Host Intro (Gene Kim)

I am so honored and delighted about who is speaking next, because it is Dr. Ron Westrum, professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. His name will be familiar to anyone who has read the State of DevOps research, which I had the privilege of working on with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble from 2013 to 2019.

So much of that was informed by the work of Dr. Westrum: the notions of culture, norms of pathological, bureaucratic, generative that have already been uttered on this stage many, many times. It is difficult to overstate just how much the work of Dr. Ron Westrum has influenced our thinking and features so prominently in so much of the way that we think and act.

I was so honored that I got to spend almost ten hours interviewing him. We got to work on several things together, and it has been such a treat. I am so delighted I finally got to meet him in person last night. Here is Dr. Westrum.

Dr. Ron Westrum

I am still standing. What is the Never Good Hope?

So the first thing I want to say is how honored I am to be here today. I am very honored that Gene Kim has asked me to come and talk to you. I am going to tell you about my journey, how I came to the idea of generative organization.

I am going to give you some high points. If I told you the whole story, it would take too long. What I have done is essentially I have picked some parts, and I want to talk about those parts.

Here is an example. This is the original Star Trek cast. What I did not know at the time that I was watching this, which was 1966, was that here was actually a generative organization.

What is it that makes it generative? First of all, an attention to expertise. Second of all, a level of collaboration which was really amazing. This was really a revolution. I did not know it at the time, to me another space program. But the reality was this was actually offering a new way of collaborating, a new way of thinking about how to solve problems. It was really remarkable, and I kind of think of it as a revolution.

Here is this cast. It is amazing people. Thinking back on it, I should have seen this was a generative organization, but I did not.

And then this book came along. Here is a marvelous example of people talking about highly innovative organizations. Tom Peters is a very bright man, but he really did not see what I think is kind of obvious in retrospect. In retrospect, we always have a better view, right?

What I did not see is basically there is a theme through this book, and that theme is the organization. It is not just people per se, but also the way that teams collaborate.

This is what got me interested in this. Here is an example of high-performance teams, and I began to think about what is important about high-performance teams. I think the thing that really attracted my attention originally was the medical area, because I could tell from the statistics and so on that there were medical teams that were way better than other teams, and I thought: what is it that makes them better?

I was interested in teams generally, in fact a variety of different kinds of teams: combat units, jazz ensembles, high creativity in science, medical safety, aviation and space systems, businesses that serve as a model for others.

In looking for things that served as a model for others, one of the things that happened to me was I got involved with the Sidewinder missile. This happened because one of my students had read a Wall Street Journal article, and he insisted that I had to read it. I said, well, I do not care about weapon systems or war. I was kind of a peacenik at the time, and I thought this is just really not my interest. He said, no, you have got to read it. About the third time, I finally said, okay, I will read it just to get you off my case. I read it, and of course I was totally sucked in.

This was like The Little Engine That Could. I do not know if most of you are old enough to remember that book. Sidewinder was one of those kinds of things. Essentially it was unfunded, and for most of the Naval Air community it was something that was unwanted.

I got sucked into the study, and I went to China Lake to study how they developed the Sidewinder missile. Here is a prime example of a generative system. Here is Bill McLean, who was the head of this effort.

China Lake itself, though, and I am going to digress here. When I did these slides, I did them at the last minute, and there was a lot of stuff I had to leave out. During World War Two, there was this amazing brain trust called OSRD. Show of hands, who has heard of OSRD? During World War Two, Vannevar Bush, a very important American technologist, had organized this brain trust across the country: scientists in universities, scientists in private organizations, and significantly China Lake, all part of this effort to improve weapons and so forth through using scientific talent.

To do this, they had to create a different kind of organization: an organization that did what was logical rather than what was bureaucratically commanded.

China Lake was one of the laboratories. It was out in the Mojave Desert, California. It was a desert environment, not the kind of place you think of as a high-creativity area. But Caltech got together essentially with the military to develop rockets for use in World War Two.

To do that, they had to have a culture that was very generative, generative in the sense that they constantly paid attention to what worked as opposed to what somebody else wanted to have work.

Here is Bill McLean. Here is an early version of his missile. Here it is in deployment. This is not an F-18, by the way.

