The devops handbook how to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations By Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis

.
Pathological
Information is hidden
Messengers are “shot”
Responsibilities are shirked
Bridging between teams is
discouraged
Failure is covered up
New ideas are crushed
Bureaucratic
Information may be ignored
Messengers are tolerated
Responsibilities are compartmented
Bridging between teams is
allowed but discouraged
Organizatoin is just and merciful
New ideas create problems
Generative
Information is actively sought
Messengers are trained
Responsibilities are shared
Bridging between teams is
rewarded
Failure causes inquiry
New ideas are weclomed
 
Figure 8:
 The Westrum organizational typology model: how organizations
process information (Source: Ron Westrum, “A typology of organisation culture,” BMJ Quality & Safety 13, 
no. 2 (2004), doi:10.1136/qshc.2003.009522.)
Promo 
- Not 
for 
distribution 
or 
sale

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40 • Part I
Just as Dr. Westrum found in healthcare organizations, a high-trust, generative 
culture also predicted IT and organizational performance in technology 
value streams. 
In the technology value stream, we establish the foundations of a generative 
culture by striving to create a safe system of work. When accidents and failures 
occur, instead of looking for human error, we look for how we can redesign 
the system to prevent the accident from happening again.
For instance, we may conduct a blameless post-mortem after every incident 
to gain the best understanding of how the accident occurred and agree upon 
what the best countermeasures are to improve the system, ideally preventing 
the problem from occurring again and enabling faster detection and recovery.
By doing this, we create organizational learning. As Bethany Macri, an engineer 
at Etsy who led the creation of the Morgue tool to help with recording of 
post-mortems, stated, “By removing blame, you remove fear; by removing 
fear, you enable honesty; and honesty enables prevention.”
Dr. Spear observes that the result of removing blame and putting organizational 
learning in its place is that “organizations become ever more self- 
diagnosing and self-improving, skilled at detecting problems [and] solving 
them.”