At QCon London 2015, Helen Walton and Pete Burden came up with a discussion on the impact of culture in project’s success (failure indeed) and gave practical advice on how to influence the organization's culture to which a person is working for.
Helen challenged the audience to talk about childhood’s dream jobs and mentioned that, when a person embraces a job thinking it could be the dreamed job, the reason one becomes unhappy is not related to the work or with the tasks themselves. It is directly connected to other people and the multiple interactions that occur every day. In other words, culture is the main reason for unhappiness at work and it is still the reason number one for project’s failure.
Giving real-life examples, she described how it is important to analyze what a person really think that need to be changed. It is not uncommon that the first reason or reasons identified are not the most important ones and one realizes that when some conditions changed, like for example getting a promotion, the feeling of being unsatisfied is still present.
Towards the goal of “creating the organization you believe in”, the following questions should be addressed by who wants to embrace that journey:
- What frustrates you?
- What bad effects do you witness?
- What poor behaviours do you experience?
- What negative results of impacts do you see?
- Is there a gap between what the organisation says and what it does?
Pete Burden explained why inquiry is the adequate technique for gathering relevant insights where a person is trying to better understand his own reality. He also challenged the audience to put this concept in practice highlighting the difference between inquiry and advocacy.
On conscious business uk he has detailed this concepts.
Audience was finally presented with a homework. Before anyone starts trying to change any company’s environmental factor, it is recommended to get the following three questions answered:
- What is your purpose
- What you long-term goal
- What your action in the next 2 weeks
