Show Notes
In this week’s episode of The TTL Podcast, Mon-Chaio and Andy delve into Ron Westrom’s influential paper, “A Typology of Organizational Cultures.” The hosts unpack the compelling insights and frameworks posited by Westrom, which categorize organizational cultures into Pathological, Bureaucratic, and Generative types. Mon-Chaio and Andy also share personal anecdotes and practical examples, such as dealing with software bugs, to illustrate the distinctions between local fix and inquiry-based approaches. They highlight the critical role of leadership and the importance of having a curious and improvement-focused mindset.
References
- A typology of organisational cultures
- Accelerate
- S1E14: The Undeserved Malignment of Bureaucracy
- Culture Series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
Transcript
Mon-Chaio: Thank you everyone for tuning in to this week’s episode of The TTL Podcast where Andy and I will discuss a paper titled A Topology of Organizational Cultures, which sounds scintillating, doesn’t it, Andy? Just like the most interesting topic known ever.
Andy: It’s, it’s short. It’s to the point. And in fact, it’s so clear, you don’t even need to read it. You read the paper, right?
Mon-Chaio: Obviously, it’s a typology of organizational cultures. So, Andy, you were the one that suggested that we tackle this. And I think it is a pretty interesting read, but I’d like to start by asking, why did you think that this would be A pertinent topic in this theme, this season, where we’re talking about diagnoses and effective change management techniques, that sort of a thing.
Andy: So there’s two reasons. One is that it’s probably actually out there in people’s minds already. Because, if you’ve read, uh, things about DevOps, or if you’ve read the Accelerate book, which is all the research that went into, does DevOps matter, does it work, what actually matters, this organizational typology came out as a, a big part of what they found.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: Now, they didn’t create it, the, the Fosgren and, and others didn’t create it, they got it from, Ron Westrom. He came up with it, and he came up with it once again, like many of these things, in the medical field. So it’s, it’s from there. But the basic idea is, if you’re trying to diagnose something in medicine, you have to have a way of naming the thing. You can’t diagnose it if you can’t name it. So, this is kind of a way of naming different kinds of cultures along a particular axis, along a particular kind of differentiation of cultures. And Westrom, and we’ll talk about this, considers this one to be a meaningful axis on which to split them. And the DevOps literature backed that up. They found that it did have meaning.
Mon-Chaio: Okay. So before we get too far into the details, maybe we should summarize what this paper says. Honestly, it’s a fairly short paper. So I actually encourage everybody give it a read. I would guess maybe 15 or 20 minutes would be all that you would need. It was published in 2004 again by Ron Westrom. And he is positing that there is a correlation between organizational cultures and safety within medical fields specifically, but then also extending to other fields such as aviation or possibly nuclear power, that sort of a thing.
Andy: Yes.
Mon-Chaio: And he splits. His organizational culture into three types. I guess you could call them. Um, one is the pathological type. One is the bureaucratic type, and one is the generative type. And he differentiates between those types mainly through how information flows.
And he says, based on how information flows, you will land in one of these three types generally, and that will cause trickle down effects for how you manage crises, and how people think about innovation, that sort of a thing. Uh, he defines the pathological type as where information is hoarded for personal gain. He defines the bureaucratic type as where information remains generally within bureaucratic silos. Department silos, organizational silos, um, and processes dominate how information is communicated. And then he defines the generative type as where information is shared as freely as possible, as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible. And he mentions that that the generative type better innovation and safety within these fields that he’s studied.
So that’s kind of, I guess, how I would summarize it. Anything else, uh, Andy, that I missed? Mm
Andy: well. I’ll just add a couple quotes from the paper that I think help clarify it a little bit. He said, and this was, I think, in the first paragraph of the paper, so you don’t have to read very far to get to some of
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: A focus on personal needs leads to a pathological environment.
A focus on departmental turf to a bureaucratic style, and a focus on the mission to a generative style. To me, when I read that, I was like, Okay, this gives me a framing that’s a bit easier to see, because when he talks about, like, it’s about information flow and information processing, it’s kind of like, oh man, how am I going to observe that?
