Agile Culture Scan: A Conversation between Dave Snowden & Luxshan Ratnavari

Editor’s note: This is a condensed, revised, and edited summary of a 30-minute conversation between Dave, Luxshan, and Beth. You can watch the original conversation in the full video below. You can also see a 10-minute clip discussing Agile Culture QuickSense here.  Also you can purchase our Agile Quicksense here

Beth Smith

To frame today’s discussion, I wanted to revisit a couple of prompts. If we start by exploring the current state of Agile, how we got here, and what needs to change, we can set the stage for why Agile isn’t delivering on its early promises, which leads naturally into discussing why QuickSense could offer a valuable alternative at this point. Before we dive in, could you both briefly introduce yourselves, your backgrounds, and your involvement in the Agile world?

Dave Snowden

I’m Dave Snowden. I set up the Cynefin Company about 21 years ago after leaving IBM. My involvement in Agile is multi-faceted. I was one of the three original creators of DSDM, which fed into the Agile Consortium. My equivalent in Logica (who were deadly competitors), along with Ed Holt and I, formed a consortium over a meal in Cheltenham. We didn’t need a ski resort for a week! We had gender balance from the start too.

The key principle of DSDM was that competitors should collaborate to create standards everyone could use, rather than pursue proprietary methods. DSDM, alongside Scrum and XP, fed into the Agile Manifesto. XP was probably what Agile was really about, but if that had been the manifesto, Agile wouldn’t have taken off. Scrum provided enough abstraction and codification to scale quickly. That rapid scaling was both a blessing and a curse, enabling fast software iteration, but also encouraging certification and education as revenue streams.

Agile expanded into other domains, strategy, HR, without enough adaptation. When SAFe emerged, commodifying Agile into a structured set of recipes, the fad cycle peaked. Agile isn’t dead, but it’s out of the hype cycle. This shift creates opportunities for software development and broader applications. Our work with Hexi kits, for example, offers a multi-vendor, multi-method, multi-tool approach based on complexity science. Rather than aggregating everything at the wrong level of granularity, like SAFe, we focus on decomposition and recombination.

Cynefin played a role in Agile’s history too. Ken Schwaber deserves credit for bringing complexity into management methods. XP brought Cynefin into Agile at the London conference. Cynefin emphasises balance, there’s space for both order and waterfall methods. Agile shouldn’t be about rejecting the past, but finding the right tool for the right context, horses for courses. The framework wars need to end.

Luxshan Ratnaravi

I’m Luxshan, I’ve worked as an Agile professional, coach, and consultant for the past 15 years. Honestly, I’ve seen Agile fail more than succeed. I don’t know whose responsibility that is. As self-therapy, I started making comic strips with my business partner Mikaell to

survive this crazy world where good intentions often fall short. The comics struck a nerve globally, exposing common anti-patterns and frustrations.

Scaling Agile tends to amplify failure. Now the industry is moving from Agile to product operating models, essentially doing Agile right, like DevOps aimed to. The core issue is failing to manage complexity, treating complex domains as ordered ones, and expecting rigid methods to thrive.

I’m keen to see how Dave and Cynefin’s work with QuickSense and Hexis fits into this landscape. Maybe we can’t call them Agile ways of working anymore, just ways of working. The rise of hybrid approaches might signal an admission that Agile doesn’t always work. But what does hybrid really mean? Supporting both Agile and waterfall? Or doing neither properly?

I’m excited to contribute to Cynefin’s work through our comics, helping expose systemic issues and spark conversations.

Dave Snowden

That’s a great point. Complexity became an excuse for avoiding discipline in Agile. Complexity actually requires more discipline, just in different ways. I’ve seen teams in Australia run one-year sprints on waterfall projects just to claim they were Agile. That’s absurd.

I loved your cartoons from the moment I saw them. They force people to think differently, what we call an ‘aporetic moment’ in Cynefin. You can be pretty savage in a cartoon without making it personal. Cartoons break patterns and nudge behaviour. That’s why QuickSense uses cartoons as a starting point.

Culture isn’t about mindset, it’s about habit. QuickSense avoids reducing culture to causal frameworks or idealistic qualities. Instead, it maps story patterns. The goal isn’t to enforce rigid frameworks, but to nudge systems, making good behaviours easier and bad behaviours harder.

We’re collaborating with Gapingvoid on cartoon-based change programmes. Cartoons on office walls, distributed on cards, even at checkpoints, enable conversations without confrontation. Quick Sense is the first step on a journey towards micro-nudging and creating real behavioural change.

Luxshan Ratnaravi

Would it be interesting to explain why we chose those six specific strips for QuickSense?

Dave Snowden

Absolutely, but I’ll probably interpret them differently from you!

Luxshan Ratnaravi

That’s the beauty of it! The six strips highlight different pains and themes:

Perceived Success vs Reality — Managers see happy teams from afar, but a closer look reveals conflict.

New Silos in Disguise — Breaking silos only to create Agile Release Trains that function as new silos.

Fake Agile — Scrum ceremonies without releasing increments, reinforcing project mindsets.

Consultancy Target Operating Models — Expensive, generic frameworks decoupled from organisational reality.

Cognitive Load — Overloaded teams switching between conflicting priorities without clear direction.

Ivory Tower Roles — Architects or coaches detached from the reality of daily work.

By letting people select the cartoon that resonates most, Quick Sense reveals patterns, not precision, to guide micro-nudging and meaningful change.

Dave Snowden

One of the things I love about these, by the way, is that my coding days are 30 years behind me now. It’s been over three decades since I last wrote code. What comes through in the cartoons is that you are actively engaged, and you can see real-world experience reflected in them. I think that is one of the reasons they have impact. Another important point is that people should be aware that they can, if they wish, select a different set of cartoons and include those instead. Yes, it will cost more, but it is possible. However, I believe the real opportunity is to integrate these cartoons into broader change programmes.

