You're doing culture wrong

DevOps “culture” gets blamed for everything—so what is it, really? Pinja and Eficode consultant Dan Khurram cut through the buzzwords to define culture in practical terms: how decisions get made, what behaviors are acceptable, and how teams talk about uncertainty and failure. They compare textbook “DevOps culture” to actual corporate culture, then borrow lessons from high-stakes domains like aviation and healthcare on learning from incidents instead of hiding them. Along the way: onboarding as your first culture signal, Microsoft’s “learn-it-all” shift, and three takeaways you can apply now—don’t call it a culture change, define your “why” for your context, and start locally so good habits spread. If your transformation feels like more ceremonies than substance (hello, Jira), this episode gives you a clearer map. 

[Dan] (0:03 - 0:11)

Was the culture change the input or did the culture change as an output of changing other stuff and finding a balance between all that?

[Pinja] (0:14 - 0:49)

Welcome to the DevOps Sauna, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of DevOps, platform engineering, security, and more as we explore the future of development. Join us as we dive into the heart of DevOps, one story at a time. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or only starting your DevOps journey, we're happy to welcome you into the DevOps Sauna.

All right, welcome back to the DevOps Sauna. I am joined today by my colleague Dan Khurram. Welcome, Dan.

[Dan] (0:49 - 0:51)

Hello, Pinja. Thanks for having me.

[Pinja] (0:51 - 0:51)

How are you doing today?

[Dan] (0:52 - 1:03)

I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited to be the first post-Darren guest here.

I feel I'm your emotional support co-host to help you get through this uncertain time. So yeah, thanks for having me.

[Pinja] (1:04 - 1:42)

I'm very happy to have you here. And we have a really loaded topic here today, so that's even more nerve-wracking, I guess, because everybody knows that when we talk about agile, when we talk about DevOps, one of the key things at the very core of that is the discussion of the culture, how to build a DevOps culture. So we're going to talk about the DevOps culture and how we actually don't think that it means what everybody thinks it means, but this is something that we...

Let's just hear us out, okay? We're getting there. We will have some guidance here and some thinking here that might actually get you to have some discussions and genuine discussions on how to actually improve the culture, because maybe we should go into the core of what we actually even mean.

[Dan] (1:42 - 2:17)

Yeah. What are we even talking about? This comes up a lot, right?

We do a lot of projects with a lot of teams where we're changing things of the culture where it just comes up so often, but you can't put your finger on it. And you're like, did we change the culture? Did we not change the culture?

So yeah, this is exciting. I'm also excited to actually figure things out while we're talking. I have said to many people, I've been on podcasts, I've been on stage, I've been on panels.

This is probably going to be the closest thing that could get me in trouble with HR. So we have to be very careful here. And it's the closest thing that might get us cancelled.

So I can't get you cancelled on your first episode post, Darren.

[Pinja] (2:17 - 3:00)

I hope we're not doing that, but maybe... Do we get enough clickbaits and enough kinds of soundbites to get you hooked on this episode? We hope we did.

But let's get into the mystical DevOps culture. So what actually is that? And well, obviously, since it's 2025, we asked AI, what is DevOps culture?

And we got the answer of its mindset and a set of values. Okay. We've got two things there.

Mindset, a set of values that promotes cooperation and shared responsibility. Sure. I can get behind those.

Between the development operations team. Okay. That's the original definition, bridge the gap between dev and ops to build and deliver high quality software.

Okay. Quality, value. Nice.

Faster and more reliably. How would you dissect this, Dan? What does it mean to you?

[Dan] (3:00 - 4:12)

Yeah. I mean, the first thing is I also asked AI just before this call, because I was interested in how many times you have to ask it to give the same answer. And then I got, I just said, what is DevOps?

Right. DevOps is a cultural philosophy, a set of practices and tools that merge software development and IT operations to deliver high quality applications and services at high velocity. And I think that now that we've defined, but before we even dissect it, I want to compare this.