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm
Andy: But with this, I can kind of connect it to, alright, when I go into a meeting, what’s, what’s the sense I get? What’s the, what, what are the, like, decisions that are made? What are the documents that are brought in? What is the way that the meeting runs? Is it about personal needs? Is it about, like, the chairman?
Everyone turns to the chairman of the meeting and, uh, takes their cue from what need, what has to happen based on what that person is saying. Is it, is it that you walk into a meeting and there’s The secretary and, uh, and, uh, the chairman and then there’s the agenda and all of that. No one’s turning to them, but they, they run it.
Or is it a, possibly looks much more chaotic, but you can hear everyone talking about, like, Why are we here? What is the point of discussion? Let’s get to that. Let’s analyze it. Oh, we undiscovered, we uncovered something new. What do we do with that? Then you’re generative culture.
Mon-Chaio: hmm. Mm
Andy: I read that, I was like, okay, this gives me a framing that I can use.
And then also, do you remember, Manchao, when we were back on those episodes talking about culture and how do you build culture and what is culture? He also gave a definition of culture that I, I actually, I read it and I was like, I kind of like this. And he said, culture then is the patterned way that an organization responds to its challenges, whether these are explicit, for example, a crisis, or implicit, a latent problem or opportunity.
So. It’s, it’s those patterns of behavior. We talked about that, I believe. And he’s saying it’s not, it’s not the pattern of behavior you might do when everything’s just fine. It’s the pattern when there’s a challenge. It’s kind of like, what do you revert to? Do you immediately turn into, uh, don’t tell anyone this because that would look bad for me?
Or do you turn into, let’s understand the problem and then tell people what’s going on?
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. I like that. I actually, um, thought that was a little too simplistic when I read it. Um, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. And I think being simplistic makes it a little bit easier to understand. Because I think if we rewind back, to our season one about culture. think our definition was something around the rituals and symbols that, um, something or the other, um, which I think all of those words are important, but they, they muddle it a little bit for people and they’re like, well, what’s a ritual?
What’s a symbol?
Andy: yeah, now you have to start unpacking that into all these like, oh, well, ritual is these things. When is it a ritual? When’s it just a thing that happened?
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Yep. Um, what I did forget to mention though is, and you can correct me if you thought differently when you read the paper, it seemed that he felt The leadership at the top, the, the head person, was the most important person in terms of changing the culture. And that that leader’s,
Andy: Yes.
Mon-Chaio: personality type, if you will, had strong impact on what type of culture was created within the organization.
Andy: Yes. And I think that’s probably true. And I think it’s partly true because they set so many examples of how do you behave when something doesn’t go the way you expected?
Mon-Chaio: Mhmm.
Andy: Or the way you want it. What do you do with new information?
Mon-Chaio: Mhmm.
Andy: So, if we take Westrom’s typology, I guess maybe we should apply the so what test to it. So what? Okay, so he says there’s these three types. Okay, cool. What’s the outcome? Mm hmm. Mm
Mon-Chaio: a little bit tricky for me, uh, because I didn’t feel like these three types were extremely nuanced. And often, when I read things, or when I just see things out in the world, and the answer seems obvious, It does make me question the, so what? And I got a little bit of that from this paper, right?
Because he’s saying, look, on the one hand you have the pathological type where you shoot the messenger. Okay, yeah, uh, like let’s do a survey and everyone agrees that’s bad, right? Great. Okay, bad. And then he says the middle type, the bureaucratic type, is where the messenger is sort of contained. The message is wrapped up, maybe it’s sanitized a bit, it’s PR’d a little bit, and then you kind deliver the message. Uh, okay, I think, again, most people would agree, that’s not great, we don’t want to be doing that either. And then he jumps all the way and it’s like, and then there’s this generative type where everything is shared freely, and people are able to access whatever, and then they can go about and do their job in the best way possible.
