Culture Discussion

[00:00:00]
>> So thoughts on this, discussion around culture, how it's impacting your work. Do you see why I kept saying just give me a minute? [LAUGH]
>> It's very enlightening. And the more I thought about those quadrants, the more I realized how when I first started I think we were in the lower right trying to get things done quickly.

[00:00:23]
But also at the same time wanting all of the teams, or all of the subscribers to have a sense of ownership which is the collaborate, that's why it failed. And now kind of again facing a little bit of frustrations and, as you said, swimming upstream where we're trying to expand into other verticals.

[00:00:41]
So we're trying to get things done fast, but a lot of our product owners want things to be done right, so again, conflicting quadrants. Yeah, certain light bulbs over here were popping off minute by minute.
>> Yeah, any other thoughts on this? You got one online there?
>> So if we understand, so if we identify cultural mismatches, we don't necessarily need to quit our jobs, but perhaps instead change our approach.

[00:01:13]
>> Yes, that is one way. That's a great question, that's one way to consider it. I mean I'm not a career coach, but if you're in an organization that, I don't want you to change who you are, I want you to be yourself. So ideally, you would find an organization where your personal values align with the underlying assumptions that that organization has and sort of shares.

[00:01:42]
And if you can do that, that's a place where you can probably stay for a long time. If you can't find that, then it's possible for you to kinda change your approach a little and maybe operate on the edge of what you really, truly want personally to find more alignment.

[00:01:59]
But I think if I was talking with someone as an individual, I might actually encourage them to look around a little bit. I actually really believe that it's hard to work in a place where you don't have that alignment, so I would probably encourage that. But if it's a design system scenario, that's where I think there is a lot of flexibility.

[00:02:21]
And kinda the whole point with the spectrum is to show that all the processes we have around design systems, they're way more nuanced than we think they are. This is a simplified version of what you're actually dealing with. You have not just one organizational culture you're interacting with, you have the subculture of every single subscriber group that you're also interacting with, this is not simple.

[00:02:47]
So that means what you might need to do is there are some tools you can use, I can share some of that stuff, to do some of those assessments so you can understand how each of these parts of your organization want to interact. And if you do that, that gives you the ability to say you know what, when we're working with this part of the organization we know they need us to be a little bit more hierarchical, they want us to just lay it out for them.

[00:03:10]
And so if we take contribution as an example, you might have a couple different ways that parts of your organization can contribute, not just a single way. You might say for those folks who really want that step by step process laid out, you can follow this. If you wanna be a little bit more collaborative about it, that's great, here's another model you can follow, reach out we'll set up some time to talk.

[00:03:34]
So I think what I'm trying to encourage is us to get away from a black and white approach to this, to recognize there's a lot more nuance to it. And that we have to do the work to understand each other in order to put processes in place that will actually help us mature in a healthy way.