Technological improvements like containers, VMs, infrastructure-as-code, software-defined-networking, collaborative version control, and CI/CD can make it possible to fix cultural issues around organisational dynamics and bad product delivery. According to Nigel Kersten, software leaders should leverage tech to create positive changes in organisational dynamics and relationships between teams.
Nigel Kersten spoke about how technology can drive culture change at FlowCon France 2024.
Cultural change efforts across larger tech organizations tend to fail often. The most common problem is a failure to define what "cultural change" actually means, Kersten said. "Culture" is far too broad a term, and unless you identify specific and actionable issues that you want to address, you won’t succeed:
First, you’ll find that everyone has a different idea of what "culture" means and a different set of issues in mind, which makes progress difficult. Secondly, you’ll find that without a more specific and concrete set of goals, people will lack confidence that they can create any kind of impact, and will feel helpless.
In most software organisations, it is technological improvements that make it possible to fix the sorts of issues around organisational dynamics and bad product delivery, Kersten said. Improvements don’t automatically happen due to new tech capabilities, but they do become possible if leaders take advantage of them, he added.
Kersten argued that most technologists want to learn new things, as there’s a natural incentive there for their own careers:
If they understand what the business is trying to achieve and why, and you’re regularly listening to your teams in the way good leaders do, then suggestions for new tech will naturally emerge.
The job of a tech leader is to work out how to leverage this new tech to create positive changes in organisational dynamics and relationships between teams, Kersten mentioned.
Tech that creates simplified abstractions over complexity drives the greatest cultural change, Kersten said. Think of containers, VMs, infrastructure-as-code, software-defined-networking, collaborative version control, and CI/CD:
The tools in this space all enable subject matter experts to bundle up their expertise and make it usable by a larger group of people.
This democratisation makes it easier to have that larger group work towards a common goal, which allows teams to work at their own pace without waiting for someone else to fulfil their request, ultimately making it easier to solve problems for your users, Kersten concluded.
InfoQ interviewed Nigel Kersten about driving culture change with technology.
InfoQ: You mentioned in your talk that getting to fast flow or doing platform engineering well is much more than a shift in culture. What’s needed to support technological change in organizations?
Nigel Kersten: If you’re an organisational leader, the very best thing you can do to enable technical change is to create engaged, satisfied teams with clear context around your business goals, incentivise them to look for continuous improvements, and then give them the time, space, and support to investigate new technologies.
Common examples here are anything to do with automation. If teams have the space to learn new skills and apply them to automate manual tasks, then it’s a relatively simple next step to expose that automation to other teams and to start creating self-service interfaces. This could be something as simple as the remediation of a certain kind of issue in production, or updating a configuration setting.
InfoQ: What are the things that we can or cannot improve with software?
Kersten: Software won’t help you if you don’t have a strategy, if you don’t have a clear vision, and if you don’t have a clear set of goals you want your organisation to achieve. It won’t help you fix diversity issues on your teams, and it won’t help you create psychological safety, which we know is a primary driver of successful teams.
Software can help you with improving internal and external feedback loops, speeding up decision-making, inter-team interactions, and the impact that teams can have on the business, but not without conscious effort from leadership. Software by itself is never a magic bullet.