Agile

Change The Environment, Not The People

Short personal reflections, thoughts, and ideas

Last week, I was on holiday, and it was a great experience! 🥳 There was one catch: we started each day full of ambitions and ideas for fun activities, but not much happened at the end of the day.

It was 35–40 degrees Celsius ☀, which we’re not used to and even the local people struggled with. Despite good intentions, all energy evaporated once the sun started shining. Swimming pool it was.

I’ve noticed a similar pattern in some organizations I’ve worked with. Employees went to work with admirable ambitions and great ideas to try. Yet somehow, the organization’s culture (and environment) quickly diminished all good intentions.

Professor Sumantra Ghoshal offered a great way to think about how your work environment shapes your behavior. Organizations often have different “smells” to them, and all those smells work together to drive how people behave. The environment we work in shapes how we behave and feel.

Most of us feel more inspired and energized in a fresh, lush forest 🌲 than in the drab, concrete jungle or a metropolitan city in the scorching summer heat.

Re-energizing people often has less to do with changing them and more with changing the context in which they work. This leads to one interesting opportunity for change:

👉 Don’t change the people, but change the environment

You can sort these smells into four dimensions, where the ends represent competing values:

1️⃣ Constraint vs Stretch
2️⃣ Compliance vs Discipline
3️⃣ Control vs Support
4️⃣ Contract vs Trust

We tweaked the concept into a Retrospective exercise. With this exercise, you make your organization’s positive and negative smells clear and specific, inspect its impact on teams, and make improvements together.