So, To me, that did seem a little un nuanced. It’s like, we all want to be the generative type. One thing I didn’t get out of this paper was there are times when you want to be a pathological leader, because I don’t. And I think there are times when you want to be a pathological leader. And are there times when you want to set a bureaucratic culture? I can see that a little bit more,
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: but I still think it’s kind of like, eh, you’re really not leaning towards that.
And so, that’s why I kind of feel like, well, he’s just saying, go for the generative type, why couldn’t that have just been a paragraph, and then we call it a day. Um, I think there were other good things in the paper, but I’ll start off there. That was my initial thought as I was going through it.
Andy: I, I, I, I, yeah, I get that as well. It’s like, he came up with these three types. And his entire discussion, his framing about them was generative is the one you want.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: he kind of, he does give a few examples of things that he thinks are bureaucratic and things that he thinks are generative. And I think his, his point is as you go from pathological to bureaucratic to generative, you become as a group more effective. You can deal with, um, Change better, uh, because the pathological organization, change is something to be hidden, . The bureaucratic is when change happens, it it wants to, as you said, contain it. It wants to come up with, okay, what are the new rules? Let’s just change the rules we’re working by and, and get that to work. And so it’ll kind of handle it. It’ll push it off for a while, but it can eventually adapt itself and just handle it. The generative, the idea, I think, is it will immediately take that something is going on and immediately try to figure out, as immediate as it is possible, immediately start trying to work out what to do about this and, and get it all working. And so I think that’s the idea, is the so what is, this points a way of behavior handling of information that gets you a more effective organization. Now, the thing is, is in his paper he provides other than anecdote, what he calls case study, um, other than anecdote he doesn’t provide much evidence that that is true.
Mon-Chaio: Right, and he, to his credit, he does mention that, uh, more evidence needs to be gathered. Um, he says there’s strong correlation, uh, but more evidence is needed. The other part that I think makes this paper in some ways less useful is, I didn’t feel like there was a transitional nature between his organizational topologies. And I don’t think he mentions that there’s a transitional nature behind it. And I certainly didn’t read into it that there was a transitional nature. It’s not like if you’re a pathological, you move slowly towards bureaucratic, and then you move slowly towards generative. That’s not the sense I got at all.
And if I step back and think about it, I’m not sure that I agree that it’s like a, that it’s a linear transition in that way.
Andy: No, I, I, I would think that the transitions would, could jump to any one of the three
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: and that an organization, any given organization is a mixture of all three.
Mon-Chaio: And interestingly, that’s the other part that makes this paper less useful in my mind, is he mentions later on, almost at the end, that there’s this question of like, local loci of good culture in organizations of other cultural types, teams that are generative, that sit in pathological organizations, things like that.
Andy: hmm. Mm
Mon-Chaio: And he doesn’t present any tactics. around how you go about making that goodness spread. And in fact, I think he kind of leaves it as an open question about whether these teams can even survive, and how do these teams come to that state in the first place if sort of culture is pushed, in his mind, very top down from the top.
And he just says, well, you know, those are things to explore.
Andy: He says, um, a study of emergency department team training stressed the need to consider the larger context. Does the isolated pathological culture get fixed or does it contaminate the larger environment? Often pathological units can get away with horrid performances if they have the right political connections.
are good at securing grants, or have a high publication rate. In many hospitals, it is notorious that some units and some individuals, because of elite status, can get away with anything. So the context matters. So basically what he’s saying is, yes, these can all coexist within a boundary, and they all probably have tactics that they can use to get there.
His, his thinking, his research, uh, doesn’t get into that. I think this is probably where most papers would say Future research needed.
Mon-Chaio: Right, exactly. Exactly.
Andy: think, I think he is right. Or do you, do you think he’s right? Um, that they can coexist. That they will, if you look in any large enough organization, you’ll go in there and you’ll be like, okay, as a whole this organization is bureaucratic. But this group over here, they’re pathological. And this area over here, they seem to be generative.
