It is making the change personally meaningful to employees. To take change from the organizational to the personal frontier, leaders need to give their people the space and support to define what the agile mindset means to them. This will differ among senior leaders, middle managers, and frontline staff, and have different implications for each. Inviting colleagues to share personal experiences and struggles can build transformational momentum and unlock transformational energy. Even the best-designed culture programs can fail if the surrounding context does not support—or worse, hinders— new mindsets and behaviors. To sustain a new culture, the structures, processes, and technology must be redesigned to support behavioral expectations. To be successful, the desired culture change needs to be hardwired into all elements of the business-as-usual organization as well as the transformation.

Continuous learning and improvement is a core principle of agile working. It applies to agile culture as well. Successful agile transformations have shown the value of monitoring progress, evaluating behavioral change and its impact on performance, and running regular retrospectives to learn from successes and failures. However, measuring behavioral change has traditionally been a challenge.

Culture counts in all organizational transformations; it becomes critical in agile transformations. Organizations can be agile by changing their structure, processes, and technology. But they cannot be agile without changing the way people work and interact daily. Enabling a successful, agile transformation requires a fundamental shift in culture. Lessons from organizations that have successfully made this shift can give.