Culture change can be fast!

20 Feb 2026  James carpenter  14 mins read.

Introduction

One often hears people in the agile community talk about how cultural change takes time and patience. Don’t believe it!

Ask yourself, how long does it take for company culture to change when massive layoffs are announced and enacted? Does it take months or years for people to start behaving differently? Similarly, how quickly did policies and behaviors change when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented people from working together in-person?

When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower. - Alexander Den Heijer

A huge portion of the behaviors observed within a product development organization are a direct reflection of the organizational system in which people are working. If the executive will exists to change the organizational design, tremendous rapid improvement in value delivery and adaptability is both possible and probable.

Attempting to boil the ocean is a recipe for failure. I’m not claiming one can change an entire organization with thousands of engineers overnight. Yet, as long as we are only talking about a narrow and deep slice of a company consisting of several dozen engineers and related individuals, rapid change is indeed possible.

Furthermore, the approaches for achieving such rapid improvements in the typical software/firmware/hardware context are well documented and understood by those who have experience with this type of change. The executive will to enact the changes is often missing, but as long as this can be found, the changes can be very quick.

I am a huge fan of LeSS, which is a design for a product-focused organizational ecosystem optimized for system-level adaptability and value delivery when doing product development in a dynamic market. That is to say, most every complex product development effort.

The most important parts of LeSS deal with changing the organizational design, and the related changes in power dynamics and reward systems which accompany the organizational design changes. LeSS is far from the only solution for creating a more effective product development organization, but it is a well documented approach with some of the most rigorously vetted trainer/coaches on the planet. Every Certified LeSS Trainer (CLT) has real-world hands-on experience putting these sorts of deep organizational design changes in place, not just textbook classroom experience. The level of rigorous vetting is one of many reasons there are not that many CLTs around.

Example Scenario

For argument’s sake, let’s say one decides to leverage the ideas within LeSS to create a more effective product development organization within a narrow and deep vertical slice of the organization consisting of no more than around 60 people. How long will it take?

Before answering this question, I think it is important to distinguish between the following:

  • Part A: Putting the new organizational design in place, and getting to the point the system has stabilized enough to be continuously, organically improving at a steady rate.
  • Part B: On-going continuous improvement within the context of the new organizational design.

Part B should hopefully be never ending. The whole point is to create an adaptive and continuously evolving organization, which evolves organically without requiring periodic forceful management interventions to keep things on track.

So the focus of my response to “How long?” is going to be focused on Part A. To keep the answers concrete, I will assume LeSS is being used as an approach for guiding the changes.

Step By Step

The high-level steps to changing the organization within a LeSS-like context are as follows:

Step 1: Executive Offsite (~1 week)

Conduct an executive offsite in which key decision makers with positional authority to change the organizational design attend, along with senior individual contributors who can bring ground truth to the conversation. The objectives of the offsite are:

  • Knowledge-transfer to establish a common baseline understanding and nomenclature
  • Gaining alignment on the organizational changes which are needed
  • Go/No Go Executive decision to move forward with the changes discussed

The executive offsite typically only takes about a week to run. There is, of course, time spent getting executive management to the point where they wish to sponsor this. Organizing and running the workshop doesn’t take that long once there is a green light for doing so.

The delays tend to be about the time required to work through corporate politics to gain a green light, not the time required to organize the offsite. The delay or lack thereof tends to be entirely within the realm of a senior executive’s control.

Within the LeSS community, the typical labeling for this workshop would be a Certified LeSS for Executives + Informed Consent Workshop.

Step 2: Educate Everyone Involved (3 weeks prep + several cohorts=>6 weeks)

Every potential volunteer one hopes will enthusiastically join the new organizational design deserves an opportunity to understand what will be expected of them within the new context. Ideally, they will have an opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to take part. To do that, they need to understand what they are saying yes to.

With 60 people, potentially spread across several geographies, running everyone through multi-day in-person training will take multiple cohorts. Assuming around 25 people per cohort across two or three geographies, somewhere around 3 weeks will be needed.

