roles, frameworks, or labels.
        Videos

        Navigating the Judgment Trap: How to Foster a Healthy Agile Environment

        Explores how judgment in Agile teams harms morale and innovation, and offers practical steps to create a supportive, collaborative, and growth-focused Agile environment.
        Videos

        Why Is It So Important that Senior Leadership Teams are Engaged During an Agile Consulting Engagement?

        Active senior leadership engagement is essential for successful Agile transformation, enabling systemic change, faster adaptation, and organisation-wide alignment.
        Videos

        Why is Satya Nadella a better example of agile leadership than Steve Jobs?

        Compares Satya Nadella’s and Steve Jobs’s leadership, highlighting Nadella’s agile approach that fosters innovation, decentralised decision-making, and lasting organisational change.
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        Professional Organisational Change at the Ghana Police Service

        Explores the Ghana Police Service’s shift to a modern, professional model using servant leadership, agile frameworks, and strategic change to restore public trust and effectiveness.
        Videos

        Boosting Team Morale and Engagement Through Effective Mentorship Programs

        Explores how long-term mentorship programmes boost team morale, engagement, and performance by fostering intrinsic motivation, collaboration, and continuous learning.
        Videos

        Empowering Your Team: Why Quick Fixes in Agile and DevOps Are a Myth

        Explains why lasting Agile and DevOps success requires empowering teams and building internal capability, not relying on quick fixes or external consultants for solutions.
        Videos

        Breaking the Silence: How to Combat Communication Gaps in Agile Teams

        Explores the impact of communication gaps in Agile teams, their causes and consequences, and offers practical strategies to foster open, effective team dialogue.
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        7 deadly sins of Agile: Wrath

        Explores how blame and intolerance for mistakes harm Agile teams, and offers strategies to replace blame with accountability, learning, and a safer team culture.
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        Searching for self-organisation

        Explore the journey to self-organisation in teams. Discover strategies to foster accountability, identity, and high performance for agile success.
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        7 Harbingers of the Agile Apocalypse - Famine

        Explores how resource scarcity—like lack of trust, funding, tools, and training—undermines Agile teams, and offers strategies to empower and support organisational success.
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        Transforming Agile: How to Shift from Blame to Systemic Solutions for Better Team Dynamics

        Explores how shifting from blame to addressing systemic issues and measurement systems can improve team dynamics, collaboration, and agility in software development.
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        Luddites have no place in the modern organisation

        Explores how resistance to change and outdated mindsets hinder organisational agility, stressing the need for adaptable, forward-thinking teams in modern business.
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        Why did so many of the early agile transformations fail?

        Early agile transformations often failed due to top-down decisions, lack of team involvement, and misalignment between leadership and those doing the work.
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        The Power of Kindness in Agile: A Core Virtue for Success

        Explores how kindness, empathy, and compassion in Agile foster trust, improve team collaboration, and enhance customer focus for long-term organisational success.
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        Cultivating Patience: The Secret Ingredient for Thriving Agile Teams

        Explores how patience fosters trust, growth, and collaboration in agile teams, offering practical steps to build a supportive, blame-free, and productive team culture.
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        Engaging Your Team: The Secret to Successful Organisational Change

        Learn how involving, empowering, and communicating with your team drives successful organisational change by fostering shared goals, trust, and a culture of engagement.
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        Breaking the Silence: How to Combat the Hidden Dangers in Agile Teams

        Explores the risks of unspoken issues in Agile teams, detailing how silence harms communication, trust, and value delivery, and offers strategies to foster open dialogue.
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        Unlocking Agility: How Decentralisation Empowers Teams to Maximise Value in Any Organisation

        Explores how decentralising decision-making boosts team agility, engagement, and innovation, helping organisations of any size maximise value and adapt to change.
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        Unlocking Transformation: Why Embracing Difficult Conversations with Agile Consultants is Key to Success

        Explores how open, challenging conversations with agile consultants drive organisational change, foster learning, and support continuous improvement and accountability.
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        Transforming Chaos into Collaboration: How a Common Framework Can Revolutionise Your Team's Dynamics

        Explores how adopting a shared framework and structured communication can turn team chaos into collaboration, boosting trust, engagement, and continuous improvement.
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        Organisational Physics

        Organisational Physics is a conceptual model that uses systems thinking to analyse and influence the dynamics within organisations, focusing on the interplay between people, processes, and technology.
        Course

        Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM)

        Scrum.org created the Evidence-Based Management™ (EBM) framework which is an Agile approach to help leaders guide their teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities, and business results. EBM focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organization’s performance and achieve its strategic goals.
        Videos

        Conquering Sloth in Agile: 6 Signs Your Team Might Be Stalling

        Learn to spot six key signs of sloth in Agile teams, including missed deliveries, ignored feedback, rigid processes, and lack of adaptation, to improve true agility.
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        Empowering Leadership: Driving Cultural Change for Agile Success

        Explores how effective leadership drives cultural change, supports agile practices, and fosters collaboration through vision, automation, learning, and breaking down silos.
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        Liberating Structures

        Liberating Structures is a set of simple, adaptable facilitation methods designed to make meetings more interactive, inclusive, and productive. Each structure replaces conventional habits like open discussion or status reporting with clear participation formats. Used across Agile, Lean, and organisational change initiatives, they provide structure without control, helping teams uncover insights and co-create better outcomes.
        Videos

        Unlocking Sustainable Growth: Why Leadership is the Key to Successful Scaling

        Effective scaling depends on strong leadership—empowering teams, removing bottlenecks, and decentralising decisions to enable sustainable organisational growth.
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        Is Your Engineering Culture Ready to Scale with Your Technology?

        Explores why scaling technology alone isn’t enough, highlighting the need for engineering cultures that support collaboration, DevOps, and continuous learning as teams grow.

        Connect with Martin Hinshelwood

        If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.

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