I want to compare this to a dictionary definition of culture. What is that in our lives? And then I think, well, I'm not even, I think I already know it because I already got it on my screen.

So Google the dictionary definition of corporate culture, and then let's circle back onto DevOps as a culture. Yeah. So I don't know, do you want me to go through the definition of culture?

Obviously the best source is Wikipedia. So definition of culture, a cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society, serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, demeanor in situations, I guess that's context and decisions and how you act, and just serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Okay.

That's a bit different to the DevOps culture definition.

[Pinja] (4:12 - 4:17)

It is. Yeah. There are a couple of dimensions different from what we discussed with DevOps.

Yeah.

[Dan] (4:17 - 4:58)

A few different dimensions. And then let's round it off with the definition of corporate culture. Again, let's go back to Wikipedia.

Corporate culture includes the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that shape how employees interact, make decisions and work together. Okay. And now the fear of losing people, I've actually pulled out a few keywords and just go into first principles.

Now, what are the definitions of inside culture? The elements and variables, context, codified, acceptable and unacceptable norms, behavior, dress, language, expectations, interactions, decisions. And I think I'll stop there.

[Pinja] (4:58 - 5:26)

Yeah. So many, many things here. And how do we measure all that is also a very good question.

And I guess what you can already hear is that there are many ways to define what is actually a culture. And when somebody says, well, we have a good culture in our company. And then when we ask, what does it mean?

Well, we got our breakfast. We got our, is it the lunch vouchers that we get? 20 of them in a month.

What else could be?

[Dan] (5:26 - 6:26)

That's such a Finnish example, right? Anyone not from Finland not understanding what lunch vouchers are. But I mean, it's a cultural example because you finish lunch and how you stop and go for a hot meal and not a sandwich and a bag of crisps right from a Tesco meal deal.

And other shops are available. We're not sponsored by Tesco. Is that a cultural difference?

That's a different social behavior. So yes, that was a great example of actually what I would say is culture. So that's great.

But there's lots of different examples of when I hear things like, we make decisions by consensus or who makes the decision? Well, it's the manager. Well, I think those are really good tangible examples of culture.

And this is where I really struggle when we work with a lot of teams and we're talking about changing things. And they're like, oh, the culture needs to change around. For me, I do product management.

The culture needs to change around innovation. And I'm like, I have no understanding of what you just said. And I don't know if you do either.

[Pinja] (6:26 - 8:33)

That's an easy way to say it, right? People grasp onto this like, the culture needs to change. It's a very easy answer.

I'm not saying that is the wrong answer. If you feel that the culture is wrong, there's something not working in your company. And it's not just like, well, the business is bad, the economy is bad, but it's actually how you work together with your peers, with your managers.

Do you feel that you're able to voice your opinion? It's these kinds of things. If you feel that it's not working, it might be the culture, but that's the thing.

How do you improve the culture? And do you start from it? Let's go a little back, because we know that there is a high need for high performance in any industry.

Obviously, because we're at the DevOps sauna right now, we're going to focus on the IT industry. We're going to talk a little bit about some transformations. But if we think of aviation, like any airline, we talk about healthcare, there's always that need for high performance, right?

We're talking about people's lives. We're talking about high pressure situations. I think we can draw a little bit of inspiration from other industries.

And in those specific ones, what do you do? What does an organization do when things go bad? Because things can go really bad, because we're talking about people's lives.

And how do you ensure that you have the company culture and the organizational culture to support? Say, okay, who do I go to in a situation where I have a problem? If I cannot land the plane, we don't have enough bed sites, besides for people, for patients.

There's an accident down the street, and we get a call from the dispatchers, like, okay, so you're going to get 50 victims. This is a very bad example, really, really extreme. But imagine this.

How fast can you react to these changes? Who do you go to? Do you have a protocol?

Obviously, you cannot have a protocol for every single thing. But what does it mean? What is the communication chain?

Do you even have a communication chain? Do you have instructions? Can somebody help you in a situation like this?

And how do you function? Just drawing from those examples, basically, the situation is there. And we're not asking to go to a healthcare system and healthcare provider and say, okay, your culture is the wrong thing here.