Preparing for this step, as well as the steps which immediately follow it, does take a little time. Assuming a more aggressive effort, the planning could be achieved within two or three weeks. The longer pole in the tent is mostly about the internal effort of socializing the requirement for everyone to make themselves available for the upcoming training and restructuring.

As long as more than one person is helping with the logistics, the logistical efforts are only a little more time consuming than those required for Step 1.

For argument’s sake, let’s say 3 weeks for preparation, and 3 weeks for training everyone. This suggests Step 2 will require around 6 weeks in total.

Within the LeSS community, the typical labeling for this training would be a Certified LeSS Practitioner Workshop.

Step 3: Launch Event (~1 week)

The launch event should be scheduled as soon after the last training event as possible, typically the subsequent week. In this event people will need to self-organize into cross-functional, cross-component teams, work out a common explicit quality standard, flesh out enough of a single combined product backlog to keep the teams busy for a couple Sprints, and work up a variety of artifacts.

The teams will also need to work out their Sprint cadence, and launch their first Sprint. By the time Step 3 is over, the teams should be in Sprint, with their first Sprint Planning session behind them.

Rather than time box this effort and risk leaving too many unresolved issues, I personally prefer to let the group run until done, within reason. This generally takes less than a week, but it can sometimes take slightly longer. The length of the first Sprint can be adjusted to align with whatever Sprint cadence and schedule the group decides on.

Within the LeSS community, you will often hear a portion of this effort termed a “flip event”, especially the portion in which people self-organize into teams.

Step 4: Stabilization (~6 weeks)

It tends to take a few Sprints before teams start to gel and embrace the level of accountability and ownership expected of them within the new structure. The behaviors of management during this time period, especially during the Sprint boundary events, are critical.

With adequate coaching of management and the teams, the teams will typically come into their own by the end of the third Sprint. Once this happens, the effort will transition into the continuous improvement phase I described as Part B.

If management behaviors are not self-consistent with the new organizational design, the teams can easily flail around for months or years. So, reaching Part B assumes management is doing their job well enough not to derail the effort.

Assuming 2-week Sprints, and assuming the teams gel by the end of the 3rd Sprint, Step 4 will take around 6 weeks.

Estimated Total Elapsed Time

Using the above numbers we have:

  • Executive Offsite: 1 week
  • Educate Everyone Involved: 6 weeks
  • Launch Event: 1 week
  • Stabilization: 6 weeks

Total: 14 weeks=>~3.5 months

Reflections on the Example Scenario

Notice that an individual contributor doing development isn’t away from their desk for more than a couple weeks. The improvements in value delivery tend to more than compensate for this “lost time” within a few Sprints. This assumes the individual contributor was actually working on the most important thing in the company for them to be working on, which is seldom the case to begin with.

Management’s role should be to improve the system, not run the system. So any time management spends during this organizational change effort is time spent doing their day job. It isn’t time away from their day job. The traditional role of managing the work being done isn’t within a manager’s role definition within a LeSS organization. Doing so is completely counter to the idea of self-managing teams.

On the surface, 14 weeks may sound like a lot of time, yet for a larger organization this is nearly an overnight change.

Breathing life into the new organizational design mostly happens during the launch activities of Step 2, which only takes a week. So from one perspective, you could say the changes are implemented within a single week.

With time, it will become possible to roll in another deep and narrow slice of the organization. The first Requirement Area of a larger organization tends to be the most challenging one to get going well. It will probably take around 6 to 9 months of effort before it will make sense to consider rolling in more people. When the time comes for that, many of the above steps will need to be repeated to some degree. The specifics will vary based on context.

I also didn’t spend any time talking about changes in formal role definitions, or changes in compensation strategies. These will need to be addressed. In practice this is often done in conjunction with the other structural changes, rather than as a prerequisite for Step 2. It would be good for management to at least start thinking through and foreshadowing some of the changes prior to Step 2.

