Project Scagile Webinar: Measurably Improve Corporate Culture & Agile Customer Orientation
How do you scale an agile corporate culture?
In our webinar, we addressed this very question! Below you will find the Project Scagile webinar “Shaping Organizational Culture”.
Many executives know that their teams focus too much on ‘Doing Agile’ (i.e. Scrum, or other frameworks) and forget about ‘Being Agile’: Real customer orientation and self-organization that leads to innovation.
Our co-founder Christian Heidemeyer moderates and comments on various expert interviews that show how it works - have fun!
Webinar “Scaling Agility” on Youtube (full 60 minutes)
Expert interviews in the webinar: The guest list
- Christian Heidemeyer (psychologist, Scrum Master, initiator of Project Scagile) – moderates the webinar and classifies the contributions.
- Maureen Becker (Scaled Agile Trainer) – Part of the panel of experts and addresses the challenge of the “frozen middle” in middle management.
- Kevin Rassner (Organizational Development Coach) – Highlights the importance of lived humanity and rituals for building trust.
- Vivek Saran (Agile Program Manager) – Uses concrete examples to show how transparency and early feedback avoid project errors.
- Eric Obrien (Principal Agile Coach) – Advocates focusing on existing successes and blameless retros to establish a learning culture.
- Suyi Ojo (Agile Transformation & Delivery Lead) – Emphasizes the importance of the human component of collaboration and provides practical examples
- Philip Rogers (Technical Program Manager & Lean Agile Coach) – Provides impulses for cultural experiments, culture books and the right balance between push and pull coaching.
- Sameh Abdou (Agile Coach & SAFe Trainer) – Explains what culture is and how it is anchored in collaboration and processes.
- Steve (Agile Coach) – Openly discusses the benefits of “fail fast” and hypothesis testing to learn faster.
- John – Anchors psychological safety, among other things, with a “Failure Award” and concrete practices for error transparency.
- Sean Depkin (Release Train Engineer) – Provides insight into leadership behavior in the event of necessary product pivots and how leadership teams become role models for error tolerance.
Summary & Key Take Aways: How to successfully scale agility in companies
The webinar highlights how cultural change succeeds in agile transformations. Christian Heidemeyer guides through the expert statements and combines psychological models with practical examples from large organizations.
- Trust first: Transparency, walk-the-talk from executives and consciously lived humanity (e.g. check-ins, personal stories) form the foundation of an agile culture.
- Middle management as leverage: Scrum Masters and Product Owners from middle management need coaching, training and personal relationships to move from command & control to servant leadership.
- Change behavior instead of buzzwords: New processes such as regular retros, culture books or culture KPIs sustainably anchor desired behaviors – culture follows lived habits.
- Psychological safety: Disclose errors openly, explain pivot decisions and create spaces with formats such as Failure Awards in which teams take risks and share ideas early.
- Systemic alignment: HR, finance and executive teams must actively support the change (360° feedback, long-term teams, shared “why” story) so that messages remain consistent.
- Learn from successes and failures: Bright-spot analyses, appreciative inquiry and hypothesis tests provide momentum, while misconceptions are identified and corrected early on.