But is that even the right thing to approach here?

[Dan] (8:34 - 10:51)

Yeah. I mean, I think we've just fallen for the trap, right? There's so many things there that could be cultural, that could be performance related, they could be leadership, they could be just onboarding of an employee.

So if we break it down, I think you said some really important stuff there. And we're still almost building our definition of what we're talking about as culture as we started the podcast, right? And performance is a good example there, right?

So in most organizations, where it can be corporate, it can be companies, it can be maybe nonprofits, your culture is essentially measured against your performance. And what we see in the news, when you give those examples like an aviation failure, a healthcare failure, and so forth, that is actually the performance has gone wrong of what you're supposed to do. And what starts to get analysed is what happened before and what happened after the failure.

And that's very cultural, right? If someone starts to hide the failures, right, that's not so... Is that an example of a poor culture?

Yeah, it can be because that's an acceptable norm that people hide mistakes, or do people talk about them. In some industries, hiding the mistake makes things worse. And that's why they have standard operating procedures.

Aviation has, you know, my favourite TV show, which says a lot about me. There's a National Geographic, the aircraft investigation, right? You investigate it and you find out what went wrong.

And you have to be open and honest, everyone gets interviewed, you got the flight recordings, you got the metrics and the sensors on the planes and so forth, because they knew as a culture that if they don't investigate it and stuff goes wrong, well, people won't come on planes, right? You have to do the ritual and the ceremony to fix stuff and make sure things don't go wrong so often in healthcare, right? We've heard awful examples of news about cover-ups of, I don't know, the medicine being bad or like underperformance in a hospital and like the kind of corporate cover-up to get people to come to the hospital.

Maybe that's a cultural thing. But then there was still the performance element to it, which I think is actually that's separate to our social culture, because often when we're interacting in day-to-day life, we're not performing, we're just being, and we're operating in the realms of socially acceptable culture. I'm not going to go outside and start stealing puppies, that's socially not acceptable.

[Pinja] (10:52 - 10:52)

No, we suck.

[Dan] (10:53 - 11:11)

I'm not performing. But coming back, like DevOps, DevOps and technology, let's not fall into the trap here. This is what they want to happen, alright?

They want us to fall into the trap and not come to a solution. I think we need to end this or get to a point where we give people advice on cultural changes, because we do that. We know how to do that.

[Pinja] (11:11 - 12:11)

We do this all the time. That's the thing. Dan is working with product management.

Myself, before becoming a team lead, I was an agile portfolio and product management consultant. And we've seen a lot of IT transformations and IT organisation, product management, product development organisation changes. I'm going to say something that might be very obvious to many, but it's just worth saying.

When we are doing a transformation in an organisation, that also means that we're changing the culture. And this is kind of a duh moment, but it's one of those things that you don't usually start from, like, let's change your culture. Somebody, an R&D lead, an IT manager, a CIO, somebody comes to our office or has a call with us and says, we need to improve our business.

But when we do, the improvement of the business is usually changing the culture in many ways. And when we were preparing for this episode with Dan, we had a couple of examples. These are customers that we're not able to name by names, these organisations.

But Dan, would you start with the example that you had?

[Dan] (12:11 - 14:12)

Yeah, sure. I mean, do you mean the examples of the companies I've worked in, and we were talking about the onboarding process or the kind of successful culture change example? I think there's so many of those.

Again, I asked a colleague, hey, I'm doing this podcast. We were out for lunch, the Finnish lunch that we were talking about, a good cultural example. And I said, hey, tomorrow I'm going to do an example of culture in an IT organisation and transformations.

Can you give me an example? Your experience, you've had 20 years working in different companies or something like that. He's like, yeah, I'll give you an example of a culture change.

And then I had to stop him. And I said, okay, wait, was this a change that was initiated to change the culture? Or was this a change that led to a culture change?

He's like, led to a culture change. Okay, good definition. So companies that do hardware and software, they, in the space of seven years, had to change their business model because the business wasn't so great.

