with Jennifer Zuber.
Agile transformations fail not because of poor frameworks, but because they ignore culture as the social operating system. Drawing from Marcus Collins’ idea that to go viral, you must align with identity and subculture, this talk reframes change as a cultural movement, not an initiative.
Key points
- Every Agile movement started as a subculture — passionate, identity-driven, story-rich.
- Organisational change only “sticks” when it becomes part of how people see themselves.
- Neuroscience explains why — the brain’s social circuitry (belonging, safety, status) determines uptake more than rational arguments or process maps.
- How to design change “memes”: short, emotionally charged, identity-reinforcing artefacts that spread organically through teams.
- Case mini-stories: something like a safety-culture shift in engineering, a neuro-based change-ritual in a financial org, an agile-at-scale pilot that went viral through subculture cues.
Learning outcome
- Stop managing adoption; start engineering belonging.