I attended the Agile Unconference in Zurich and was blown away by the interest of people in the topic of “Org Smells”. We had lots of great topics and great discussions, and especially the coffee breaks ☕ were filled with great connections.

In my workshop on ‘Organizational Smells,’ we tried to discover and explore subtle yet potent signs hinting at underlying issues within workplaces.
We delved deep into some ‘smells’—latent inefficiencies, communication breakdowns, or structural hurdles—that often elude conventional detection.

I prepared this a little 1-hour workshop, with this agenda:

What are Organizational Smells?
Collect + Share their observed smells
My experience
- How to find them
- What to do
- Discussion
Diving in some of them:
- What is the smell
- What is the behaviour
- What is the unwanted behaviour
- What is the blue and red part of the policy behind it
2-4-All:
- What is your take away?
- Black Hat Thinking

What is an Org Smell?

An Organiztional Smell is something that seems “off”, that is hindering value creation (collaboration).

Examples from participants:

“What is the account number where I can book my time on?”
Finger pointing Culture
Software Architects in different departments, dictating Software Engineers how to do their work: Tests, code, architecture, styling, …

How do you find Org Smells?

Just ask people
Observe people (Tip: Linger at the coffee machine)
Use challenging hypothesis interviews to discover real examples

Collect and Sort these smells with the participants

Action?

Be the coach and mirror back behaviour
- React to Small Things
Change the company policies (self designing) and announce the change
Launch experiments with explicit rule breaking mentality
Role play behaviours with participants in the room

Define Acceptance Criteria and ask powerful questions:
- How would you measure the Change in the System?
  - Be aware of Goodhart’s Law 😁
- What did we observe if this problem is gone?