They were mostly selling hardware, and they wanted to change the business model to sell solutions. Okay, we're going to move from hardware to software, we need new people, we need new leadership, new targets, new things. This is very performance related.

This is very context related. The customers were kind of the same, they moved up the value chain to sell to different people in the customer organisation, totally different stakeholders. In the space of seven years, there were three or four different CEOs that moved offices, like literally the physical space they're in, and maybe about 50% turnover in the staff from beginning to end when my colleague was working.

And at the end of it, the culture has actually changed. How we operate, how we work, how we make decisions, what's acceptable, unacceptable, the language, all of those elements that we just defined have changed. And at the end of the conversation, we were like, okay, so are we saying that to change the culture, you just need to change 50% of the people in your entire business?

The moral of the story is like, did the culture change the input? Or did the culture change as an output of changing other stuff and finding a balance between all that? So that was the example for me.

[Pinja] (14:13 - 16:25)

Yeah. And the one that I was thinking about, I worked with this company for a couple of years, two and a half years, and we started with an assessment. And they really wanted to grow a company within the embedded software system and business, and they were highly regulated as well.

So we came to an organization where the product organization, software development organization, and the hardware and the sales did not speak to one another. And we ended up in a situation where we read through their whole process chain, the whole process chart for how they do intake? How do they actually refine their requirements starting from the, we call them the epic level?

How is that communicated from product to R&D? In the software side, how is that communicated to the hardware, which is not as agile? They have their own process, but how does that align with the software?

And they had a good journey. That's the thing. We kindly forced them to communicate with one another.

How do you actually do this? We forced them to think about how to accept uncertainty. That was one thing, right?

Because this was an organization that did a lot of refinement at the very early stages of the product development cycle, which meant that they locked themselves into those specifications. And we were able to get into a space where they actually started to be more agile and actually work with one another. So again, we're talking about what was acceptable and unacceptable.

It was no longer acceptable to do things on your own. It was encouraged, mandated to have this communication chain. This was acceptable, unacceptable.

We changed the language. We changed how the decisions were made because we also brought in the sales into the same roadmapping cycles, for example, so that they had the same language. They had the same way of looking at things.

So it was a very interesting journey with this organization. And we were very happy because we actually felt that we made ourselves redundant at the end. Even us, we said that, I don't think you're going to need us for now, at least.

Again, we did not start from the cultural change. So it was the interactions, it was the decision making, but the context change with the communication change was also there. So the worldview point was that thing as well.

[Dan] (16:26 - 16:34)

Yeah. Then I think we're almost coming to lesson number one, right? Rule number one of culture change.

Don't call it a culture change.

[Pinja] (16:36 - 16:37)

This is like the fight club.

[Dan] (16:37 - 16:38)

This is fight club.

[Pinja] (16:38 - 16:39)

Yeah. Don't talk about it.

[Dan] (16:39 - 18:42)

Don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. There's a lot of underlying elements that you need to go into the root cause.

You need to almost do the basics of performance of your tasks and your teams and just turn it around and say, okay, why are we not able to perform? And that kind of, I wouldn't say obvious, it's very difficult to sometimes see things when you're in the middle of it and trying to just do your work and you're busy. But if it's something like that, maybe I need to talk to other people.

I need to change my perspective. I need to change how I sign off on things, decision-making, we keep looping back. That's very important.

While you were talking, I was remembering some of the research I'd done for the podcast and what you just said almost, okay, first of all, if you Google successful culture change examples, be ready to be working your way through a lot of repetitive block, but I've done it so you don't have to. And one example comes up as Microsoft, whether or not you like the company, whether you're not, the culture has changed in the company in a way they went through almost an enigmatic, big, most famous person in the world, CEO kind of vibe from Bill Gates. They've gone to Satya Nadella.