Mon-Chaio: I do agree with that. I think the interesting question goes back to something that we raised and had a slight disagreement between when we did the cultural episodes, which was speed of cultural change and bottoms up versus top down cultural change.
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And I think what he’s saying aligns a lot towards what I think, which is, with the right leader, you can really speed up cultural change.
Without having to push it bottoms up and have everybody, you know, do all the work that we talked about, such as creating adverse situations to illustrate that your espouse theory and your theory and use are out of sync and changing way people think and then pushing that up. But I do think that it’s a little bit challenging then because he doesn’t present tactics on the fact that there are these different groups with different cultures within a larger organization, then what?
Yeah.
Andy: this is the thing, is to think that there is leadership throughout the organization. You have, like, the executive board, and then you have, like, the head of a particular area, or things like that. So you’ve got different parts of leadership. And I think some of the question becomes, how much influence are they able to have within their area?
So if you want to be a tyrant, make sure none of your other leaders have influence.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah. Uh, Uh,
Andy: we’ve said so far is basically what he says in the article. You, you listed out pretty much every single part, point that he said of this is what defines each one of the, the culture types. That doesn’t really give us much to go on. It’s not quite concrete enough to be able to say, okay, so those are the characteristics. If we can change it in this way, we have a chance of getting to the other kind of culture. And I’m wondering if this would help. So I found chapter three of the Accelerate book. So for Accelerate, what it is is basically a book long research report. And they came up with an instrument to measure kind of Are you generative, or are you not generative? Because that was their interest. Because they were like, if generative is the one, according to Westrom, all we need to measure is generative versus not generative. Um, now let’s go through the, uh, I think it’s seven items on their survey. And just figure out, like, does this give us an indication of what you might do?
Mon-Chaio: Okay.
Andy: the first one, and this is a survey instrument to measure how, like, generative you are. Uh, on a seven point Likert scale, so this is the strongly agree, strongly disagree scale.
And the first one is, information is actively sought. Second is, messengers are not punished when they deliver news of failures or other bad news. Third is, responsibilities are shared. Fourth is, cross functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded. Fifth is, failure causes inquiry. Sixth is new ideas are welcomed, and seventh is failures are treated primarily as opportunities to improve the system. Now as I read through those, to me they, they’re not hugely more expressive than what Westrom said, but they are slightly more actionable. So, information is actively sought. Okay, I can ask myself, am I actively seeking information? Is what I just did about seeking information? Okay, so that gives me something I can use to judge my behaviors. Messengers are not punished. Okay. When people tell me something bad, do I just immediately get angry with them? Do I get red in the face and tell them that that was a terrible thing? Or do I do something else? Responsibilities are shared. It’s actionable, but I think it’s really difficult,
Mon-Chaio: Uh,
Andy: uh, especially if you’re going from pathological to something else.
Mon-Chaio: Or even cultures that would call themselves generative, I think often have this, well, even if not, who should I blame? Who should be the responsible party? Whose name is on the Jira ticket, since Jira only allows one assignee.
Andy: Who’s the R in the racy matrix?
Mon-Chaio: yep.
Andy: Um, But I would say, some of those places, what, what they’re probably figuring out is that they’re more bureaucratic than they might think.
Mon-Chaio: Exactly, yep.
Andy: Uh, cross functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded. Yeah, when I hear that there’s something that would need interaction with another team, what’s my reaction? When I see my group going off and interacting with another team, what’s my reaction? I say, oh, great for identifying that and getting it, getting it to the issue and, and working it out and working it through and working with other people? Or do I say like, oh man, you put our project at risk. took time away from what we’re working on right now. Uh, failure causes inquiry? Yeah. That’s a pretty easy one to identify if you’re doing it or not. Now, sometimes you might think you’re doing it and others people think you aren’t, but that’s about getting proper feedback on what’s going on. New ideas are welcomed. I think that’s a hard one. seem easy on the surface,
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: but I think it’s a hard one because, in my mind, a generative culture will also be very curious.
