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InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Deliberately Designing Culture at Ocado Technology

Deliberately Designing Culture at Ocado Technology

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Douglas Talbot, Head of Organisational Effectiveness for Ocado Technology, about the challenges and opportunities involved in creating a culture of innovation and agility in “a technology company that also does retail”.

Key Takeaways

  • Differences in the way IT is approached in different parts of the world
  • Applying ideas from agile, lean and Kanban to making business smarter by looking beyond process and practices to the people factors that make a difference to organisational outcomes 
  • Looking beyond the “latest consultancy model of choice” and taking an evidence-based approach to understand what really drives motivation and behavioural change in teams
  • Leadership is a game of providing clarity of vision and allowing teams to be self-organising and empowered
  • Cultural change is not really possible without commitment from the very top
  • Top talent wants to work in places where there is a great culture, so culture becomes a competitive advantage
  • 0m:25s - Introductions
  • 1m:05s - Focusing on making organisations smarter
  • 1m:44s - Differences in the approach to IT between New Zealand and Europe
  • 2m:10s - Differences across European organisations
  • 2m:30s - “No 8 Wire” approach in New Zealand makes them receptive of agile & lean approaches
  • 3m:35s - Not necessarily innovative; rather necessity driven
  • 4m:15s - Larger economies enable more resources, more people and more money to be spent solving problems
  • 4m:45s - What Ocado Technology does
  • 6m:55s - Applying ideas from agile, lean and Kanban to making business smarter by looking beyond process and practices to the people factors that make a difference to organisational outcomes
  • 7m:20s - All too often an agile/lean adoption starts with a bang and ends with a whimper, because they are driven by process and practice without making culture change the core driver
  • 8m:35s - Diverse backgrounds of the organisational effectiveness group
  • 9m:05s - Engaging a behavioural economist and an organisational psychologist to ensure there is an understanding of the evidence around group dynamics and motivation
  • 9m:25s - Looking beyond the “latest consultancy model of choice” and taking an evidence-based approach to understand what really drives motivation and behavioural change in teams
  • 10m:10s - Examples of evidence found and changes made
  • 10m:20s - Exploring Daniel Pink’s work on autonomy, mastery and purpose and the underlying research into self-determination theory, relatedness and engagement
  • 10m:55s - When exploring the underlying research many of the papers are focused on narrow sectors of the marketplace and may not directly extrapolate into other areas
  • 11m:25s - It is often hard to find evidence which relates to IT and software teams
  • 11m:40s - Researching the ideas needed for great leadership training
  • 11m:55s - Looking at research into physical environments and how they impact productivity in order to support the design of new office space
  • 12m:50s - An example of content developed in response to the evidence based approach is training on how to give and receive good feedback, based on Richard Hackman’s work on collaborative teams
  • 14m:05s - How the work on Collaborative Intelligence shows the importance of peer-to-peer coaching for team success
  • 14m:50s - Building tools and having conversations about what effective feedback actually is
  • 15m:50s - Outcomes that show that peer feedback learning has made a positive difference
  • 17m:00s - Measuring trends over time to see the actual impact of culture change
  • 17m:35s - Designing leadership training to support culture change
  • 18m:20s - The lack of evidence for specific approaches at the detailed level
  • 19m:10s - The importance of visionary leadership for motivated teams
  • 19m:20s - Transactional Analysis as a leadership skill
  • 19m:50s - Leadership is a game of providing clarity of vision and allowing teams to be self-organising and empowered
  • 20m:15s - The value and benefits of autonomous teams; evidence from Spotify
  • 20m:30s - The need for alignment as well as autonomy
  • 20m:55s - Using tools like the Delegation Board from Management 3.0
  • 21m:35s - Cultural change is not really possible without commitment from the very top
  • 22m:15s - Failure of agile/lean/Kanban adoption is most often related to management sticking with “what’s safe”
  • 23m:00s - Working with the leadership and management groups to actually make the changes stick is the hardest and longest part of any transformation
  • 24m:30s - The challenge for the agile/lean/Kanban movement is to help and support large, traditional organisations as they make the shift away from Taylorism and command & control thinking to the approaches needed for the 21st century
  • 25m:40s - Very few organisations have made long-term sustainable change to new ways of working; the organisations which are most successful are the ones which were founded on the basis of agile/lean management, rather than those which are transitioning into a new way of working
  • 27m:10s - Discussing how Suncorp made a successful, long-term transformation
  • 28m:40s - The demands of the new generation of graduates to work in humanistic workplaces
  • 29m:10s - The growth in demand for IT skills and the resultant dearth of skilled people
  • 29m:44s - Top talent wants to work in places where there is a great culture, so culture becomes a competitive advantage
  • 30m:15s - The need to consciously design positive culture into organisations and not just leave it to chance
  • 30m:35s - The importance of culture change being a long game, and it needs imbedded change agents, not external coaches/consultants

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