And one of the things that he, I don't know if this was, it's not written here, whether he intended it, or this was kind of the output changing from a know-it-all mindset to a learn-it- all mentality. And I remembered that because you said, are you comfortable with anxiety and not knowing and risk-taking, right? And when your performance depends on risk-taking, especially in product development, software development, where you won't always know things early on, you're figuring it out as you go along.

Are you okay with that? Is the team able to operate and perform in that way? Well, actually in the past, now we're talking about the difference between, let's say, old school project management waterfall, you need to know stuff upfront to then deliver it.

You might not know everything upfront and deliver it. And are you comfortable with that? How do you become comfortable with that?

You talk to more people. You have a communication cadence. You have the structures, you break down the tasks and you learn and you feedback and you retrospectively change things around.

I thought that was a really good example of that. And I don't know if I'm being sold by the marketing of Microsoft as a business here, but it was good.

[Pinja] (18:42 - 19:39)

No, there are many aspects of how you actually build a culture? What does it mean? And I think if I want to raise lesson number two, you need to define what it is.

Because it's different for, depending on your business, depending on your company, remember the why, why you're doing it, why you're making the changes. And it might come as a byproduct. It might be an output or something else.

It might not be the spark of the change, but let's remember that. That's lesson number two. In fact, why do you want to do it?

And let's talk about getting a new person in. We were talking about our experiences when we were doing the research for this. How do you join a company?

And is it something that when you're on board on your first date, how does it make you feel? When you ask in an interview, what is the company culture like? And you get the key words, you get psychological safety, isn't that?

That's good, right? Somebody might mention radical candor. Okay, fair enough.

[Dan] (19:39 - 19:40)

Ding, ding, buzzwords.

[Pinja] (19:41 - 21:19)

Exactly. It's bingo. I'm not saying these are unimportant.

I'm not trying to diminish again. Hear us out is what I'm trying to say. But the first thing when you enter the new corporate office or a company office, how are you treated?

And do you feel that you're important? We can now separate the things like, do you get your laptop? Was somebody up on their task?

This is performance based, right? Did you have a procedure for that? Did you get instructions on how to do things?

Do you now know who to go to if you have a problem? But it's more as well, how are you treated? Is there somebody to onboard you?

Because I had the example of changing positions in one of my previous jobs and going to a new department. My new manager decided to be remote that day. They were working from that office usually, but on that day specifically, I don't think they were specifically trying to avoid meeting me, but it was just a coincidence that on this specific day, I just felt like working remotely.

All right, good. I was familiar with the company. I'd been there for a couple of years.

So yeah, I had the equipment, but I went to the new quarters at this campus and I didn't know where to sit. Am I taking somebody's hot desk? Like we were supposed to have hot desks, but of course there are assigned seats, right?

As in every open office. Who's the familiar face I can take out for lunch? Only a few people raised their heads when they saw that there's a new person, but maybe this is also Finland.

We might not tend to creed foreign people announcing new people to that place very warmly, but I didn't feel very welcome in this case.

[Dan] (21:19 - 21:52)

Yeah, you didn't feel so welcome. I think this is good. So if I just kind of put a placeholder in the map of where we are, we're talking about people joining your culture or your culture as a tool for new joiners and the journey of an employee through their career and life and that company's culture, well, the country's culture.

I've moved countries and I had to learn a new company culture and social culture. I mean, it's pretty similar to moving from the UK, isn't it?

[Pinja] (21:52 - 21:56)

Yeah, but it's also because that's the first place where you communicate the company culture.

[Dan] (21:56 - 21:57)

Yeah, it's the first place.

[Pinja] (21:57 - 21:59)

That's why we're talking about onboarding.

[Dan] (21:59 - 22:38)

Yeah. I'll even rewind further back. During the interview process, during the job description when you're applying for it.

When I left uni, my first job, I found it by going to a jobs fair. I don't know if you have those here. So it was a big conference center in Birmingham or something like that.

A thousand companies there and maybe like 10,000 students trying to find graduate jobs. And I'm wandering around aimlessly. Okay.

I don't know what I want to do with my life. I think I just went to visit a CV helper. These people, the recruiters who help you design, he tore my CV to pieces.

