You Can't Make a Flower Grow Faster—The Oblique Approach to Shaping Culture | Karim Harbott

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Karim Harbott
Episode Title: You Can't Make a Flower Grow Faster—The Oblique Approach to Shaping Culture
Date: November 5, 2025

In this episode, Vasco Duarte speaks with agile coach and organizational culture expert Karim Harbott about one of the thorniest topics in agile transformations: how to intentionally influence and evolve organizational culture. Using lively metaphors, personal stories, and real-world examples, Karim and Vasco dig deep into why culture change is so elusive, why it defies direct management, and which experiments leaders and coaches can try to shape a healthier, more collaborative environment.

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Main Theme

"You can't make a flower grow faster." The central theme revolves around the oblique (indirect) approach to culture change—why culture can’t be directly engineered, commanded, or managed as a project, but can only be nudged and cultivated by creating favorable environments, experimenting, and iterating.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Challenge of Changing Culture

• Karim: “Creating a supporting organizational culture...it's incredibly hard to do. It's incredibly intangible.” [02:00]
• Culture is described as both an enabler and impediment to agility.
• Unlike process improvements, culture is an emergent property of the organizational system, not something you can dictate.

2. The Flower Metaphor: Nurture, Don’t Force

• Karim shares a story about his young daughter trying to manually “make her sunflower grow faster,” which he relates to leaders and coaches wanting to “command” culture change.
  • Karim: "Maybe you can't make it grow faster, but all you can do is give it the right ingredients... create the environment and then it will grow. But you can't directly." [04:10]
• Culture grows at its own pace; you can only control the environment, not the outcome.

3. Culture Change as Experimentation

• The conversation highlights that effecting cultural shifts requires running safe-to-fail experiments, not grand plans.
  • Karim: "You can't command collaboration or innovation or a culture... All we can do is create the environment whereby we think it's more likely to happen." [05:19]
  • Vasco: "You can't tell the system what you want to happen. The system has its own way to adapt to whatever you do." [02:56]
• Emphasis on the iterative, experimental mindset: try, observe, adapt.

4. Levers of Culture: Leadership, Incentives, and Policies

• Karim references his “five levers” (not all listed, but examples discussed):
  • Leadership behaviors: How leaders act when things go wrong, with failures, etc. [07:11]
    • Karim: "You can say, 'we have psychological safety here,' but then if you do fail and your leader berates you... do you really have that?" [07:18]
  • Structural and policy choices: How teams are constructed, how incentives are set up.
    • Misaligned incentives (such as testers rewarded for finding bugs and developers for writing code) thwart collaboration.
    • Realignment (integrated teams, shared goals) is a direct experiment.
  • Unintended Consequences: Any organizational change (policy, structure, incentive) may have side effects; constant adjustment needed.

5. Leadership Experiments: Modeling & Stepping Back

• Leaders hinder initiative by micromanaging; true change emerges when they step back and foster autonomy.
  • Vasco: "Have you tried stepping back?... Have you tried asking people, 'what would you do?'... just step back and let them do it." [08:30]
• A practical tip for Scrum Masters: Withdraw from daily stand-ups to allow the team to facilitate and participate on their own.

6. Barriers and Sensing Mechanisms

• Misaligned HR Policies: Individual-focused measurement and rewards undermine collective goals.
  • Karim: "We measure individual productivity and we send individual targets and we reward individual behaviors. So now... what's right for me and what's right for the team are two different things." [09:57]
• Effective culture change requires patience and the building of sensing mechanisms (e.g. retrospectives, ongoing conversations), as cultural shifts are lagging indicators and hard to quantify.

7. Concrete Experiments for Collaboration

• Incentive Adjustment: Move to a 50/50 split between individual and team performance.
  • Karim: "Now we are rewarded not for writing more lines of code or for finding more defects, but for the team delivering value." [11:27]
• Embedded Liaisons: Borrow from military “team of teams”: embed team members across units to build relationships and communication.
• All cultural improvements rely on patience—"it takes time for culture to catch up."

