Cultural Archeology: Unearthing Ancient Patterns for Modern Innovation
Kumar: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Meridian Point and another episode of the show focused on disruption and innovation. Today, we're joined by Andreas Wittler, an Agile Coach and Scrum Master at Atruvia AG and the owner of Six E Consulting. He brings a unique anthropological lens to organizational transformation, drawing from diverse fields like psychology, anthropology, and social sciences.
Andreas helps teams and organizations navigate change by understanding deeper patterns in human behavior and collaboration. During the pandemic, he transformed a career setback into an opportunity to build a global network of thought leaders, demonstrating firsthand how disruption can spark innovation. His work explores how historical patterns and cultural insights can help modern organizations become more adaptive and resilient.
So without further ado, I'm going to invite Andreas to the stage here. Thank you so much for joining us today, Andreas.
Andreas: Hello and thank you for having me.
Kumar: All right. So, you've written aboutā€”I found you on LinkedIn actually, and some of the writings that you've shared on there are really quite interesting and intriguing. You've written about finding these universal patterns, if you will, rudiments in how humans collaborate across different cultures and time periods. How can this understanding help organizations navigate disruption?
Andreas: Thanks for the question. What I call a rudiment is actually from when you learn to play an instrument, drums, then you're doing something like left, right, right, left or so, small patterns that you're using to play a song on the drums. So what we found is that there are small pebbles of collaboration that are really helpful if mastered. And if not, well, you will have to catch up someday later on.
One example is the challenge to find innovative ways to deliver service or product. So one of those pebbles in collaboration is listening to each other to collaborate. And when we are, for instance, listening, we have two choices. There is a listening to reply early because you want to filter from what I'm saying, the proof that you were right. So this kind of listening or you could go the other way and say, I want to listen to understand. I'm curious and I'm kind of entering your world and trying to understand the world seeing through your eyes using your brains using your ears and trying to understand what is there to in the end discover something that could lead to an innovation first principles patterns or needs or whatever my kind of thinking and doing offers to you and inspires you to connect to my world.
Kumar: Interesting. So really these rudiments, they connect people regardless of culture, language, obviously language. Hopefully there's a shared language that people can share ideas. But what you're saying is these rudiments help people communicate across cultural barriers, that if you learn how to listen, you can sort of transcend the barriers that culture can impose. Is that right?
Andreas: We could create something new from that. It is not only you listening to me, but it's also me listening to you. So we both enter the world of each other.
Kumar: Can you give maybe an example of how you've seen this in practice, you know, in a multicultural team, perhaps, you know, that's maybe separated by time zone or geography, whatever it might be?
Andreas: Yeah, of course. Classical challenge is meeting a deadline. What do we have to do to meet a deadline? What's the status quo? What's the work flowing? What is our plan? We could discover that there is an obstacle, for instance, and ask why is that important? What is behind the thing on the surface, the symptom, the reason for this thing becoming an obstacle? And we could work around the obstacle and try to challenge ourselves what is the real challenge of that obstacle and we could also discover why we haven't done anything about it so far and what might be leading to a solution innovatively and of course we could discuss how would we know that we are on the right track how would we measure success. All this is not given; it is to be explored to emerge.
And whenever, for instance, I'm working with someone from a different culture, I have to tune myself into their ways of thinking and try to express my ways of solving a problem. And then, bam, we're hitting something. And this is the spark I'm looking for. I'm right, you are wrong, but we are different and maybe we can find a way to create something that hasn't been there before.
Kumar: Yeah, that's certainly been my experience, right? You try to build bridges rather than force your way of thinking on someone. I read this book and I can't remember the name of the author, but it was about culture and I can't remember the name of the book either. And in the book, the author talks about low context cultures and high context cultures. And the Western world being a high context culture and characterized by people having to explain all the context so that other people that they're talking to can understand, right?
In the Western world, we tend to do a lot of explaining. And in low context cultures, that's a sign of rudeness. And it's like, hey, I already know this. Why are you telling me all this stuff? And I suppose that the approach that you're talking about, which is more listening and asking questions, would work in any context culture because you're not doing a lot of explaining, you're doing a lot of asking and you're being curious. What's your reaction to that?
Andreas: Yeah, it sounds good to me. Listening is not the skill we are being brought up with very well. It depends a little bit on your culture and your family. But in general, I would say in the Western world, listening is not the skill number one. My personal opinion is that we are biased towards action trying things doing forcing expressing ourselves not listening.