And people who aren’t used to it can see the curiosity, the questioning that goes to a new idea. They can see that as something pushing the new idea away.
Mon-Chaio: Right, yep. Or, not being focused, right? I see this a lot also where the people that are asking the questions are seen as nuisances. Because we’re trying to move in a certain direction, and we’ve addressed your question, and you’re coming at it from a different angle, but we feel like we’ve already addressed it, why can’t we move forward and move on?
Andy: Why aren’t you just welcoming my new idea? This is, this is the new direction. Why aren’t you just welcoming the new idea? We’re supposed to be generative
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: are welcoming the new idea. They’re trying to decide how to welcome the new idea. failures are treated primarily as opportunities to improve the system. I think that and failure causes inquiry are the two where have to kind of tread the most lightly at first because you’re in that failure case where people are probably already feeling like something’s gone wrong, and the inquiry into it, you want to avoid it being a blame, but you also need to make sure that it’s a thing about learning, and learning is hard.
Thank you. And finding out that something went wrong because of a decision you made is hard. And I think the key is in this, that it says it’s an opportunity to improve the system. Whereas a pathological one would view it as an opportunity to, well, improve the individual.
Mon-Chaio: Or not improve the individual, but not subvert the individual,
Andy: yes, because you’re trying to protect your power. This needs to be a way to not subvert the individual. Subvert the person with the power.
Mon-Chaio: And when we talk about opportunities to fix or opportunities for inquiry, westrom actually presented a really interesting scale. He called response to anomaly. And we talked a little bit about it at the left hand side of the pathological part is the suppression, which information comes in, you suppress it at all costs. Then it comes on to encapsulation, which we talked about.
You keep it within your group, you formulate what it means, you deliver processes to communicate it out. Next is public relations, um, you try to deliver it. pretty up the information, uh, and make it seem as benign as possible, perhaps.
Andy: hmm.
Mon-Chaio: The remaining three, to me, though, are the most interesting. He calls it local fix, so you fix it right where you see it.
Global fix, which is, now you take that across the organization, and you fix all instances of that problem. And then inquiry is right at the very end, and he defines it as attempting to get to the root cause of a problem.
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And I would say again that there’s many generative organizations that see global fix as the end state.
I I’ve been open to information, I have analyzed it, we found a problem, we’re fixing it across the organization. Isn’t that generative? But I think if You think about it. Inquiry is actually much further on from global fix, because as soon as you get to inquiry, all of a sudden, it’s not just about this problem.
You may be saying in the extreme
Andy: all these other things are happening as well, and it’s all seems to be coming from this thing
Mon-Chaio: Well, you’re right. In the extreme case, the inquiry might lead to does this company even should it even exist?
Andy: Mm
Mon-Chaio: very extreme case, or is the leadership right? And I think those are difficult questions for leaders and organizations to ask themselves.
Andy: Let’s take this actually I think this is a really interesting one because you can also apply it to the most technical minute level Which I think might be easier for people to grasp
Mon-Chaio: mm hmm. Mm
Andy: say you get a bug report You’re told your software failed in this particular case and your very first reaction is We’re close to a release.
Just ignore it. Just push it away. That’s suppression.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: Uh, so encapsulation would probably be along the lines of, uh, the person who found out you’ll talk to them. Uh, you’ll, you’ll convince them not to bring it up. Uh, we’ll just hold it here within the team. Yeah. The team, we know about it.
Mon-Chaio: Right, we
Andy: assessed the impact. We filed the ticket, but there’s no need to talk to the customer. There’s no need to tell the product team. We, the development team, it’s okay. We, we, we’ve, we’ve got this handled. Uh, public relations would be, all right, we’re going to go talk to the product team. We’re going to bring this up and we’re going to work with them to make sure that we tell the rest of the organization, the sales team and everyone else.
