Information Flow in Three Work Cultures
By: Quentin Hartman
Tags: Company Culture, DevOps, QA, Guild Education, Security

Nothing defines a group of people more than its culture. More than anything else, culture shapes what it feels like to be a part of that group. “Culture” is an expansive concept, and can include everything from the most foundational beliefs and major ceremonies of a group, to the most mundane little details of daily life. Art, music, food, speech patterns, clothing, architecture… the list could go on. But what does culture mean in a business context? What is your culture at work? How does the culture at work affect your ability to work?

Work cultures are distinct from other cultures in that they are much more narrowly focused, and are often created with a lot of intention. If culture in general describes how a group lives, culture in business describes how a group works. A lot of scholarly effort has been put into studying and defining work culture. One of the most useful models of organizational culture was put forth by Ron Westrum in his 2004 paper “A Typology of Organisational Cultures,” where he defines the three cultures model. The cultures are pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. Westrum found that one of the most telling attributes about the dominant culture is how the people and processes within an organization handle information. Especially telling is the handling of information about failures, flaws, weaknesses, or other shortcomings. Let’s call this Toxic Information.

A pathological culture is as negative as it sounds. This culture is focused primarily on the acquisition and retention of power by individuals within the organization. One of the primary means to maintain this power is to control the flow of information, especially Toxic Information. In a pathological culture, Toxic Information is frequently weaponized. It is used against others in the organization to ensure the person who has the information maintains their power.

It’s also common in a pathological culture for information to be suppressed. When it can’t be suppressed, a scapegoat is found to “take the fall” for the organization. This results in a large number of other negative behaviors, including low cooperation, blame, siloing information, hiding failures, and fear of innovation. These traits are particularly dangerous for creative work like software development. They encourage people to always choose the “safe” paths, which hinders innovation. They create adversarial social patterns between teams, which leads to infighting, and known problems getting ignored until they cause issues in production.

Strongly pathological organizations can be effective for short periods of time so long as they pay very well or have some other amazing upside for the individuals, but people tend to become unhappy and burn out or become disengaged quickly. As a result, these organizations tend to have high turnover rates, and there is a strong correlation with markers for corruption. In fact, organizations that go too far down this road often collapse because they are held together only by individual self-interest, and fundamental problems are rarely addressed.

A Bureaucratic culture, on the other hand, focuses primarily on rules. Almost every large organization has some element of bureaucracy in its culture. Virtually any time you see a standard form, or have to look up a process, you’re seeing bureaucracy in action. Some amount of it is necessary, even healthy, for organizations to scale efficiently. However, there are pitfalls. Bureaucracy can often lead to “not my problem” attitudes because areas of responsibility are very narrowly defined. Communication between groups is often limited, and sometimes discouraged. This can be because an “us vs them” attitude has arisen because people have begun to identify with their immediate coworkers, but not the organization as a whole. It can also be because the “proper channels” for that communication are too onerous. The novel or interesting tend to be actively discouraged because change of any kind is seen as too risky. Individuals are disempowered to make decisions unless they are formally part of the leadership group. All this leads to Toxic Information being ignored or shuffled from place to place, allowing problems to go unaddressed for extended periods of time.

Bureaucracies also tend to be strongly justice seeking. When Toxic Information does finally come to light, they will not generally try to suppress it or dodge responsibility, but they will be quick to find some form of punishment or restitution to execute “justice.” This leads to a feeling that the issue is “dealt with,” but will often fail to address the root problem. Perhaps worse, bureaucratic thinking will cause people to be overly reliant on “proper channels” in a crisis. Westrum points to the communication failures between police and firefighters responding to the September 11th attacks as a catastrophic example of this force in action.

Bureaucracies can be very effective, however. A great example of this is a military organization. Most world class militaries are very effective at meeting their objectives, but most of the people who are there aren’t performing creative work, and relatively few of them are likely to be happy enough to stay there long term. Their biggest weakness, though, is their inability to adapt and act efficiently. The often onerous process to get changes approved takes time and effort away from actually implementing those changes. This is not a good environment for developing software, where the pace of change is constantly accelerating.