I was down.

[Pinja] (22:39 - 22:39)

What?

[Dan] (22:39 - 25:46)

Yeah. I'd shown him my CV and he crossed out half of it and said, you're never going to get a job like this, mate. Get out of here and go do your own.

Wow. I'm like, well, remind me not to work for you. I'm wandering around.

I'm desolate. I'm just trying to grab up, hoover up all the freebies, notepads and pens to finish my last year at university. And someone just steps out of a booth and says, hey, how are you doing?

Are you okay? And I'm like, actually, you know what? I'm having a really bad day.

And they're like, come on, come hang out. Got me a coffee. I went into the booth and they're like, have you ever heard of us?

I'm like, no, no, no, I haven't. And they said, yeah, here's what we do. I'm like, I'm not sure this is relevant.

I'm doing an engineering master's. I'm not sure this is relevant for me. It was a graduate management consulting scheme.

And it was the last year's intake who were at the booth. The last year's graduates at the booth and just saying, how are you doing? This was our experience.

Here's some information. We think you'd be, I'd enjoy working with you, the person said. They didn't care about my CV.

They're like, you sound cool. You sound like you can resolve a problem. I'd enjoy working with you.

I'm like, that's nice. And then I went away and I kind of stayed in touch with them. I did the official application, but I stayed in touch with this person.

Throughout the application process, my interview process was a two-day assessment center. They put me up in a nice hotel. The first day I did not get assessed.

The first day they showed me around the office, the team, well, not just me personally, there were like 10 of us, no, 20 of us. They took us out to dinner. At the dinner was the group CEO.

This is a billion, more than billion pound company. Group CEO, all of the potential hiring managers and people who were hired last year, taking you out for dinner. We had drinks at the hotel bar.

The next day you're being assessed and you actually work together as a team. I have to say everybody who got hired were the people who were at the bar the latest, to be honest. I don't know what that says about the culture, but at least this was good, I guess that's how you judge management consultants.

But yeah, that was even before I got hired. And on the first day, there'd been a big effort of bringing us in again. You're not put to work, you put to learning and making sure you're comfortable.

You get to see all the different kinds of things. So that was like before. And then there's other examples of culture.

I worked for a large supermarket chain in a corporate office job. The first day is the corporate introduction. Now I've joined, recruited through a headhunter and stuff, joined.

On the second day, I'm sent to work in a supermarket for a month and I've applied for a corporate office job. I'm consulting, but I'm working in a shop floor store for a month. It was great.

I learned about business. I learned how the front end of meeting customers works. I made friends with the store staff.

That's where the cultural values are on display for the customers who come in. And you go to a supermarket, you want to be greeted by someone, helped at the checkout maybe. And then I went to my corporate office job.

I had a war story. I had examples of doing it at 6am, stacking crates, that kind of stuff. And then I was onboarded that way and so forth.

So it's a very different experience of the performance of an onboarding an employee, hiring them, to them, how I felt culturally in those companies as well.

[Pinja] (25:46 - 27:30)

So again, how do you communicate these things? We could have a very separate discussion about mission and values and vision. What are those?

Let's push those aside right now. But what you actually do on a day-to-day basis, you were made to feel onboarded, right? They made the effort of meeting you, of asking you, how is that?

And there's a concept called the eight-hour test. Would you be comfortable sitting next to this person for eight hours on a plane? That also says something about the culture.

We don't need to be like each other, everybody doesn't need to be best friends. That's not company culture. If somebody says, we're a big family here, that's usually a red flag for me in a company, to be honest.

But it's just like, as I say, a culture of fit. It's a culture of fit. And if we think about drawing back now, we have two lessons that we've already mentioned to you.

Maybe the third one is a call to action. If you feel something's off, your senses might be right. Is it your spidey senses that are tingling or something?

And you feel that there's a need to initiate the discussion in your organization. It might not start from, as we said before, that it always starts from a transformation case when you're trying to improve the business. But think about the assumptions that you got in your organization and think about the context that you got.