There’s nothing wrong here. We found this thing. There’s nothing to worry about. Local fix. Do you remember Manchow? When we were working together, we had an intern and we set him loose on a bug. Kind of worked with him for a little bit and then we’re like, Here, here’s this bug, go and fix it. And, um, after about a day, he called us over for the code review and he’s like, I fixed it.
was really happy. And he showed us the fix. And he said, So, here’s the problem. At this point, at this point, this, uh, this variable was undefined. This was in Perl, so it was undef. At this point, it was undef. And we tried to call a method on it. And you can’t call a method on undef. So, so the fix is just don’t call the method when it’s undef.
Mon-Chaio: I don’t recall that. That’s funny
Andy: You don’t remember
Mon-Chaio: I don’t remember that specific.
Andy: So he’d put it, he just put an if statement around that call and said, if, if the thing, because that would be a truthy expression, if the thing, then go ahead and call the function, call the, call the method. And we’re like, that doesn’t, that doesn’t fix the issue, but it was absolutely a local fix.
He took. The presented case, which was, we were seeing this message in our log files saying that we were calling a method on undef, um, yeah, it’s not going to do that anymore.
Mon-Chaio: Right, it did fix, it did fix the issue. The issue to him was the exception in the logs. his fix eliminated the exception in the logs.
Andy: So, there you go. Now, if he had done closer to what we were asking, what, what, what, cause our immediate reaction was, that is not right. That is not the way you fix this. Our immediate reaction was, yeah, but why is that undef? Go and track down why that’s undef, because this code does not expect it to be undef.
And if that thing can be undef, who knows what else along the path that this, this data is going to get to could go wrong. So you might fix it at that one spot, but maybe just the next point will do something with it that it can’t do with undef. So, uh, We wanted him to address the problem kind of wherever it existed.
Now, the naive way of doing that is what I see in a lot of code now that languages have started adding this in, is you do the kind of like, uh, follow this, uh, method call chain if defined.
Mon-Chaio: Mhm. Mhm.
Andy: uh, where you can say, Oh, just go ahead with this, this thing if it’s defined. And what I see is teams then just Adding that in more and more places to hit that global fix, and now their default way of calling anything on objects and it turns into question mark dot rather than just dot.
Mon-Chaio: Right, it’s just defaulted in the way you type things.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Like your muscle memory is always question mark dot.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah.
Andy: And that, that is in approach to a global fix, but I think that’s the naive global fix. The fix that we actually wanted him to do is don’t let it be undef in the first place.
Mon-Chaio: Mhm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm
Andy: getting closer to the root cause of the problem. Let’s go and figure out why it was undef. Now, a global fix, if you said it was able to be undef, like, oh no, this is a completely valid state, would be to then go through and start adding in those if statements or the question mark dots or whatever. But a more inquiry approach to it would be, well, structurally, we shouldn’t be in that state because it’s, it’s dangerous. To let an undefined value propagate through our system because, and this is why some of the newer languages also make a distinction between a type and a type that allows undefined because the, the, uh, who it is, C A R H O R S, uh, Uh, one billion dollar mistake, which was defining the concept of null and go through programming languages. It’s probably much more than a billion dollar mistake. And an inquiry says, no, our fundamental data structure here is wrong. We should come up with a data structure that doesn’t let this happen because we just cannot put the system together in that way. And then that would be an inquiry fix that actually goes out and understands the root cause of why did we end up with this thing where there was nothing there. So I, I think hopefully for our listeners in thinking about, like, something much more tactical, tactical, of how can this play out, that same thing plays out in the way that you deal with, um, someone not performing the way you think, uh, the organization thinks they should, or, uh, in the way that you discuss what’s the goal for the next quarter,
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: do, do you just kind of like cut it all short?
Uh, do you actually go, And inquire what’s, what’s going on. So all of that I think can be used, but going down to the programming level helps us all, uh, get something much more concrete.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, and you mentioned somebody not performing. I think most of the time, uh, people are located squarely in the local fix, aren’t they not? Well, we’ll
Andy: Oh yeah. You just give them a little training.
