Culture, is not your friend

"culture is not your friend! Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture."

- Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna’s words sting because they’re true: culture is not neutral. It shapes us, exploits us, and resists our attempts to reshape it. For anyone in the role of agile coach, this isn’t just philosophy—it’s the daily battlefield. Scrum itself admits it: it’s a cultural change agent, not just a process framework.

Agile as Counter-Culture

The agile movement didn’t begin as a polished corporate best practice. It began as counter-culture, a rebellion against the industrial-age assumptions that dominated corporate life. Taylorism had reduced workers to interchangeable cogs. Project management had become an obsession with predictive planning, Gantt charts, and documentation in triplicate. The corporate memeplex prized control, predictability, and hierarchy.

Agile’s founders were outsiders. They were developers, consultants, and tinkerers who refused to accept that software had to be built like an assembly line. In 2001, they gathered at Snowbird and drafted the Agile Manifesto—a document that reads less like a process manual and more like a set of cultural insurgency values: trust people, embrace change, work in small feedback loops. It was punk rock in the world of smooth-jazz corporate management.

The Tensions Inside Agile

Even within that gathering, agile was never monolithic. On one side were the XP monks—Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler—programmers devoted to code as craft, building their practices around discipline, feedback, and simplicity. Agile, to them, was almost spiritual: a rhythm of test-driven development, pairing, and collective ownership.

On the other side were the process people, such as Jeff Sutherland, who brought structural scaffolding and systems thinking into the mix. Scrum’s cycles and roles still bear traces of Sutherland’s background in aviation and military planning.

And then there were standouts like Alistair Cockburn, whose Crystal family of methods insisted that context matters—team size, risk, and environment should shape the method, not dogma.

What unified them wasn’t method but values. They found common cause around a memetic core: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, responding to change over following a plan. The Agile Manifesto was a truce among competing memeplexes—a federation of practices and philosophies that agreed long enough to write down four values and twelve principles.

Replicators and Their Clock Speeds

To make sense of why cultural change in organisations is so maddening, it helps to zoom out. Three replicators drive the complex adaptive systems we live in:

• Genes evolve slowly, across millennia. They whisper our biological defaults: conserve energy, seek status, fear the unknown.
• Memes replicate across decades or centuries. Religions, ideologies, and corporate hierarchies endure as memeplexes—clusters of interlocking memes that reinforce one another. Agile itself is a memeplex: ceremonies, jargon, values, and rituals bundled together.
• Temes (Susan Blackmore’s “third replicator”) evolve at machine speed. Digital code, AI models, design patterns—these can replicate globally in seconds, often beyond direct human intention.

The coach enters an arena where these clock speeds collide. Genes anchor us in evolutionary caution. Memeplexes defend “the way we’ve always done it.” Temes mutate too fast for organisational antibodies to keep up. No wonder change feels chaotic.

Pools of Culture

It’s tempting to talk about “corporate culture” as if it were a single organism. In reality, large organisations are archipelagos of culture. Marketing’s memeplex bears little resemblance to Finance’s. Ops runs on a different set of rituals than Product. Even within one department, you’ll find team-level pools of culture, each with its own immune system.

For a coach, this fragmentation is both an opportunity and an obstacle. It means you’re not battling one culture, but many. Some pools may be fertile soil for new memes, others toxic swamps where change dies quickly. The task is not to bulldoze a uniform culture but to seed, nurture, and connect healthier memeplexes until the broader landscape begins to shift.

The Coach as Permaculture Gardener

Traditional corporate change programs often look like industrial agriculture: bulldoze the existing soil, plant a single “best practice” crop, and spray away anything that resists. It can deliver quick results, but the ecosystem collapses the moment attention wanes.

A more sustainable metaphor is permaculture. In permaculture, you don’t impose a rigid blueprint; you observe the land, understand its microclimates, and design systems that regenerate themselves over time. Diversity is valued because it creates resilience. Waste is recycled back into the system. Growth is slower, but the results endure.

For the agile coach, permaculture means:

• Respecting the existing landscape: each team’s memeplex is part of the ecosystem, not an obstacle to be paved over.
• Seeding diversity: encouraging multiple practices and experiments, rather than enforcing a single process across the organisation.
• Working with natural flows: tapping into existing rhythms, incentives, and values rather than fighting them head-on.
• Designing for resilience: focusing on practices that can survive leadership turnover, shifting priorities, and the next big reorg.

Long-lived cultural change isn’t about rolling out a new framework from HQ. It’s about tending the organisational soil so healthier memeplexes can thrive, spread, and outcompete the old ones.

Circling Back to McKenna

McKenna’s critique was not gentle: civilisation, he said, is billions of people scrambling for happiness by trampling each other, while being led by the least noble and least visionary among us. Yet even in that bleak assessment, he saw possibility. We have the resources, knowledge, and capacity to build something close to paradise—if only we resist the dehumanising values of control.

For the agile coach, this is the deeper work. You’re not just facilitating ceremonies or optimising delivery pipelines. You’re standing in the tension between what culture is and what it could be. You’re helping people fight back—gently, persistently—against the control icons of bureaucracy, fear, and compliance. You’re cultivating memeplexes that value trust, autonomy, and learning.

Ultimately, cultural change is not about faster software or prettier burndown charts. It’s about planting the seeds of a more humane way of working, one that might—if enough of us nurture it—outcompete the memeplexes of hierarchy and fear. That’s the insurgency worth coaching.