Kumar: That's true. The smell more of the eastern world from my perspective.
Andreas: That's exactly what this is.
Kumar: I'll find the name of the book and the author and I'm included in the show notes but I'm horrible with remembering things like that but it was a really good book. And the low context cultures are usually the ones in the East, right? So the Asian cultures, Japan, China, India, to a certain extent, are lower context. Of course, there's a spectrum, not everyone's the same, just like anything, but it was an interesting book.
All right. So, you know, in my intro, I talked a little bit about your personal disruption, right? During the pandemic, you went from being laid off to building connections and creating this great thing. Tell us about that.
Andreas: Yeah, I mean, when the pandemic hit us, it was the first time in history as far as I can see it, that everyone on this planet had more or less the same context. This pandemic hit us all at the same time. And we had to recover from whatever consequences we had to experience in our neighborhoods.
My consequence was I was locked down for a couple of months and had to accept not being employed any longer. So I used technology and that technology emerged at the same time, video conferencing and all the tools, whiteboards and so on, to people I knew from my past, but also explored into other communities wherever they were.
And my idea was how to find out what the different organizations and people in other countries and contexts are doing with Scrum, for instance, the Agile world was my safe haven in that time. And I tried to connect to other coaches, scrum masters, to some of the people that had signed the manifesto and from there it went on and on. We collaborated on, I don't know, liberating structures, for instance, or on what is fun in India in context of Indian people. And I had the opportunity to connect to teachers in Malaysia and India, to people in New Zealand, Australia, and I learned from everyone something.
So on the one hand, it was a horrible experience for many of us, but on the other, it's also an opportunity at the same time and connecting to those people and discussing grieving with them and having difficult conversations about our situation. On the other hand, gave us some hope and connection and some insights. It was a valuable learning time for me. I would say after university, the time of most intense learning I had ever.
Kumar: That's amazing. So what can you share a few things that really stuck out to you that you learned and have shared since with people that you work with?
Andreas: Yeah, I had the opportunity to connect to people in Colorado, in Denver and Boulder. And for instance, there was a session about respect. What is respect from their point of view? And I had the opportunity to work in a breakout room with someone who served as a ranger to the Burning Man Festival. So working on something like respect with someone with such a different background was really amazing for me. Great experience how to learn and work and collaborate with someone who's really strong on this point respect.
Kumar: Did it change your definition of respect?
Andreas: Absolutely yes.
Kumar: So what was it before and what did it become?
Andreas: I couldn't say that this was very important in my vocabulary or my doing. But connecting to this person was something that for me was a deep emotional experience. Respect for someone coming from Europe is more a formal thing. And not something that is deeply rooted in your heart and your being. I connect to you as the Kumar of this podcast show, but the respect is something different. And I respect now after the work of people and the individuality of people more than ever before. So this was something life-changing, I would say.
Kumar: What was this a sort of an agile scrum session?
Andreas: Yeah.
Kumar: Okay. Because respect is one of the values right in scrum.
Andreas: Exactly. And maybe that was the context that you were talking, speaking about it from. We started there.
Kumar: Respect in collaboration, think about it. How many times are we connecting to each other in disrespectful ways?
Andreas: Saying that we are right. And we want to enforce some of the ideas, not giving the room necessary for exploring.
Kumar: I remember also, Otto Sharma, the theory, the four levels of connecting and discussing the forced level, the deepest level is we are bringing to the table, whatever we have, our skills, our past, our experiences, and then trying to build something that none of us could have built before with that situation. This is respect.
Andreas: That's amazing. Sounds like a really good experience there.
Kumar: So in light of recent developments in the agile space. Right. So I don't know how things are in Europe, but certainly in the US, you know, agile has been around for a long time, twenty four years. Right. And in many places, it's it's a bad word because companies have tried it and they've matured beyond it, or in some cases it's been a failure. They've gone back to old ways of working.
What would you say is the current state, if you want to call it that, or where do you see people like us? You know, I still work as an agile coach, a professional coach, and I still do the things I did ten, fifteen years ago. At the same time, I'm aware that things are changing and we have to evolve. Where do you see Agile going in the future?