Finally, generative cultures are fundamentally mission and performance focused. The high-level goals of the organization are clearly articulated, and individuals are empowered within their spheres to contribute to that mission. Cooperation and collaboration are encouraged. Novel ideas and experiments that are likely paths to better outcomes are encouraged. Most importantly, Toxic Information isn’t seen as toxic at all: it’s an opportunity for improvement. As a result, strongly generative organizations will actively seek out Toxic Information as a means of self-improvement. When Toxic Information surfaces, they will look for contributing factors and work for true fixes to underlying problems. Justice seeking, scapegoating, and suppression should all be very rare, and ideally, entirely absent.

People in generative cultures tend to be happier on average than in other cultures because they can clearly connect their work to the higher goals of the organization and are empowered to make a difference. This clearly is the best environment for creative work like software development, but it’s not without its risks. The biggest challenge in a generative culture is scaling it to large numbers of people. As people know each other less, trust is more difficult to maintain, communication is less frequent, and efficiency can be lost as people lose track of what others are doing and overlapping work starts happening.

At Guild we’re working towards a strongly generative culture, even in the face of our rapid growth. Not only does this cultural model provide for the healthiest and happiest environment for the people that inhabit it, but there are also strong correlations between generative attributes and effective organizations. We’ve already established that the handling of Toxic Information is a strong indicator for the kind of culture that exists in an organization, but it goes beyond that. The way that all information flows is important. In a generative culture there is a strong emphasis on getting the right information to the right people at the right time. That is a challenge at the best of times, and in an organization that is growing as rapidly as Guild is, that challenge is magnified.

At the highest level, Guild is meeting that challenge with a focus on transparency and candor. Frequent communications about the state of the business, progress on initiatives, and upcoming challenges are all topics one can expect to see. But several less obvious efforts within the technology organization also promote a generative culture.

The establishment of the QA, Security, and DevOps teams this year are prime examples of organizational changes that have deep cultural importance. On the surface, these teams are centers of specialized skills and considerations that are fundamental parts of building and delivering software, but they are also key actors in facilitating information flow and cooperation across teams.

DevOps is most directly and obviously engaged in helping information move around and fostering cooperation. It’s right in our team mission statement. We spend a large portion of our time interacting with developers from all over the company, supporting their work around automation, observability, and infrastructure. We bring our own skills to the table, helping squads make stronger and more consistent decisions, more quickly. Our goal here is to be a super responsive first line of support to get developers unblocked. But we would be making a big mistake to think we have all the answers. We are also collaborating with the individual dev squads. We are collecting good ideas that we find in one squad and sharing them where they might be useful on another. Sometimes, we even integrate them into our core patterns. The observability efforts that we are shepherding are entirely about surfacing the right information to the right people at the right time.

QA’s role here is also pretty obvious. I know the joke is that all QA does is find creative ways to break things, but really, it’s about making developers aware of ways the software we create might not do what we expect. Ideally, it also creates that awareness as quickly and easily as possible using sophisticated testing and automation tools. The benefit of focus here is twofold: we have better awareness of flaws, and we can spend less total effort finding them. Once the problems are found, QA also makes sure that loops get closed with the project managers and devs who own that code so that decisions can be made about how and when to address the issues.

Security helps information flow through auditing and compliance efforts. The relationship here isn’t obvious, but it becomes apparent if you dig below the surface a bit. Audits are fundamentally about discovering where we can be better, and compliance compares us to recognized standards for good processes and practices. When we’re proactive about compliance and can show evidence that we meet these standards when partners ask for it, we protect ourselves from disruptive audits being imposed on us and we make it easier to get contracts for new deals signed. Our security team is also engaged in this effort through a formal Application Security program that is being spun up. At its core, the program aims to ensure that developers know about secure coding best practices and that they are warned about possible vulnerabilities in their code before it makes it into production.

It takes a lot of work to create an organization with a great culture. There are countless aspects to be considered, but perhaps the most important one is how the organization handles information, especially information we’ve called Toxic Information. Is it hoarded to be used as a weapon for personal gain? Is it hindered by bureaucratic roadblocks? Or, does information flow freely to where it’s needed when it’s needed? The latter is what we’re aiming for at Guild. It’s a major component of a generative culture, where people are happy and the organization is able to meet the high-level goals at the heart of its mission. Information flow is only one part of what it takes to get there, though. What else can you do in your role, with your teammates, to get your organization closer to that strongly generative ideal?