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Measuring Culture

Westrum Model​

One particular way to define and measure culture is to look at how information flows through an organization at different levels of trust. Trust affects whether information flows freely or remains confined to individuals and teams and whether people take ownership or wait for instructions. Different levels of trust lead to decisions that will eventually produce quite different workflows and collaboration patterns.

The "Westrum Culture Typology" is a sociological model that describes culture based on organizational information flow. It claims that we can find three distinct cultures in organizations:

  1. Generative Culture: Characterized by open, mission-driven collaboration. People feel safe and encouraged to openly cooperate across organizational boundaries. They can bring in their feedback, admit mistakes and propose updates to structures and processes. Failures lead to blameless inquiry and are seen as a chance for improvement.
  2. Bureaucratic Culture: Characterized by rigid rules. Rules have become the safe zone for people regardless of whether they make sense or are outdated. Collaboration and innovation is possible but people will be hesitant to risk too much for it and instead stay close to the rules.
  3. Pathological Culture: Characterized by defensiveness. People openly and covertly fight against each other and try to defend themselves against being blamed. Information is weaponized and communication across boundaries is met with scepticism because of that. People are discouraged from any sort of experiments because failures lead to scapegoating and emotionally charged conflicts.

DORA Research​

In 2017 the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) program conducted a study with 20k development teams to figure out which capabilities in software development actually matter. Their results have been published in a book called "Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps" which many experts in the software industry have praised as a rare case of large-scale independent empirical research in the software industry.

They also looked into the significance of organizational culture based on the idea behind the Westrum Culture Typology. In order to make culture measurable they created a questionaire that was given to every team member and they asked them to answer questions on a 7-point Likert scale, which means:

  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neutral
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree

They asked people the following questions:

  1. On my team, information is actively sought.
  2. Messengers are not punished when they deliver news of failures or other bad news.
  3. On my team, responsibilities are shared.
  4. On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded.
  5. On my team, failures are treated primarily as opportunities to improve the system.
  6. On my team, new ideas are welcomed.

The culture score of each team was calculated by simply taking the average over all answers and all team members. A higher score is better which means the culture is closer to a generative culture.

Because the score is calculated for each team it is likely that culture varies across teams within the same organization. The DORA research explicitly mentions that it is a common pitfall to focus on local team culture and not consider the broader organizational culture surrounding the team.

The DORA research project evaluated all the empirical data and found that organizational culture is highly significant in predicting overall team performance (source). The DORA project was eventually acquired by Google and the concept of a generative organizational culture was adopted as a recommended DevOps practice by Google Cloud.