Andreas: I would say the situation is more or less the same as in the US. Right now, it's difficult. But I wouldn't say we have matured into Agile as a common thing. What we have is on the surface done something, the form, the cargo cart of Agile, maybe Scrum or some other ways of collaborating. But in the deepest sense, we haven't tried really to be agile. We haven't listened and collaborated well, and we haven't tried to keep the focus on delivering and discovering things.
What I'm seeing in my context is the discovery side is more or less neglected. It is not introduced agile ways of collaboration to discover new ways to serve and to deliver products to customers. It's more like we have this and that plan and please hurry and deliver this and that output at the best this or that outcome without great opportunities to discover things. And in these times, technology is pressing us so hard to let go of old ways of doing things. I wouldn't say we have really started to master it or to really do it at the core of it.
Kumar: I would say you're right. I had a conversation with a product person a few weeks ago, and we talked about the same thing really about discovery being something that's a bit of a, I wouldn't say it was a lost art, but maybe a never gained art that people are so keen on delivering something that they don't take time to discover what we really should be delivering. And so I definitely second that.
You, in your writings on LinkedIn, you often compare organizational transformation to Margaret Mead's anthropology approach. Can you sort of describe for us what is her anthropology approach?
Andreas: Yeah. Coming to Age in Samoa is the first book she wrote, and she just entered a completely different culture just to observe and learn how adolescence is taking place there in Samoa. And we are speaking about the nineteen twenties or something, so she completely emerged in that society and she lived with them for a long time to just experience by herself what is society for them what is the challenge the adolescence brings for them and how are they treating those young people helping them to become mature.
By observing this, by asking questions, by living with them, she learned a lot. It is first of all, of course, curiosity and openness, and then also the longing for connection to them and experiencing all the anxieties and the needs they have. And then translating into our terms, our westerners' terms what she expressed there.
I saw there as a different way to do such a natural thing as coming to age. So this openness and this complete immersion hasn't been before the rule in that area. That research that she triggered was very insightful and powerful for creating a different view on the challenges we have as a society. You could use any idea, any product or service idea to see if this is really solving what the customer needs. Living with the customer, seeing how they are doing whatever they are doing.
Kumar: It's not the standard even now. So it was a very sort of immersive approach to understand the culture there.
Andreas: Absolutely yes and with great openness.
Kumar: Great openness, which is another value in scrum.
Andreas: It is indeed.
Kumar: Okay. So would you say that scrum masters coaches and perhaps organizational leaders need to be anthropologists?
Andreas: Kind of, yes. It could be helpful to have this in your toolbox, switch stances and say okay I'm just talking five percent or less of the time. I'm listening a lot, observing, trying to understand what's going on and why.
For instance, if you're a middle manager somewhere in an organization and you have a certain goal, you could go to the teams, do the gamble walk, see what they are facing as challenges and try to understand and to help them. In some context this is a standard; you have to do it there and what I'm seeing is whenever we are connecting managers middle managers responsible for projects programs, you name it, to the people doing the work there is also some learning and reconnection and in the best case the best hope I have when influencing to do this is that they are really learning from each other's worlds.
Kumar: Yeah, that's great points. You know many organizations struggle to let go of old ways of working even when they don't work. Why do you suppose that is?
Andreas: Letting go is always difficult. I mean, it's like cleaning your room. You have to make space for new ideas, for new ways of doing things. And this also has to do with what is the picture of myself? Am I the innovative guy or am I convinced that the old ways worked so good I would like to stick to them?
I doubt that anyone who is now doing something in the IT world would say we can do without AI. AI came around the corner and it stayed. So if this is the new way of working, you have to let go of something out.
Kumar: Definitely. Yeah. I suppose that's true. There's some things that come along that really have a profound impact on how we work, right? So Google search and even before that, the internet. You remember the time before the iPhones?
Andreas: I do. I do. I had a Blackberry and before that I had some, a Motorola or something.
Kumar: It feels like the stone ages. It feels like such a long time ago. And technology changes so rapidly, so often. And AI has only been, well, it's been around for longer than a couple of years, but the AI as we know it today has only been around for a couple of years, three years or so. And it's already caused a huge disruption, if you will, I personally discovered that I'm now planning my trips overseas using AI, finding the nicest places to stay, the beautiful hotel or B&Bs. And I just organized the whole thing using AI. I wouldn't have in the past.
Andreas: Same here. It's so easy.
Kumar: It is.
