Lecture style including active participation through intense discussions, taking the individual experiences of the audience into account. I could offer this session as well as a workshop.

If this is accepted as a talk, I would first point out typical cultural differences that have an impact especially on agile teams. Examples are among others: realistic planning, taking responsibility, or stating problems. I will point out how I have seen these things affecting projects and will discuss similar experiences the audience might have encountered (most often my “talks” turn into discussions with the audience, that’s probably the way I interpret “talk” ;-) ) Next I want to shift the focus on how we can create cultural awareness. Examples are: rotating people over different sites (for a given amount of time), establishing the role of ambassadors, management by flying around (comparable to management by walking around) and other things that also help to keep the sites in touch and to provide social connections across sites and teams.. And finally I want to concentrate on the importance of focusing on similarities which are created by establishing a common vision, rules and guidelines for the project, creating joint values based on mutual respect, trust and continuous learning. I will definitely also for the latter two topics (creating cultural awareness and focusing on similarities) motivate discussions with the audience.

One comment on the meta-level: I came to the conclusion about the importance of the focus on similarities when I discovered that very often in one company at one site there are already big cultural differences. One example is business analysts differ culture-wise from developers. And thus I encountered that when leveraging this kind of culture across sites (e.g. when working with several development teams on different sites in different countries, but in the end “we” are all developers) that this helps tremendously in overcoming the cultural differences.

If this is accepted as a workshop, I would – after setting the stage where we will clarify the goal of the workshop, collect the diverse experiences the workshop participants have in overcoming cultural differences in distributed (agile) settings. I’m assuming that there will be both experiences where teams were not able to overcome cultural differences and on the other hand in this sense successful experiences. Next, we will find out which of the experiences are useful for other teams as are, and which ones need (re-)solutions. We will then work on the latter ones in order to find out how to overcome these differences by either coming up with a solution or by coming up with ideas that make these differences unimportant.

Depending on the amount of participants we will split into different groups in the individual steps. And depending on the amount of experiences of which the participants think that these need a (re-)solution – we might need to prioritize these first because we might not be able to work on all of them in the available time.

As a result we will create concrete techniques and ideas that will help distributed teams to establish a joint culture.