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.

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.

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.

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."

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 |

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.