The technology industry thrives on structure and frameworks. We depend on organized modes of operation that are trusted to yield consistent (or at least comparable) results. Whether it be design patterns, agile methodologies, or programming frameworks, the technology industry is built on determinism and consistency.
However, the topic of “Culture” has acquired a strangely mysterious reputation. Organizations are predisposed to treating it as a nebulous, unknowable, almost magical quality. For an industry that is supposed to be driven by structure, proofs and data, the technology industry seems to have fallen into this fantastical model of thinking
The Better Managed Development (BMD) method seeks to disprove this notion that culture is immeasurable or unknowable. In this manifesto, we describe ideals of the method as a framework for cultural governance in the technology organization.
Table of Contents
The BMD method aims to
- Provide a method for enterprise-scale cultural governance and oversight
- Provide a mechanism for transparency, good-faith and accountability for the cultural ends of the technology enterprise
- Bridge the gap between the perception and reality of culture in the enterprise
- Support consistent application of cultural principles across teams and managers in the enterprise
- Support the needs of leaders that need a structured way to operate and communicate about culture
- Support the needs of individual contributors that enjoy clearly defined expectations regarding their employer’s culture
- Provide a method that allows for measuring culture at scale
- Make organizational culture tangible and observable
- Serve as a meta-framework that other frameworks like Agile and OKR can fit into, offering minimal disruption to the current state of the organization.
- Define a basis upon which the technology industry can develop shared “design” patterns for executing cultural initiatives.
- An organization’s “culture” is not a monolith. It is composed of multiple distinct facets that matter to different segments of the organization.
- “Culture” in the broad sense of the term includes both technical and nontechnical expectations
- “Culture” is measurable, observable and governable at scale
- Overuse of the word “Culture” is counterproductive to the aims of effective cultural governance.
- On their own, more popular units of deliverables (“Goals”, “Objectives”, “Key Results”, “Milestones”) are inadequate for the purposes of effective cultural governance
- An organization’s “culture” is composed of multiple complementary, conflicting and overlapping Outcomes, or Cultural Outcomes
- It is improbable that at a given point in time, all of an organization’s acknowledged cultural outcomes are in complete alignment with each other.
- All activities in the organization that aren’t directly related to products or services sold by the organization, should be attributable to specific, well-defined Cultural Outcomes
- Every organization should maintain an up-to-date catalog of relevant Components that are attributable to how the organization delivers on its culture
- Every component invested in the delivery of a cultural outcome emits Signals.
- The technology industry will eventually arrive at a shared set of recommended Cultural Outcomes and Signals
- Specific individuals should be responsible for monitoring specific Cultural Outcomes