Andreas: Same here. I told what I wanted and all the dates. And I said, you know, plan me a trip. And it did, right? And it was beautiful. And you will never switch back and to go to someone, an expert or someone else helpful to organize this for you. You can do it by yourself. It is quite disruptive.
Kumar: So where do you see AI? How do you see AI influencing the space that we work in, right? In terms of the work that we do with teams, with the organizations that we support? What are your thoughts there?
Andreas: It is like the iPhone in everything. It is helping us even if we're just using a product and don't know how to use AI. The product knows; it is interwoven into the services or whatever it is in that product. So you're using a phone, a watch, or anything that is producing data, using data, connecting to other machines without you doing anything.
The other day I came around vibe computing. Kids without any knowledge about computing, they can use apps more or less to create games. They will never let go of that. It's so much fun, and it's so creative. So we see a lot of things being automated. Agents doing things for you, stupid routines, will not be one of your tasks any longer in the short future. And that sets you free to do the real interesting thing, the innovative things.
Kumar: That's a good way to look at it, for sure. And I suppose there's hope that as change agents that we are, we can help people let go of the things that occupy their time now, which is more the mundane things, the repetitive things, and start to help them think about the more important things, the more creative and innovative things that maybe they could be working on, right?
And free up their time to do those types of things. But of course, like anything, it's going to take time and effort and we have to be, in your words, anthropologists in a way to observe, ask questions and be open to creating space for these types of conversations to occur.
Andreas: Right, and I'm learning from my kids as well so it's not only an adult thing here.
Kumar: Yeah, yeah of course and I think they're probably the best. I'll give you an example: my partner, my business partner, he works with AI and specifically with young kids in more disadvantaged areas in the part of the country where he lives. And he's created a program using AI to teach these kids about agile and product management and so on and so forth. And these are all in the STEM program, the science technology engineering fields, right?
So kids that have aptitude but don't have the means to go buy a computer or whatever. And so the grants that we were able to secure through the state funding gave them the opportunity to learn how to use these tools and create some amazing things to a point where they were out competing college kids and maybe even some people in working actually have jobs to create the types of apps and things that people would actually go out and spend money on. So it was quite amazing.
What kids today are already sort of cultured to and programmed from an early age to use a phone, to use these types of applications that may be harder for us older people. So we can help them with some other things with our experience in life, maybe.
Andreas: Yeah. Perhaps. And working, collaborating on these things. Maybe one of my kids will become an entrepreneur. I don't know.
Kumar: Yeah. You never know. Maybe I can counsel there a little bit.
Andreas: There you go.
Kumar: So I'm going to sort of wind us down with some fun questions for you. Okay. People to know you a little bit better. First one is, what's your favorite beverage of choice, coffee, tea, or something else.
Andreas: I would say in the morning, it's definitely coffee. I'm not working without any coffee. Sorry. It's my kind of gasoline. My machine is working with this coffee. I lived in Italy for a couple of years and you can't escape.
Kumar: Yeah. Same here. I have an espresso machine up there and I make myself a nice double.
Andreas: Yeah. As a German guy, I also love my beer. Yeah, of course. It's a stereotyped thing, but yes. And of course, I also enjoy in company a good bottle of red wine or white wine, whatever it is. It is relaxing and connecting on a level.
Kumar: Depends on the context, right?
Andreas: Absolutely. But sitting somewhere on a terrace with a view on the sea and some sundowners.
Kumar: That's right. All right. So what about this? Digital boards or physical walls?
Andreas: I love physical walls. I have the opportunity two weeks from now to reconnect to people meeting in an office, like in the old days, stickies on the walls and all that. I really love that. But of course I wouldn't like to have to go to the office five days a week again. This has passed. I think we will never see it again.
Kumar: Well, yeah, maybe. What's the most overrated agile practice?
Andreas: The most overratedā€”oh boy. I would say not because of its design but how they are conducted, it's review. I haven't seen any reviews that are not staged in some form. Some play going on. On the forefront, it's all shiny and we are happy. We are not inclined to talk about anything that we missed or failures maybe or things that are near misses also. We are just polishing everything ten times. And then saying, hey, we superheroes, we delivered this and that. And it's so great and awesome and applause.
Kumar: I love that. That is so true. That is so true. It is definitely underutilized and overrated.
