Information Flow: The Hidden Driver of Engineering Culture

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today I’m sitting down with Adrian Peryer. Adrian, welcome. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Adrian Peryer: Nice to be with you, Shane.

Shane Hastie: Now, you and I have met very briefly recently, but I’d love to just kick off with who’s Adrian?

Adrian Peryer: I’m always described as the facilitator, Shane. So who’s Adrian is he’s facilitating? So that’s the short answer. In the technology sector, I work with a colleague, Sarah Greer. We design and facilitate meetings for tech companies at various levels. We’re often working with product managers and product teams, and sometimes we’re working on bigger meetings between the technology company and their customers.

Shane Hastie: Now, we got together because of some work you’ve been doing around Ron Westrom’s continuum. Now, our audience, some of them will probably have heard of Westrom’s work from things like Accelerate and the Phoenix Project and the Dora work. But probably a good starting point is, do you want to just summarize what Westrom’s work on culture is about?

Westrum’s Three Culture Types [02:03]

Adrian Peryer: Happy to. Ron Westrom is a wonderful sociologist. I mean, he was studying organizations and culture in organizations and how people work. And he started off with the idea there were two cultures. There’s a generative engineering culture where people build things, and that was because he was working with engineering organizations. And then there was a more bureaucratic culture. He told me that one day he was sat in a large engineering company. I won’t name them to shame them, but he realized there’s a third culture, a much more pathological culture. So what Ron figured out really was that when we’re talking about culture, we’re talking about the way in which people handle information, how information flows between people. And in some organizations, it’s hoarded. Information is used as a weapon. It’s a source of political power. And if things go wrong in those organizations, then people look to scapegoat to blame someone.

So you have an atmosphere of fear and threat, and people sending you signals that they really don’t want to know things. They don’t want bad news. And if somebody brings you bad news, they’re likely to be punished. You shoot the messenger. Then in other organizations, in contrast, you’ve got rules about how you share information. So you’ve got official channels, things are set up and people know what they are and how to share and report to each other. And if things go wrong in those organizations, the right response normally is to hold an inquiry and to seek justice. Who was to blame? Who made a mistake? And often you get people protecting their area, protecting their turf. Maybe they engage in PR and they try and spin who was to blame it on what happened. And then in that third area, that generative culture, you have everybody focused much more on performance, on the mission, on what’s happening on the customers.

And in those organizations, there’s a priority for making sure the right person has the right information at the right time and it’s available in the right way. So that was Ron’s original sort of insight. He realized that with these three types of organization, and wherever he looked and tested this, it seemed to hold true. And the key is that the difference between them was information flow. Information flow was the sort of bedrock of what was creating these different organizational cultures.

Recognizing Your Culture as a Leader [04:25]

Shane Hastie: I suspect we can all, in our experience, or those of us who’ve been working for more than a few years, can point to examples of all three of those, the weaponized, the official channels and the performance focused. Let’s take the folks who are likely to be the audience. Technologists who care about other people who possibly moving into an early career leadership role for the first time or moving up the manager pathway of the technologist’s dual track, how do they recognize the environment they’re in and what can they do to influence the environment around them?

Adrian Peryer: They’re great questions. I mean, the recognition is, and this is the beauty I think of Ron Westrom’s work, there are a clear set of descriptors of each of the models. So you can literally step back and say, how do we respond to failure, as a good example. What is that response? If you take stock of that and you think, well, what we do is we have blameless postmortems. We literally pause and we say, what was happening in the system that contributed to this going wrong? Then you’re likely to be in a generative culture. And as a leader, in a sense, you are asking yourself, how am I responding? What’s my response? If your response is to encourage people to share bad news, if your response is to say to people bring it forward, then again, you are encouraging that generative culture.

Why Teams See Themselves as Generative [05:53]

But I think you asked a really good question. You said, we’ve all been in these different types of organizations where you get all three types of culture. And I think that’s very true for most people. What’s surprising is if you go and ask teams and team leaders, what’s your organizational culture like? You get the same pattern time and time again, which is they’re most positive about their own team. So most people say, well, in our team, information flows, we trust each other, we collaborate, we cooperate. And then if you say to them, where’s the problem? They will point at another team or another area and say, we don’t have as good relationships there. And in a sense, there’s a few things going on. Firstly, team leaders are very good at creating a force field around their own team and protecting them and managing some of that environment. And that’s great because that’s part of the job. That’s part of being a good team leader.

From Startup to Silos [06:47]

But it’s also true to say that most small units are by nature generative. People figure out it’s the most effective way of behaving. And in fact, you could argue most startups are generative in their nature. People focus on the mission. You’ve been in a startup, I’ve been in startups, you go through that, everything is all about the mission and getting it done. You might work long hours, but it doesn’t matter because you’re fully focused on the task. And then if you’re successful, something strange happens, you start to grow and then specialists arrive and they get put into different areas and functions emerge. You might have a finance team or a marketing team or whatever. And suddenly you’ve got that point where either the information continues to flow in the same way or silos emerge.

