The Culture Game a a tutorial and reference guide for every progressive, changing-making manager on the planet. The premise of the book is that managers do not have to ask permission, because they are already authorized to convene meetings, hire, fire, and deploy small budgets.
The Culture Game book is built in part on concepts found in the book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP, the work of Dave Logan and co-authors.
The book explains how the pace of change is mandating that organizations learn faster, so they can adapt. The book provides 16 practices, derived from Agile, which help make this learning happen. The beauty of the Culture Game approach is that it is not prescriptive. The book is a cookbook. To get results, you only need to do 3 or 4 of the practices to start. For example, you can choose to implement the practices Be Punctual, Facilitate Your Meetings and Structure Your Interactions in all your meetings. These 3 practices promise to substantially raise the level of satisfaction, learning and results in your meetings.
Part 3 of the book explains the power of the triad structure described by Dave Logan and co-authors in the book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. A triad is a 3-person structure where:
1. Every person in the group shares common values;
2. Each person is committed with the others to execute a small strategy together that gets specific, intended results, and
3. Each person in the group takes responsibility for maintaining the quality of the connection between the other two people.
If you are a manager, and you know the Culture Game practices, then you already know the power of the practices to generate fun, satisfaction and learning in your department or group.
The next step is to teach others how to do it just like you did. In the book, I argue that triads are the secret sauce that can be used to scale agility from teams to tribes. The book embraces and extends the triad concept from TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. It provides A-B-C guidance on how to form a triad to socialize these techniques throughout your organization. Triads are a super-powerful way to scale agility from teams to tribes, groups of up to 150 people that exist informally in every organization.
The book TRIBAL LEADERSHIP describes 5 stages of culture, and then describes the triad structure as a vector for culture change. The book lays down a foundation. THE CULTURE GAME builds on this, supplying the small strategy (The 16 Tribal Learning practices) and A-B-C guidance on how to socialize these practices using triads. This is a bottom-up approach that effectively scales agility UP and OUT of software teams, and into the mainstream…scaling agile from teams, to tribes.
If TRIBAL LEADERSHIP is an operating system, THE CULTURE GAME is an application that runs on it. Triads are a brilliant idea; my book is the first ‘application’ to run on TRIBAL LEADERSHIP. I think it is fair to say that it is not the last. Triads are the real deal.
You can learn more about the TRIBAL LEADERSHIP book here and get a quick summary here.
TRIBAL LEADERSHIP co-author Dave Logan recently wrote about how he and I, and his entire team spent 2 days working together. We used Culture Game concepts to structure 2 days of work with Dave’s CultureSync team in Los Angeles. (CultureSync is Dave’s management consultancy.) The results were pretty good!!
You can read that article from Dave’s column at CBSNEWS.COM, here:
Make Your Meetings Hyper-Productive and Fun by Dave Logan (CBSNEWS)
You can learn more about the THE CULTURE GAME book, and pre-order it here.