Welcome back. I want to spend some time in this video talking about culture. Ultimately, DevOps is all about culture. Sometimes tooling and technology get highlighted as key enablers, that at the end of the day, if the culture is not supportive of this new way of working, an organization will not be high-performing. In this video, we're going to focus on the Westrum topology for improving organizational culture. After you're through watching this video, you should be able to define the Westrum topology, describe what is meant by a pathological, bureaucratic, and generative organization, and discuss the positives related to a generative culture. So, the model that is used in DevOps is the Westrum model. Ron Westrum had been researching human factors in system safety, particularly in the context of accidents and technological domains that are highly complex and risky, such as aviation and healthcare. In 1988, he developed a topology of organizational cultures. Pathological or power-oriented organizations are characterized by large amounts of fear and threat. People often hoard information or withhold it for political reasons or distort it to make themselves look better. Bureaucratic, rule-oriented organizations protect departments. Those in the department want to maintain their turf, insist on their own rules, and generally do things by the book, their book. Generative or performance-oriented organizations focus on the mission. How do we accomplish our goal? Everything is subordinated to good performance, to doing what we're supposed to do. Westrum's further insight was that the organizational culture predicts the way information flows through an organization. Westrum provides three characteristics of good information. First, it provides answers to the questions that the receiver needs answered. Second, it is timely. Lastly, it is presented in such a way that it can be effectively used by the receiver. Good information flow is critical to the safe and effective operation of high-tempo and high-consequence environments, including technology organizations. Additional insight from Westrum was that this definition of organizational culture predicts performance outcomes. This is an important connection to DevOps, because we often hear that culture is important, and now we have data to show that culture can predict software delivery performance. To go into more detail regarding the topology, this table on screen helps with describing the behavior seen in three types of cultures outlined: pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. I'm going to go into detail on a few of these just to provide some examples and context for describing each of these cultures. So, in this first example around cooperation. In a pathological organization, there's low cooperation; in a bureaucratic one, there's modest; and in a generative, high cooperation. This directly connects to DevOps, because as we've discussed, it's all about collaboration and cooperation. So, in a generative culture, you will see a lot of teams collaborating to the point where you won't even know who they report to or how the work is structured. Second, in a pathological organization, messengers are shot; in a bureaucratic one, messengers are neglected; and a generative one, messengers are trained. So, as you can see again, in a generative culture is strongly encouraged to bring information forward and to discuss it in a meaningful way versus ignoring it or basically telling the person not to bring it forward in the future. Third, in a pathological organization, responsibilities are shirked; in a bureaucratic organization, there are very narrow responsibilities; and in a generative organization, risks are shared. So, again, when we talk about DevOps, we talk about high degrees of collaboration and sharing, and responsibility is shared across the entire team and across the organization. So, again, optimizing for that generative culture is very important in DevOps. In the case of a pathological organization, bridging is discouraged; in a bureaucratic organization, it is tolerated; and in generative one, it's actually encouraged. So, you see, again, this connection to DevOps because we talk about breaking down barriers and silos, and really strongly encouraging teams to bridge and work together to focus on an outcome. In a pathological organization, failure leads to scapegoating or blame. In a bureaucratic organization, failure leads to justice. In a generative one, failure leads to inquiry. You're going to see this theme again throughout our content, and you'll see that when there is a failure, if it truly becomes an opportunity to learn, that is what is considered a generative culture. Lastly, in a pathological culture, novelty is crushed; in a bureaucratic organization, novelty leads to problems; and in a generative organization, novelty is actually implemented. So, again, this shows the concept of high-performing organizations are actually continuously learning and improving and trying to get better. Culture enables information processing through three mechanisms. First, in organizations with a generative culture, people collaborate more effectively and there is a higher level of trust both across the organization and up and down the hierarchy. Second, according to the book accelerate, generative culture emphasizes the mission, an emphasis that allows people involved to put aside their personal issues and also the departmental issues that are so evident in bureaucratic organizations. The mission is primary. Third, generativity encourages a level playing field, in which hierarchy plays less of a role. A good culture requires trust and cooperation between people across the organization. So, reflects the level of collaboration and trust inside the organization. In addition, a better organizational culture can indicate higher-quality decision making. In a team with a generative culture, not only is better information available for making decisions, but those decisions are more easily reversed if they turn out to be wrong, because the team is more likely to be open and transparent rather than close in hierarchical. Problems are also more rapidly discovered and addressed. Ultimately, culture predicts software delivery performance, organizational performance, and leads to higher levels of job satisfaction.