Andreas: Yeah, absolutely. We would like to have more as agile coaches, I suppose I'm speaking for you as well, a more open conversation here, also talking about the things that didn't work out so well, learnings from that, the double loop learnings. It's not only done, but we also accounted for all the learnings from whatever we found on our ways. This open conversation, I'm almost not able to evidence somewhere. It's a rare beast.
Kumar: Yeah. What about the most underrated agile practice?
Andreas: Oh, definitely. It's a retrospective. It is for me, the core, the heart of everything that we are doing, just pausing and reflecting on our collaboration. What I'm seeing a lot in retrospective is that we are blaming circumstance and I don't know who, but not ourselves in the kind of, we missed an opportunity to improve, or we missed an opportunity to go into a constructive conflict with each other. If I'm not of the same opinion of you, am I speaking up or shutting down?
Kumar: Yeah. I agree. I would say my two would be the same as what you picked. Definitely the retrospective is being underrated. All right, one last one. What are you reading or maybe if there's a book that really impacted you recently that changed how you think about innovation?
Andreas: Hmm. Very difficult. What I explore a little bit is the times around fifteen, seventy, sixteen, ninety of the pirates in the Caribbean. They created a new society. Something very new at that time was a lot of freedom, but also responsibilities with balancing power. All that around these ideas. I mean, names like Blackbeard or so. They are also known in our times. But what they really created in that time is a new type of society. And that had a lot of influence on innovation. This freedom and this responsibility, this balancing the power of the captain with the power of the quartermaster on the ship. I would say this is almost modern times.
Kumar: Is it a historical account or a fictional account?
Andreas: No, it's just books about how the society worked in those times. And all of them came from Europe, desperate, with high chances of not surviving the travel, and still fighting and connecting and helping each other and respecting the freedom of the others. They came from European societies where we had in those times kings and you could be beheaded for nothing more or less, and they created something that resembles for me like the good old times of the founding fathers of the United States, this kind of freedom and adventure.
Kumar: That's very cool. There's actually a show that was released. I forget what network or I forget what it's called, but it was about the pirates and it was about all these characters and the freedom that they created. And maybe loosely based on the records from the time. I'll have to remember that and put that in the show notes as well, because I don't remember names of things, unfortunately.
All right. So what have I not asked you that you'd like to share with our audience?
Andreas: One pattern that I found also very interesting is that roughly around a hundred years later, after something has been invented, it is brought into our reality, our normal lives. If we go back a hundred years, we would be in the nineteen twenties, the golden age.
So there are a lot of ideas from that time that haven't made it into our minds; of course there was World War II and a great disruption there. And I would say that it is fruitful to revisit all these ideas a little bit maybe with the help of AI and see what is in that box for us for our times.
What I learned from John Boyd who invented also the OODA loop, is that tactics deriving from the better use of technology take a little bit longer than would be necessary to come into our action. We fought wars in the past with technology that would allow for different tactics and strategic angles. And the same is true for industrial production, for instance.
I mean, when Henry Ford invented the conveyor belt production style, we had a lot of things there that have been invented long before. We didn't make use of it. And now the same thing might be true for something that is now coming around the corner. And maybe my kids or my grandchildren will be the ones using that technology. I hope this is accelerating, but I would say roughly three generations it takes until something very new goes into everyday's life.
Kumar: Wouldn't you say that things are accelerating in terms of new ideas, new inventions and things like that?
Andreas: Think about the amount of knowledge that is created every single day. The amount of data created in one year, I think it was twenty sixteen or so when the whole mankind created in that one year more data than in the whole history of mankind before. It's machines talking to machines and all that. And we now have the power to compute all that. And I would say that not far into the future, innovation itself will not be only coming from humans. It's research done by robots for us.
Kumar: I fully believe that it's gonna happen sooner rather than later.
Andreas: We will see. Yeah. We'll see it. You and me maybe.
Kumar: Well, Andreas, it's been a real pleasure talking to you today and I hope the audience, I'm sure that they would've enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much for being here. And I'm thinking there's probably another conversation we could have about some of the topics that we didn't dive into as deeply as maybe we could have. And so we can maybe brainstorm and come up with maybe another focus and bring you back on if you're open to that.
Andreas: Yeah, I have to thank you very much for the opportunity for today. And I will be open for any conversation we would like to have.
Kumar: All right. Sounds great. Something going a little bit deeper. Thank you.
Andreas: All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Have a good day.
Kumar: Bye.