You can run a Quick Sense every month or every three months. People can identify the need to create more stories like certain ones and fewer like others. You can measure whether you are moving in the right direction. The cartoons themselves can serve as change agents within your organisation. This is very different from the traditional approach, which I call “new-age fluffy bunny” thinking, where everyone gets in a room and agrees to be nice to each other. This does not really drive change. Cognitive neuroscience tells us that you need to create anomalies to prompt people to think differently. Cartoons achieve this by presenting anomalies, making people think differently. The role of artefacts in change programmes is often overlooked.

Something else you mentioned earlier is the hybrid concept. That is what we originally said with Cynefin on XP. We did not use the term “hybrid”; we simply stated that different things apply in different contexts. This also relates to AI. One of our other Quick Senses, for example, is based on award-winning work we did with AstraZeneca, examining AI preparedness and the balance between AI and human factors. This is a major issue in coding at the moment. Some exaggerated claims are being made about programmer productivity, all focusing on the speed of code development rather than quality. I believe that was an issue with Agile as well, it prioritised speed over quality.

I remember working with Richard on pair programming, and sometimes it is necessary to let people do nothing for a few hours rather than simply churn out code. The impact of this approach is crucial. What we provide is a fast and enjoyable tool, not a survey. It features cartoons, allows storytelling, and does not rely on Likert scales. There is no option to provide negative responses, which reduces stress and offers a clear starting point. You can then measure whether specific initiatives are having an impact. You can ask people what sort of balance they expect a given initiative to bring and then evaluate whether it achieves that. You can also encourage people to create their own stories about the future (there is nothing wrong with that) and consider how they would like the narrative to evolve. This allows for rapid next steps while maintaining a consistent means of tracking progress.

Luxshan Ratnaravi

One of the things I do is run workshops with companies where they create their own comic strips based on the challenges they experience. Initially, they assume it is a drawing workshop, but in reality, it is about storytelling. It is possible to create your own comic strips, integrate them into your Quick Sense culture scan, and relate them to the most pressing issues.

Dave Snowden

That is something we should discuss further, Luxshan. Ideas emerge when you engage in this process. We actually have templates to help people tell better stories. We used them yesterday in Prague with a company, providing them with a structure to convey their message effectively after setting the context.

We could apply the same approach to the hexagon cards we are developing with you and Gaping Void. People could select cards, arrange them in a sequence, and then build stories around them. There is enormous potential to expand on this if we focus on development.

Beth Smith

Would you like to give a brief overview, perhaps five minutes, on Hexi? Recognising, of course, that Quick Sense fits into a broader suite of tools, methods, and solutions.

Dave Snowden

It is important to understand that Quick Sense is a diagnostic and feedback tool, but it is part of a larger concept we are working on in Agile. Some years ago, we made a strategic decision at Cognitive Edge, which upset some of my and Beth’s colleagues, to move everything into an open-source wiki. I do not believe in putting content behind firewalls. When you are in growth mode, that approach does not work. You want people to use your materials, rather than having to pay to access them. It may sound paradoxical, but making something free increases engagement, and people will then seek you out. That is how open source works.

The Hexi Kit concept was initially developed before my time at IBM. The idea is to take a method or framework and break it down to its lowest level of coherent granularity. In Scrum, for example, that could be a sprint. We have our own methods based on this approach, allowing Cynefin to be broken down into five different levels of presentation rather than requiring the entire framework to be used at once.

Hexi works by allowing you to take a methodology or toolset, deconstruct it into its smallest functional units, and represent these on hexagonal cards with images and text. A QR code on each Hexi links to the original source material (our wiki, in this case) which we are making available to other providers.

This allows organisations to move beyond rigid frameworks. Instead of adopting a single methodology, they can select multiple Hexi Kits, choose the elements that work best for them, and arrange them in sequences (what we call “assemblies”). The software we are developing enables users to store these assemblies, search them using AI, and modify individual components. The metaphor we use is that we provide ingredients for chefs rather than recipe books. Assemblies represent recipes from past projects, but you can always adjust them by changing the ingredients.

This approach aligns with an older concept from DSDM, encouraging competitors to collaborate in order to advance the field. When that happens, progress accelerates. Proprietary ownership of individual methods slows development. Furthermore, we can incorporate disruptive quotes, images, and cartoon sets from Comic Agile as prompts, reminders of what to avoid or what to aspire to. This creates an engaging environment while ensuring flexibility in project execution.

Beth Smith

Luxshan, anything to add? I was going to mention that we also run masterclasses together. If you would like to highlight that, it would be great.

Dave Snowden

One of the most enjoyable things we have done over the past year is run joint masterclasses with Luxshan. It has been fantastic (aside from me having to wake up at 3 a.m. to catch a train to Munich for one session). More collaborations like this are needed, bringing together people from different yet complementary backgrounds. That was your initiative, Luxshan, and we responded, so I am very pleased with how it has developed.

Luxshan Ratnaravi

My biggest contribution here is bringing this to the Agile field and practitioners. It has been great to see how the Agile community has embraced the masterclass. The majority of participants are Agile professionals, and it is rewarding to see how relevant the concept of navigating complexity (rather than attempting to control it) has become for this community. Addressing complexity and decision-making is essential for Agile to remain relevant.

Dave Snowden

In Paris, half the audience did not speak English fluently, and my French is terrible (despite the fact that my mother was a French teacher). I failed the subject twice at A-level, much to my family’s disappointment. However, participants translated for one another, and we adjusted accordingly. It was a joy to teach because everyone was engaged. It was not just about delivering information or providing templates, it was a genuine learning experience for all involved.

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