Circling Back

When I hear people commenting on the need to accept slow and gradual improvements within their efforts to achieve a more adaptive organization, they are usually complaining about problems which can be very rapidly fixed by addressing the underlying organizational design issues from which the problems arise. These are not the sort of problems patience and perseverance will solve. Such problems are systemic and require systemic solutions championed by executive management if they are ever to improve.

I’m not saying that everything can be fixed instantly. But I am saying one can at least stop digging the hole deeper very quickly, and begin the effort of filling it back in.

Example Symptoms of Systemic Structural Issues

Here are a few symptoms of deeper underlying systemic structural issues.

  • Those doing the work don’t clearly understand the business problem being solved. As a result, what is built is seldom what is needed.
  • It frequently takes ages to go from idea to production, mostly because of deep queues and constant hand-offs.
  • Very little of the overall engineering capacity is focused on the most important things from a business perspective. Furthermore, there tends to be very little transparency into what the most important things really are.
  • There tends to be lots of talk about “shifting left”, yet testers and developers still continue to work in separate organizational silos with lots of feedback delays.
  • Forecast accuracy is far worse than the natural variability of the work would suggest. Long running development efforts are often reported as being “on-schedule” until one gets within a month or two of a major release, at which point it suddenly becomes clear far more time is needed to achieve the planned scope.
  • There never seems to be enough time for the pursuit of technical excellence due to the internal pressures to deliver ever faster. The end result is that the mountain of technical cruft grows higher and higher, negatively impacting the long-term ability to quickly adapt to evolving business needs.
  • Consistency of delivery rate is politically more important than delivering end customer value. There is little acceptance of the natural variability which tends to come with pursuing more challenging high reward opportunities.

Although each of the above symptoms is influenced by a variety of factors beyond structural issues, the systemic cultural forces caused by inappropriate organizational design tend to dominate outcomes. Once the organizational design issues are addressed, behaviors and value delivery tend to rapidly improve.

More severe manifestations of the above symptoms will typically have disappeared by the time Step 4 is complete. Most people want to do work they are proud of — management just needs to create fertile garden conditions that will allow them to do so.

Two of the Basic LeSS Rules come to mind:

  • For the product group, establish the complete LeSS structure “at the start”; this is vital for a LeSS adoption.

  • For the larger organization beyond the product group, adopt LeSS evolutionarily using Go and See to create an organization where experimentation and improvement is the norm.

Along with one of the LeSS Huge Rules:

  • Remember each day: LeSS Huge adoptions take months or years, infinite patience, and sense of humor.

Can This Really Be Done?

There are a variety of LeSS case studies covering the successes and failures of real-world LeSS adoptions. Every LeSS trainer has written at least one extensive case study as part of becoming a LeSS trainer.

You can find my LeSS case study regarding a Large Server Hardware Company on the LeSS website, and in a variety of other formats on my website. This includes an audio book version, as well as a printed and bound paperback from online bookstores such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Where to Learn More

If you are just beginning to explore LeSS, consider taking a look at my Learning About LeSS page. This provides a curated list of where to focus your initial reading.

If you are interested in attending a public LeSS course, you can find a complete listing of my courses on my website as well as on the LeSS website using this filtered view.

Moving to Action

If you are struggling in your own organization, and would like help, please reach out. My email is james@agilecarpentry.com. My phone number is +1 832-677-7247. Unless you know I already have you in my phone contacts, please send a text message ahead of time so I will know who is calling.

You are also welcome to reach out on LinkedIn. If I don’t respond promptly on LinkedIn, try sending an email or phone text message instead.

Less

James Carpenter
James Carpenter

James is an expert in helping companies create effective engineering team structures and cultures.

Recent Articles

Hundreds of Millions In Annual Savings Realized

Billions In Lost Revenue Avoided

Economic View Of LeSS Case Study

LeSS In Arabic (ليس باللغة العربية)