8. The Intangibility of Culture

• Culture is hard to measure; even solid frameworks (like Competing Values) are abstractions.
  • Karim: "It's a lagging and it's very hard to track. So all of these things make it very difficult. And ultimately, you just get a feel for the culture." [13:32]
• For those from engineering backgrounds, the lack of metrics or checkboxes can be especially frustrating.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Karim Harbott [04:10]:
  "Maybe you can't make it grow faster, but all you can do is give it the right ingredients, you can give it the right food, the right sun, the right amount of water and create the environment and then it will grow. But you can't directly."
• Vasco Duarte [02:56]:
  "You can't tell the system what you want to happen. I mean, you can, but that doesn't mean it will happen. The system has its own way to adapt to whatever you do."
• Karim Harbott [05:19]:
  "We can't command collaboration or innovation or a culture or engagement. All we can do is create the environment whereby we think it's more likely to happen, but it might not."
• Karim Harbott [07:18]:
  "You can say, this is, we have psychological safety here... but then if you do fail and your leader berates you... do you really have that?"
• Vasco Duarte [08:30]:
  "Have you tried stepping back? ...just step back and let them do it."
• Karim Harbott [11:27]:
  "Now we are rewarded not for writing more lines of code or for finding more defects, but for the team delivering value."
• Karim Harbott [13:32]:
  "It's a lagging and it's very hard to track. So all of these things make it very difficult. And ultimately, you just get a feel for the culture of the place. Right."

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |:-------------:|:-------------------------------------------------| | 01:11 | Episode begins, topic intro from Vasco and Karim | | 01:52 | Karim: Why culture is central & so difficult | | 03:41 | Karim’s sunflower story & organizational metaphor | | 05:19 | Experiments and the limits of leadership control | | 07:11 | The five levers for culture and real-team impact | | 08:07 | Concrete example: Restructuring teams | | 08:30 | Leadership experiment: Stepping back | | 09:57 | Incentives and their role in culture | | 11:27 | Practical experiments for improving collaboration | | 12:54 | Importance of patience and sensing mechanisms | | 13:32 | The intangibility and measurement of culture |

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Conclusion

Karim Harbott and Vasco Duarte illuminate how culture change in organizations works much like tending a garden. No amount of direct intervention or top-down mandate can guarantee healthy growth. Instead, leaders must humbly experiment, nurture the right conditions, adjust incentives and structures, and most importantly, exercise patience—knowing that results come slowly and are often felt more than measured. It’s a call for curiosity, observation, and a willingness to let teams grow in their own way.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Do it now. But if you're not doing it now.

[A]

Let'S listen to the podcast.

[B]

Hello everybody. Welcome to our Wednesday the coaching episode this week with Karim Harbat. Hey Karim, welcome back.

[C]

Back again. Good to see you.

[B]

Likewise. Likewise. So on Wednesdays we want to explore a topic from a coaching perspective. What we want to do is really to learn about the topic, learn about what might be some of the causes that are creating that condition or that situation, and then together explore options, think about experiments. So rather than looking for one solution, we try to understand and devise experiments that we can then implement in practice. So, Karim, share with us, what's the topic you bring to us this week?

[C]

I bring a topic that is, in my experience, one of the biggest either impediments or enablers to greater agility, and that is creating a supporting organizational culture, evolving the culture to enable this stuff, right? It's been the focus of my work for sort of over the last 10 years and it's incredibly hard to do. It's incredibly intangible. And I think that's why it lends itself beautifully to these experiments. Because there's no one answer.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And also this is a great topic from that perspective because it's not that there isn't one answer, there isn't, but is that culture is the ultimate example of a system that you can only try to change, right? You can't dictate, you can't go back to being a culture project manager, right?

[C]

I wish I could. I wish I could.

[B]

And for me, this culture and culture as a, let's call it an emerging property in a system, in a company, right? In an organization, it illustrates so well the idea that you really need to run experiments. Because you can't say this is the culture I want. I mean, you can say it, but that doesn't mean it will be created. But whatever you say, there will be a response from the system, right? Like, and I think that this is one of the hardest aspects of the work that we do and that leaders do in general is that you can't tell the system what you want to happen. I mean, you can, but that doesn't mean it will happen. The system has its own way to adapt to whatever you do. So tell me a little bit about maybe a couple of examples of things that you have dealt with, things that you have tried out and what you have learned so far about working with this culture aspect of the systems you are part of.

