Glaudia Califano - Adopting Agile Across Borders: A Guide to Navigating Cultural Complexity in Agile Teams and Organizations

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Im writing the foreword for this book in times when travel has been restricted and countries face great uncertainty due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It is hard to imagine now how fortunate Glaudia and David were to travel the world when it was safer, and I trust that one day in the future, when you read their book, all this sorrow will be gone for good.

Glaudia and David embarked on a quest that took them from continent to continent to prove that culture matters when we talk about Agile teams. Ive found their book immensely valuable because, as a product of different cultures myself, I have always thought that culture plays an essential role in Agile.

Im a South American, and Im very fortunate to have met some of the people whose stories are being told in this book. I havent yet met Eugenio the Chilean accountant-turned-developer whose story is personal, moving, and full of encouragement.

The 10Pines story, about a company with no managers, is living proof that there is such a thing that we all, as agilists, can look to as an exemplar of an Agile company. I am fortunate to be friends with Federico Zuppa, and I visited 10Pines on multiple occasions, so I can say it is true that this happy place does exist.

This book presents a very accurate description of differences and commonalities in South American cultures. I had never looked at it this way before, and thanks to Glaudia and David, I now have a better appreciation of what Ive intuitively learned from my interaction with people from my neighboring countries.

This book is making another great contribution to the Agile community at large: it proves that Agile does exist in all corners of the world. In cognitive science theres a bias for only trusting the things that we see. Well, Glaudia and David are our eyes, and through them we can see now that Agile has expanded, and has taken different forms as local cultures mold it.

I missed the opportunity to meet Glaudia and David in person. We were supposed to meet in Buenos Aires where I was also supposed to participate in the event that the Agile Alliance co-organized. Back then, I was an Agile Alliance Board Member, and a very distracted one too I missed my plane for the first time in my career all because I was at the wrong gate: a demonstration of cultural behavior, as we Bolivians dont normally read monitors.

Marco Polo explored the Silk Road several centuries ago and mankind benefited from his discoveries that opened the doors for trading and knowledge transfer. Im anticipating that Glaudia and Davids book will similarly help to create bridges among Agile practitioners globally.

Juan Banda, Agile trainer, speaker, coach, and Community Developer for Latam at Agile Alliance (April 2020)

Many of the readers of this book know Japan as an eastern country and are familiar with its unique cultures/subcultures like Zen, Tea ceremonies, Manga, Karaoke, Sushi, and other fun parts. People who visit Japan become fans of Japanese culture but dont know deeply about our psychological dynamics.

Glaudia and David visited our company in Fukui city (a four-hour train-ride from Tokyo) in addition to other companies in Tokyo (from small software firms to large enterprises), and also attended conferences to gather insights and actually feel the high-context psychological dynamics of the Japanese people. With their affable personalities, they met, talked with, and got to know many people described in this book. This is the secret of this book; their experience makes it so vivid, lively, and full of wonders, and it comes from their curiosity not only for theory but also for people.

Kenji Hiranabe, Agile software development practitioner, book writer/translator, and winner of the 2008 Gordon Pask Award Recipient for contributions to Agile practice (May 2020)

Agile adoption isnt just about organizational transformation. Its a cultural change; and cultures tend to be disposed to change or not in unusual ways.

Many organizations will create grand statements around their values and how they would like to work, but here we can read about organizations which truly live them, like the Argentinian companies putting the well-being of their people above short-term profit; the Columbian retailer prepared to abandon traditional hierarchy; the Indonesians using phrases like, The higher up you go, the more you serve; the Scrum Teams of Singapore demonstrating true respect through listening, patience, and gentle but forthright language.

Agile transformations are assisted or constrained by a multitude of aspects: existing systems and processes, organizational structure, commitments both internal and external, and above all the culture. David and Glaudia have combed the world, bringing us not only authentic stories from around the globe, but also a portfolio of ways of looking at the problem differently and of things we might try things that those of us in Western countries with our focus on individual excellence might not have considered. Even when aspects of culture provide a poor match for Agile, the stories invite us to reflect on whether our own organizations might be similarly suffering.