Appropriate processes fall out of healthy culture

From the late 1940s onwards Toyota started to put their house in order. Through the next few decades they developed the most spectacularly successful business culture based around their core value of respect for people. This effort saw them rise to become, arguably, the no.1 automotive manufacturer in the world. A lot of people noticed what was happening at Toyota and thought that they would have a go at doing the same thing. They studied and copied Toyota’s processes and called it “Lean”, then tried to apply it in other businesses as well.

Now some businesses did indeed get benefits from adopting “Lean” processes, but getting benefits is not the same thing as spectacular success. Many found that the processes didn’t work quite as well elsewhere as they did at Toyota. They had actually missed the point. Toyota processes had become good because they were progressively evolved and fine tuned to Toyota’s situation. What was it that did the fine tuning? Toyota’s culture.

Culture can be a powerful business tool, and many of the most successful organisations in the world just so happen to have exceptionally healthy cultures. If the culture is right, great processes almost seem to happen. If the culture is wrong, no amount of process change seems to help much. Many people in the Agile world think that changing process can help to improve culture. This may be true, but the converse is where the real power is. Change your culture and you’ll get great processes - it’ll just happen.

In Agile Tai Chi we set out deliberately to build a healthy culture. Among the things we did were place a much heavier emphasis on constant testing through activities like multiple types of push hands, five elements fighting, twelve animals fighting, san shou, weapons sparring and even ground fighting (the latter almost unheard of in traditional Tai Chi Chuan). We test at every step of the way, so our people know where they are at and don’t get too delusional. There is nothing healthier than getting dumped on your backside by someone who is better at Tai Chi than you.

At Toyota they learned to highlight problems and defects as early as possible in the process, and in Agile Tai Chi we do the same. One of the biggest difficulties they had was persuading people to stop the production line. Quality is a way of being, not a process to be tacked on the end. Again, it's about culture - a culture of quality is just a far more effective thing than a quality process.

Coloured sashes embody this problem a bit like Lean Black Belts and Certified Scrum Masters. There are so many easy-to-get qualifications now in the Agile community that they are de-valuing the effort and attitude that gave rise to agile working in the first place. I have met endless certified scrum masters, for instance, who have no experience to speak of and don’t really know how to get their teams productive.

So what did we do about this problem in Agile Tai Chi? Very simple, we made our certifications almost ridiculously difficult to get. Candidates are hands-on tested (a lot), it is entirely practical (no multi-choice questions here), and they have to prove they can do it by doing it - there is no other way - and time served means absolutely nothing (another departure from many, though not all, traditional Tai Chi Chuan schools). We admired the status that CCIE holds in the networking industry, and we set out to build our certification pathway with the same kind of attitude.