I am excited to announce that we just completed round one for our book on Cultural Agility. We received some fantastic ideas – enough to uncover five separate themes for each of our six core questions.
This will be the 3rd book in The Agility Series – to learn more about the series click here. You may also want to check out our first two books which were on Organizational Agility and Leadership Agility.
We have two amazing people who have agreed to share their real life stories and experiences which we will include in an appendix to the book. We also have a member of our Wisdom Council who has agreed to write a bonus chapter on Agile Culture. Thanks to Niel Nickolaisen for stepping up! If you want to know more about what he has to say about creating an Agile Culture, you can check out Niel’s his book The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust and Ownership.
Based on the ideas we received we also now have a working sub-title, “Changing our Stories”. Want to know why that’s a great sub-title? Because it will be a nice tie-in to another book I am facilitating called “The Adaptability Code: Re-coding the Stories holding back People and Organizations”. The target release date for that one is early in 2018.
So a pretty successful first round!
In case you may not be aware, the Cultural Agility book contents will also the basis for a workshop that Sylvie Leduc and I will be delivering at Spark The Change Montreal on May 11th (you can find us under the Program area).
And that’s where you come in – how would you like to help us with the workshop by taking part in round two? Just click here to get our six questions. It should not take more than 10 minutes of your time.
Are you going to be at Spark The Change Montreal? Then we’d really like you to have a go at answering our questions! So please do click here. For those that of you that do contribute, please come introduce yourselves to Sylvie and I at the conference. Maybe we can go grab a coffee and explore some of it in more depth together or maybe you want to share a personal story or maybe we can just talk about anything you want to talk about.
If you’d like to be acknowledged in the book credits, simply leave your name and e-mail address in response to that question.
So what happens next?
We will leave round two open until April 30th midnight. This will give is ten days to digest the results before the workshop. Here’s what we will be doing at the workshop:
Larry and Sylvie will share the core of what the research has provided so far. From there, they will lead an interactive session with participants to draw on their past experiences with some of their cultural agility challenges, opportunities, and successes in enterprises within Canada and elsewhere.
They will close with some concrete deliverables for an action plan that can be collaboratively implemented afterward, to bring cultural agility into a company’s mission statement and vision. Tools will be put in place to continue to monitor progress and showcase tangible results over time.
The output from the session in an appendix to Larry’s book to help advance the cause so that we can contribute to each other’s cultural agility, and by extension to that of our organizations.
In the weeks following the workshop, we will write the actual book which we hope to get released early this summer – yep that’s a tight schedule so I hope we can make it! All contributors get a free copy so make sure to leave your name and email address in the first question.
Ok, I know you want a teaser….
So what are the themes that have emerged so far? Well we can’t give away too much…but…we can share some. Our first two questions for each book in the series focus on the killers for the type of agility we are exploring. The other four questions focus on the facilitators for that type of agility. So what are some of the killers of Cultural Agility?
- Our inability to overcome our personal and organizational stories – we are a product of the stories we learned as a child, from our cultural backgrounds and from our experience in our organizations. Unless we can first recognize these stories and how they influence our thinking towards cultural agility it will be difficult for us, if not impossible, to become more personally culturally agile.
- Assuming everyone is the same (assimilation is the goal) – creating an agile culture based on the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, can easily lead us to think that everyone needs to move towards sameness. This can create a paradox between creating an Agile Culture and creating Cultural Agility.
So what about facilitators?
- Leader must recognize their own biases and be willing to change themselves – this one is under the what leaders can do question, and is essentially the flip-side of the first killer above. We need to be able to recognize and be willing to overcome our own biases. We all have them. We just need to acknowledge them for what they are and be willing to change.
- Cultural Agility is being leveraged as a strength in leading organizations – leading organizations not have only recognized that Cultural Agility is the right thing to focus on, they actually are leveraging it as a one of their core strength to outperform the competition. Sameness is definitely not the goal in these organizations.
Conclusion
So far we have some great ideas and feel we have identified some solid themes to carry the book. We still have a lot of work to do, and like all the books in the series we never really know where they will fully end up until they are done. This is all the more true with this one as our attendance at Spark The Change Montreal is going to add a whole new level of participation and insights.
We can’t wait!
PS: also come join the conversation on our LinkedIn Group