And this is maybe the starting point. What do we want to achieve? What do we want to communicate?

And if we think of coming back to when we said this is in the culture, culture is in the heart of DevOps and Agile. We can have a debate. Is Agile a culture?

Is DevOps a culture? Or are they more like values and mindsets and kind of like drivers and catalysts for creating those cultural behaviors and what is acceptable and what is not?

[Dan] (27:30 - 30:08)

Yeah. And I think you really kind of captured it there. And I'm hoping people are taking a sentiment from it.

You might go through an Agile transformation, a DevOps transformation. And I would encourage you to just look past the ceremonies, look past the frameworks, look past the JIRA tickets. Please look past the JIRA tickets to culture.

To me, again, how we've defined it will be, how do I look at this JIRA ticket? And then what are my expectations? How am I going to interact with other people about this if something's off, right?

Okay. The requirements aren't fine. What language am I going to use to say, hey, the requirements are unclear.

Can I speak to you about it? What is acceptable and unacceptable? Is it okay for me to be uncertain?

And is it okay for me to communicate my uncertainty? And I think if those things have bad vibes, to use the kids' lingo these days, if the vibes are off on those things, that's when you kind of need to really do it. Or do you just need a biscuit?

Do you need to take a break? Do you need to take a break from that JIRA ticket? You've looked at 100 of them, go away, come back, and you say, is this a cultural problem?

Or has someone just had a day off on performing, on writing this? And I think those are really important. And what do you do then?

You kind of get the feeling now something's off. I don't know if this is a performance thing. I don't know if this is an actual cultural thing.

But now that you've kind of got more words to describe what's going wrong, maybe that is the catalyst for a new discussion. And then who can you have that discussion with? And who can't you have that discussion with?

When you Google how to do a culture change, and all the TED Talks, all the TED Talks on YouTube, all the blogs, all the Forbes and McKinsey articles, to me, they all start top-down. They all start very top-down. And not that it's wrong, and not that the leadership and the management and everyone will need to be involved in changing things.

But I'd say, why don't you just start with your colleagues? Like, hey, you also feel this is off? Were you uncomfortable in that situation?

What can we do in our circle? And can we just make how we operate in our team really good? And now I'm borrowing from a TED Talk from a very famous...

And can you take... Will one of those people go to another team eventually in a few months' time and apply that to their team? And now you've got two teams and two managers who can say, okay, there's a demand for this kind of work.

How can we take it across and show that performance? But I think if you don't have performance targets, if you don't have well-defined roles and responsibilities, you're not going to be able to do that. Do the basics first, talk about the vibes, and then maybe go from there.

[Pinja] (30:08 - 30:14)

And then it will spread like a virus. Is that a good analogy here? Is that a negative connotation?

[Dan] (30:16 - 30:23)

Adoption curves. Maybe we can say it'll follow the adoption curve from early adopters to laggards. It'll be much more...

[Pinja] (30:23 - 30:33)

Yeah, let's use the business lingo. All right. I think that's all the time we have for this today.

Dan, thank you so much for joining me in this discussion.

[Dan] (30:33 - 30:47)

Thank you so much. I felt a lot of psychological safety that I could talk about these things. I think we had a lot of candor, a lot of openness.

So I think this is a good example of this podcast being a good culture. So thank you for having me.

[Pinja] (30:47 - 30:52)

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dan.

And thank you, everybody, for joining in. And we'll see you next time.

[Dan] (30:52 - 30:53)

See you.

[Pinja] (30:57 - 31:00)

We'll now give our guest a chance to introduce himself.

[Dan] (31:00 - 31:11)

Hi, I'm Dan Khurram. I'm a consultant here at Eficode. And in today's context, I work with a lot of teams and companies and organizations on ways of working in cultural transformations.

[Pinja] (31:11 - 31:27)

I'm Pinja Kujala. I specialize in agile and portfolio management topics at Eficode. Thanks for tuning in.

We'll catch you next time. And remember, if you like what you hear, please like, rate, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. It means the world to us.