Looking Beyond Your Own Team [07:32]

And that is the point where people say, well, in my team, it’s great, but actually we have a problem with people over there. So I think if your leaders listening are thinking about their own team, they need to look at it through one lens. And that’s the sort of, what am I doing inside this unit that I’m responsible for? How is information flowing here? How collaborative is the culture? How much do people feel they’ve got the right capacity, the right capability? Is it all working? And then there’s another set of questions which are getting people to look beyond the team about all the other organizations and teams they have to collaborate and cooperate with, upstream and downstream. Who are they serving? Who are their customers and who’s serving them and how is all that working? And you can expect, and this is what we’ve learned, that’s where some of the heavy lifting has to happen.

That’s where leaders need to be thinking, okay, my bit’s working okay, but what about the bit beyond? What about all those relationships that we may need to strengthen if we’re going to actually improve things for ourselves and probably improve things for everyone else as well?

Shane Hastie: So how do I do that?

Building Stronger Cross-Team Relationships [08:41]

Adrian Peryer: There’s no easy answer. I mean, it turns out that some of the most important things that you can do are to build stronger relationships between people. Some of this is about building that trust, building that understanding. Some of it isn’t though. Some of it is about thinking about information differently. And I think this is starting to get more and more attention as we enter this AI era, I think people are now calling it. Information itself, I think, is starting to be felt much more and treated much more like a product and not simply a byproduct of the things people do. And that means being a little bit more thoughtful about who’s producing it and who’s consuming it and how it’s being produced. Is it accurate? Is it rigorous? Is it made available in the right way at the right time for those who need it?

Mapping Information Flows [09:34]

Now, if you’re going to do that, the simplest way to do it is to get the team around a whiteboard and draw a picture of the team and start to say, who are our relationships with? How is that information flowing? Who do we feel good about? And where do we think actually there are problems here? And then go start working on some of those problems. I mean, in the first instance, go talk to the other teams, have the conversation, figure out how you can improve it. There’s no magic here. It will require people to be thoughtful and to pause and to say, let’s just take stock of what’s going on. How can we enhance this information flow? Now to do that, obviously people need to be feeling that it’s a safe activity. And if you’re in one of those pathological cultures, this is the last thing that people do.

They’re much more likely to be talking about how do we hold the information and what’s our source of power? So I’m assuming that you’ve got leaders listening who are like, I’m in a generative culture, I want to make it more generative and less bureaucratic. How you do that is literally to start with by drawing some pictures of where you sit and where others sit and then starting to work on those information flows and saying, how do we enhance them?

Shane Hastie: One of the things that I’ve come across is those information flows can be hard to find at times. How do we identify the weak signals?

Weak Signals and Requisite Imagination [10:54]

Adrian Peryer: So I think you raise a really important point, but we don’t have much rigor, do we, about thinking about information flows at the organization level. There’s no directory you and I can go and look up and say, let’s look at our information flows. And again, we’re not thinking about data as a product yet. That’s probably going to change. I suspect you’re going to end up, if we were talking three years from now, most organizations, large ones anyway, would probably have, I don’t know, a knowledge graph or a semantic engine of some kind where they could do what you just suggested and do it using tools. But let’s talk about the weak signals. Weak signals are so important, and it’s an area of Ron Westrom’s work that I think is less well known. Ron talks about this wonderful concept, requisite imagination, and his suggestion is that the more generative organizations have a much stronger level of requisite imagination.

Leaders, technologists, people working as experts in different areas are much more sensitive to weak signals because they’re paying attention to what might go wrong. They’re thinking about possibilities. They’re also thinking about things that might go well and how to make the product better and how to improve things, but they’re also doing that thing about saying, well, what if that was not to happen or what if this disappeared? And that requisite imagination, that sensitivity to thinking about multiple possible futures is what contributes to lots and lots of really important work on things like safety. So if you look at fields that one’s worked in like aviation or health, you see that the organizations with the lowest levels of accidents or the least negative should never happen events are the ones that have got the highest level of requisite imagination. And people are talking about the possibility that there might be weak signals that they’re picking up.

Trusting Your Gut [12:53]

They’re noticing anomalies and nobody’s saying, oh, don’t be silly, it doesn’t work that way. People are saying, oh, that’s interesting. Let’s have a look at this. So I think again, this can happen within teams. If a leader gets this right, then they’ll learn early on never to close down a potential weak signal that somebody’s got. And that might be a gut instinct. There may be no strong evidence. It may be simply something feels off. Those things are invaluable. I think the science is now showing more and more that our gut’s connected to our brain in ways we don’t yet fully understand. So my advice to people always is trust your gut. If you’re balanced, if you’re in your wise mind state, you’re not overemotional and whatever, just trust your gut. If it feels wrong, then maybe it is wrong. And perhaps that’s worth having a conversation with someone about to figure out what’s going on.

