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This last post in the LAST conference series is about a workshop conducted by Agile Coach Rowan Bunning. 

Culture is a set of values or beliefs and represents how people work together. It outlines how people see themselves or as a team and sums up all behaviour. Culture is the personality of an organisation.

The activity started with handing out a questionnaire consisting of 15 questions to all the participants. We had to select most suitable answer for each question and then calculate totals based on the responses for four columns. Each column represented one of these company cultures:



Competence and 


Based on the maximum totals achieved for each column, every participant then knew their core organisational culture.  The presenter then invited to pick up cards from a table. Each card had core cultured values printed on them. All the participants were now sitting on separate core value tables. 

All the card had core values on one side, which we used for picking. On the opposite side were one of the four different shapes triangle , square, circle and star. These correspond to values cultivation, control, competence and collaboration respectively. 

So, some of the cards that we picked did not match with the values that resulted from the questionnaire. It was just participants’ subjective understanding of core values.

This was followed by the most interesting part of the workshop. Presenter had a sheet with four quadrants on the wall.  Initially it looked something like this:



The aim was to place al the value cards on the quadrant and relate each quadrant with a Model and Management style. The result was:

Control : Military Model and Conservative Management Style. 

Collaboration: Model is like Family and Management style : Participative.

Competence: Model like Educational Institution  and Task Driven Management Style.

Cultivation: Model is like a Spiritual Organisation and People Driven Management style.

We were also given cards with Agile values & Principles and most of them ended up in Collaboration quadrant. It was followed by doing the same mapping for SCRUM and Kanban principles to the core values.  In the end, the board looked like this:


It was an interactive session which gave good understanding of the organisational cultures and associated values.