[C]

I've learned a lot, mostly about what doesn't work. But it reminds me of, if I may, just a very quick story about my daughters because it's always nice to laugh at my little girls. So this was going back a few years, right? I remember it was just after the pandemic, right? So we were still kind of spending a lot of time in the house and in our garden. We're lucky enough to have a nice little piece of North London garden. And we were growing sunflowers, the four of us, my wife, me and my two daughters. And my youngest daughter, hers wasn't growing very much and she was the smallest, I think she was about six at the time, four or so years ago. And she was a great grumpy that hers was the smallest and her sister's was bigger and mine was almost like it was in order of how big we were. And I was doing some work out in my garden is where my office is, like where I am right now. And I was coming back and I saw her fiddling with her sunflower, like just trying to pull it or I don't know what she was doing. And I asked her and she said she was like, daddy, how can I make it grow faster? And that's like, maybe you can't make it grow faster, but all you can do is give it the right ingredients, you can give it the right food, the right sun, the right amount of water and create the environment and then it will grow. But you can't directly, you can't. And she was looking at me with this little six year old eyes like, this guy's an idiot, right? So. And it didn't grow anymore.

[B]

My advice, this is, by the way, how many people look at us as coaches, right? Like what are you Talking about, it's just a sunflower. Make it grow now.

[C]

I know. And it's. And I just thought that was such a nice metaphor for what we do as coaches and what we do as leaders. We can't command collaboration or innovation or a culture or engagement. All we can do is create the environment whereby we think it's more likely to happen, but it might not. And that's what you mean with the experiments. Right? We think if we do this, that that will happen. And so my. My focus is very much a kind of oblique approach. Your culture is always going to be a product of the behaviors of the people in your system. And you might say, okay, well, let's just change the behaviors of the people in the system. It's like, well, you can't do that either. So you've got to create a system that encourages the behaviors you want to see more of. It discourages the behaviors of which you want to see less, and then hope that that then leads to the culture you want. Right. So you can see already how hard this is and how removed.

[B]

Okay, but that is true. It is really hard and it is oblique, as you. But there are certain things that are quite direct and explicit. And I call our listeners to go and listen to yesterday's episode because it's a beautiful example of how a decision created a specific culture. Right. And for those who didn't listen, basically, we had two teams in one of Karim's old assignments or previous assignments, where one team was the tester's team that was rewarded for finding bugs, and the other team was the developers team, which of course was not rewarded for producing bugs. But there was an inherent conflict in the motivations of these two teams. Right. And when Karim tried to get them together, they wouldn't really collaborate very well because they had different demands and different goals that were not aligned with what was ultimately the goal for the system, the whole system. And I'm sure, Karim, you have other examples where even simple things can have a huge impact on the culture of the place.

[C]

Yeah, huge. And I've kind of. I narrow it down to what I call five believers. Right. And some of them are very direct, like leadership behaviors, what leaders do, how they interact with you, how they talk to people. You know, you can say, this is, we have psychological safety here. It's safe to fail. But then if you do fail and your leader berates you, or they never share their own failures, and of course, do you really have that? Right? So. So there's. There are some things over which you have control. As leaders, the way you talk to people, the way you react to failure, the way you structure teams, the policies you put in place that are impactful. But you've got to be careful because there's always some slightly unintended consequences. Right. If you put this policy in place, you think it will encourage this behavior? Actually, it does the opposite. Oopsie. We might need to tweak that. Right. So that experimentation, that iteration. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Right. It's an agile approach to culture change, I'd say for sure. It's experiments.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And when we talk about experiments, I think it's important to realize that these are not necessarily very abstract or hard to grasp things. Like in yesterday's story, you talked about how the company where you were working eventually set up teams that had both developers and testers from the same company so that they had motivation to work well together. And this is a very simple change in how you set up the teams that can have a huge impact in how the teams actually behave. And one example that I very often like to give, especially because many leaders themselves need to hear examples like that, is this idea that if you want the team to take ownership, right. Like I hear a lot of leaders and at all levels, right, like from CEO to just a tech lead or a team lead saying the same thing. Yeah, but my people don't take action when they see a problem. They don't take initiative, they don't do what they should be doing. And I'm like, okay, so how do you interact with them? Right. Like, and then you start seeing that what they are doing is that they are actually wanting to be part of every conversation and contribute to every decision. And what I often ask is, okay, have you tried stepping back? And I want to be very explicit about what I mean by stepping back. Have you tried asking people what would you do given what you know right now? Right. And this is actually David Marquez point is just ask people what would they do? And if you have nothing to add, just step back and let them do it. If you have questions, if you're not sure, then you can ask those questions. Right. And I think that this is one, one very concrete leadership experiment that we can run, which is Escrow Masters as an example. If the teams are not being very active in the daily stand up, we could just step back and let them talk, like, not interfere.

