Sunday Rewind: Org charts eat culture for breakfast: Why an agile mindset alone won’t help you by Björn Waide

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2021 MTP Engage Hamburg talk from Björn Waide, then Managing Director at Haufe-Lexware, where he shares his experiences on building a free-thinking innovative culture. 

Bjorn’s talk covers the following:

• Transitioning your organisational structure
• Dealing with complex business decisions and product ideas
• Challenges with an innovative culture

Transitioning organisational structure

Bjorn discusses the early stages of working at a start-up and the cultural path that his teams were on. The organisation used the ocean as a metaphor for the right organisational structure – you notice something is wrong with the business by looking at the waves, such as job retention or lack of productivity. The culture and structure are the underlying problems that create the waves. You can’t directly change culture without having any idea of the future structure of the business.

Dealing with complex business decisions and product ideas

Companies are always dealing with complex issues and need to avoid relying on the highest paid person to find solutions and make decisions. Björn forces teams to provide feedback on why certain ideas shouldn’t be included on a product roadmap because this creates a culture of honest feedback. He says that if you don’t consider all of the feedback in the room then mistakes and flaws will appear in decisions later down the line.

Challenges with an innovative culture

Björn says he learned that you can’t be an efficient well-oiled business as well as a free-thinking innovative organisation that runs several overlapping experiments. He explains how they had to tweak their culture slightly for the outside world to ensure that there were key decision-makers for external parties to regularly communicate with these external organisations.

Org charts eat culture for breakfast: Why an agile mindset alone won’t help you by Björn Waide