Making Time to Pause and Reflect [13:48]

So leaning into those weak signals, exercising your requisite imagination, and that’s going to require sometimes pausing and reflecting and thinking, what happened in this last period of time? What did we learn? Whenever we finished one of our sessions, Sarah and I, this is a habit we’ve worked on for years. We have an after-action review and we ask the two questions, what went well? And even better if… And we record it. Now, that’s great and that helps us improve, but it’s also a really good way of thinking, hang on, did we miss something? Was there a week signal there? So that ability to have a sort of pause and reflective time and just do that daily regularly is part of, I think, getting to your, how do we get hold of weak signals? How do we actually engage that requisite imagination? Make space for it.

Shane Hastie: That’s hard when the pressure around us is busy, busy, busy, and that pressure seems to be getting more and more intense.

Adrian Peryer: It’s hard. If I could time travel and go back and talk to my younger self, I would say you can’t ever under-invest in small amounts of time to look after yourself. And whatever that means, I mean, I’m talking to you now, I’m in an era of my life where I’ve got years of working with a therapist on me behind me, but it’s only recently that I finally followed Sarah’s advice and started doing yoga daily. And if I could go back 40 years, I’d say, Dan, no idea the impact, the positive impact. And the wonderful young yoga instructor says the hardest thing about this is actually unrolling the mat and starting. So it’s exactly the same to your point. How do we in our busy, pressured world find time to stop, to pause, to reflect? I don’t know. Everyone’s going to figure that out for themselves, but the payback for doing it could be substantial.

Even if it’s simply that 10 precious minutes that you carve out with other people to say, what’s going on? What are we noticing? Any uneasy feelings about any of this? And out of that comes that rare, hard to spot weak signal that actually suggests there’s something seriously wrong that needs righting.

Studying Culture as a Leadership Practice [16:04]

Shane Hastie: What’s the important question I haven’t asked you today?

Adrian Peryer: I think the question you could ask that would help people the most is probably, is this an area that they should be studying and acting and building into their working practice as a leader? And I would give you a strong absolute yes. It’s hard to suggest to people that they read sociological texts or Ron’s famous article in the British Medical Journal, which I probably sent now a hundred times to different people. So I know there’s an article in the British Medical Journal, but read it. It’s about organizational culture. But there’s lots of things out there that help people get into this field. There’s the wonderful Phoenix project, there’s the Accelerate work, there’s the annual DevOps Dora study that continues to roll. So I would say the big question is, how do I pay attention to this? And I’d be urging people to do it with their scientific leader head on.

This is an area that you should pay attention to where you should try and bring as much rigor as you can. There’s good techniques, there’s good practices, and don’t try and do it all yourself. If you can find help, use it. If you can find frameworks that work like Ron’s framework, use them, deploy them, because it’s really hard for some people to actually make sense of culture. They’re kind of in it. It’s the envelope. It’s like the environment. So how do you take stock of that? Well, use someone else’s framing that’s useful for you and bring that sense-making framework to your work. And as I said, have the conversation, draw things on the wideboard, start making sense with your colleagues. This is a social activity at the end of the day. You want to have people having a conversation about things like organizational culture and information flow and how easy it is to share and act on things like weak signals.

Why Culture Is Hard to Talk About [17:59]

Shane Hastie: So Adrian, there’s a lot here and a lot of depth behind this. If people do want to continue the conversation, where do they find you?

Adrian Peryer: So we’re online on our website, and I guess we make use of LinkedIn, so reach out. We’re trying to do a better job of sharing more of what we do. I think we’re well known to the organizations, the tech companies we work with, and next year is pretty full already in terms of people reaching out and saying, hey, we want to do things. We want to work on key meetings with you. But what we’re going to try and do now is to make more of this available in a community-based web forum. So reach out. We have talked with Ron Westrom for many days and weeks now, and some of that we’ve recorded. So there’s a little podcast of talking with Ron about his work, a lot of which is accessible. He’s written multiple books and whatever. So I think that’s the starting point, Shane.

And obviously, hopefully this becomes more of a conversation at key meetings, key events in the future. It does feel like for some people, it’s still a little bit uncomfortable despite the work of your podcast and other people to talk about culture. I don’t know what that says. I’d love your views on that. Do people fear that they’ll be breaking a good thing or jinxing it, or what is it? Why do some people find talking about this hard?

Shane Hastie: Because culture is one of the hardest things to measure. And as technologists, we want easy metrics.

Adrian Peryer: I think you’re right. It’s a little bit like we’re working with product teams and we start, we always get them to talk about the bigger outcomes, the bigger, longer term impact, and then we acknowledge it’s a bleak. You can’t just jump there. You can’t measure that. You need to describe it and then come back to what you’re building and how, and then figure out the connection between those two things. There is no simple metric for a great product, a whole solution doesn’t exist. Culture’s like that, you’re right. It’s tricky. It’s tricky sometimes to talk about. Interestingly, the people we’ve worked with who’ve got the best generative cultures find it the most easy conversation and they pull it in. That’s a good signal for leaders to use. If they talk about organizational culture to their leader and they get a strong negative signal, that’s probably a good, strong signal that not everything’s right and maybe they should start then with their team rather than the wider organization.

Shane Hastie: Adrian, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Adrian Peryer: Thank you, Shane. Lovely to meet you and have the conversation.

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