Mon-Chaio: Yep, or we’ll put on a performance improvement plan and get rid of them. I think the and again, this is where the global fix in inquiry really leads to uncomfortable conversations.
The global fix might be, are your leaders doing the right thing to enable people for success? But inquiry might be, you are not a learning and improvement organization, and people can’t grow the way you currently work. If the goal is to ship features as fast as possible, you will never be able to grow, therefore you always have people with performance problems as their skills age out.
That’s not a comfortable conversation to have.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: So what, right? We started the so what. Um, now this is classically the time that we present tactics, which kind of is the so what. what do we think? So there’s these cultural topologies that we think are useful in determining the effectiveness of an organization.
Even if we’re saying, look, there’s just one that you’re aiming towards, it’s generative. And, there’s the instrument from the Accelerate book that helps you determine whether you’re generative or how close you are to generative.
What else? What else can we say about this?
Andy: I would say, I think that’s the, so what is. These, these three typologies appear to exist. They seem to be meaningful in that pathological will be the least effective and generative will be the most effective. There are specific questions you can ask to get a measure of how generative you are as an organization, or at least as a part of an organization. The first place to start is diagnosis. Are you pathological? Are you generative? And then once you’ve done that investigation, you’ll probably actually have a better sense of why you’re pathological or generative or bureaucratic. Because, and, and, and I think this is actually part of it, is to become generative, you have to have that, that curiosity mindset, that let’s fix this mindset.
And a part of that is also the realism of what is possible. So if you want to change a bureaucratic group into a generative group, Bureaucracies have built into them all sorts of mechanisms to protect themselves. They’re fascinating creatures. part of being generative is going to be figuring out what those mechanisms are so that you can make the changes to become more generative. So I think a lot of this turns into the Diagnose, and then from the diagnosis you’ll get a much better, uh, reading on what changes you need to make.
Mon-Chaio: That makes sense. Bureaucracies are fascinating creatures. We explored that a little bit in our episode, the unfair malignment of bureaucracy, which we proposed that bureaucracy isn’t as bad as it seems. go check that out, if you’re interested.
But I think you’re right, Andy. You have the diagnosis. We know we’re trying to move towards generative. And you have the instrument that tells you where you might be falling down.
I think that’s good. End. You know, we identified that then comes the change part. And how do you change? Luckily, or perhaps unluckily for our listeners, we have recorded a three part episode for how you go about understanding and changing culture. We’ll put it in the show notes.
Go ahead and give that a listen. And I think that will include, hopefully, Some good tactics on how you might affect cultural change, including something that Westrom didn’t talk about here, which was the momentum of culture. And even when new leaders come in, they still have to fight against that momentum, and what are the strategies for fighting against that momentum of culture.
I think that’s it for this episode.
Andy: I think so
Mon-Chaio: As always, We would love to hear everyone’s thoughts. Have you been in a pathological, a bureaucratic, a generative culture before? How did that work out for you in the organization? Are these the right terms? Do these terms resonate with you, or do you feel like there’s something missing? There’s another topology that perhaps comes in between somewhere that also is important in the lightning.
Or, perhaps You say, look, I am in a very bureaucratic culture, and I’m not sure how I move towards generative. We can help with that. Andy and I have conversations around this with many people trying to help them move their culture along. So, whether it’s ideas, criticisms, or inquiries for help, please reach out to us.
You can find us at hosts at thettlpodcast. com That’s hosts with an S, and we always welcome any email we receive, even though sometimes, Andy, we forget to respond to it for a too long. if you fall into that bucket, we apologize. We are getting to you, but that’s our failure. I don’t know if that’s pathological or bureaucratic or just laziness, which might be its own cultural type.
Okay. See you all hopefully back here next episode. We don’t know what we’re talking about yet. I think we’ve reached a little bit of a lull, so we have to figure that out. But You know, after three seasons, it’ll be as scintillating as all of our previous almost hundred episodes. We hope to see you then, but until next time, be kind and stay curious.
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