[C]

I think you're right. And do they know what outcomes we're working towards? And do they have competence and clarity, as David Marquet would say? And did you Put that in place. And then can you step back? I've seen it with collaboration. We often talk about why aren't our teams collaborating? We want a culture of collaboration. And then you look at how they set up their HR policies, those industrial revolution HR policies of we measure individual productivity and we send individual targets and we reward individual behaviors. So now it's like, well, what's right for me and what's right for the team are two different things. So what am I going to do? Do I want my bonus, do I want my pay rise? Or do I stop and help my colleague and then I get less of a bonus? Right. So you know, when we, when we're exasperated that we don't have a culture of collaboration or a culture of safety, think about what's preventing that, what's in the way of those people behaving in the way you want to make them. And it comes down to leadership. Again, no bad teams, just bad leadership. And I'm a big believer in that. It's really.

[B]

Do you have an experiment in mind for that collaboration topic? Because that's something I've heard, right? Like why aren't teams talking about dependencies? Why aren't they solving the dependencies or on their own? Like what are some of, some of the experiments that you have run in that kind of context where there was maybe some complaints or some, some missed expectations, let's call it, when it came to collaboration.

[C]

The first experiment is that I've run is to address the initial issue around incentives. And I think I've only ever made it to 50. 50, right? 50%, your individual contribution, 50% team based outcomes. Now we are rewarded not for writing more lines of code or for finding more defects, but for the team delivering value. And if what it takes is the team, for the team to deliver value is me, to stop what I'm doing and sit with the tester, sit with the designer, go and speak to the customer, do some product discovery, whatever it might be, then that's what I'll do. Just like in football. And if you're a striker and you what it takes right now is for you to defend, then you defend because there's two minutes to go and you're about to win the Champions League and you just need to not let a goal in, then you do that, right? And I think so. Experiments around incentives are always difficult because HR is difficult. But we've run those experiments. Other experiments around inter team collaboration are a bit more difficult to put in place. But we've tried, we've tried A few things, like embedded liaisons, they would call them, I think General Stanley McChrystal would call it, from team of teams. You go and work in this team. Build some relationships. They can come and work with you. Build some relationships. Now we know who to talk to. Now we know. So, yeah, we've run things like that, and it really does move the needle. It really does move the needle on behaviors, but it takes time for culture to catch up. It's a lagging indicator. So that makes it even harder for you.

[B]

Yeah, and that's the other topic. Right. Like, it's important to have that understanding that a lot of the experiments, when it comes to behaviors and culture will have delayed impacts. And we need to build sensing mechanisms, like conversations, retrospectives. We need to build sensing mechanisms that allow for that delayed response from the teams or the system, as we've been calling it so far. And that application of a hard skill for leaders, patience is also something that you get more familiar with.

[C]

It is. And also, remember, it's very difficult to measure culture. I mean, there are models out there, right? The competing values framework is one, there are others, but these are all abstractions of reality because culture is abstract. It's intangible. So we're measuring something that is very hard to pin down, and we're trying to make changes that evolve that. But it's. It's a lagging and it's b. Very hard to track. So all of these things make it very difficult. And ultimately, you just get a feel for the culture of the place. Right. You know, when I go in as a consultant or to teach a class, I just be like, there's a. I like the culture of this place. And sometimes I'm just like, well, I'm glad I don't work here. Get a feel for it. And so. But that's hard because especially if you've got an engineering background, Right? You want things to be rules and measurable and, like, you know, hey, I ticked this box. The culture change, done. You know, it doesn't work like that.

[B]

Yeah, we'll talk more about that in a second. And for those of you interested, we'll be talking about success for Scrum Masters tomorrow, so make sure you tune into that episode as well. Karim, thank you very much for sharing that story.

[C]

You're welcome.

[B]

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[A]

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