Sidewinder was an extraordinarily effective missile. It was way cheaper than all the other stuff. It was way better than the other stuff. It performed in Vietnam far better than the Sparrow and certainly better than the Falcon. It was a really amazing system.

But to do it, they had to engage the creativity of the team, a small essentially skunk works team. Navy did not want this missile. They did everything they could to put barriers in front of the thing being developed. China Lake had actually been told: you cannot develop guided missiles, you are only there to test them. So they did it illegally. Well, illegal prototypes are always interesting. The armed services realize that illegal prototypes are often the way that new systems come about.

Here was an example of something that was not supposed to happen, but it did happen because people decided that was what the Navy needed.

Eventually I wrote a book about it. I do not want to talk about how long it took to write this book or all the struggles. It is interesting, but it would take us off task today.

The fascinating thing is here was something which was really an unusual R&D story. It was unusual because, A, it was way cheaper; B, it was far better; and C, it was done by an organization that was actually a national treasure. It was a national treasure because it concentrated all the expertise that was necessary to develop a whole series of weapons, for the Vietnam War for instance, for the Navy. It was, as we will see, basically an organization that also had this Cinderella quality.

Cinderella is an important metaphor here. It is important because often when you have a high-performance team in the midst of an organization that is very bureaucratic, Cinderella is hated. Certainly China Lake was hated by everybody else because it would do these things that it was not supposed to do and would actually succeed in doing them.

You can imagine if you are a defense contractor. Here is a government laboratory. It is supposed to be very bureaucratic, right? And they are doing things that are better than you are doing. Eventually Sidewinder had to be made by commercial companies and so forth. But China Lake was essentially a problem for the standard system because they were doing things that were really good, and they got away with them. Whenever somebody gets away with too much, there is a tremendous amount of jealousy.

At about the time that Sidewinder came out, I read an article, and eventually a couple years later this book, about the USS Benfold. Anybody read this book? It is Your Ship, a terrific book actually.

What was really interesting about this book is that it describes how you build a generative organization. When Abrashoff came on board this ship, he discovered that the crew hated the previous commander. In fact, when the guy got off the ship, the crew cheered.

So Abrashoff made himself a pledge, and the pledge was: when my tour finishes, my crew is going to respect me.

In a very short amount of time, within basically six months, this was a ship that was winning awards for combat readiness. He had changed the culture of this ship. He interviewed every single sailor on the ship. He told people that they needed to learn new skills. He improved the teaming and so forth, and he got actually a ship that was so high performance that when it was in the Gulf it would typically get more cruise missiles than other ships because it was so highly respected.

They won the Spokane Trophy twice. But the interesting thing is that several years earlier, there had been a really remarkable study. The study started by asking admirals who the captains were that they thought were really great captains. Then they followed up and interviewed the captains. They interviewed the crews and so forth of ships. What was it about these captains that was really good?

The answer is very simply that the kinds of things that distinguished the Benfold, the attention to the morale of the crew, the attention to cross-training, and especially the flow of information, distinguished it. What distinguished the Benfold from other ships was something that was actually a common feature of successful captains. Successful captains ran ships that had a generative culture.

Another example that got my attention was the issue of the psychology of airliner flight decks. When I had a sabbatical in Edinburgh, I went down to the library on a fairly regular basis and began reading journals about aviation psychology. It rapidly developed that there was this movement going on in the United States to try to find out why there were so many crew-caused accidents.

The answer to many of these accidents was the failure of information flow. The captains would not listen to their co-pilots, and so the total mental resources of the airliner flight deck were not being used.

Here, in a very small example, two or three people, you have a problem with flow of information. Failure of information in many cases led to the crashes of these airliners.

I think United was probably the airline that was most successful in this area, trying to figure out what was going wrong, why they were having so many accidents and so forth. It really came down to a problem of crew communication.

What was developed as a result of this was a system of getting people organized to be able to communicate effectively: crew resource management. Not only in the airlines, but also in a variety of other areas, there were similar problems with teamwork. For instance, medical teams often did not communicate very successfully as a result of the culture that essentially made surgeons into gods and made it impossible to talk back to the doctors and so forth.

After crew resource management became something in the airlines and in the naval area and Air Force area as well, this same idea, crew resource management, became a general feature of a variety of different environments. It has been interesting to see this spread to nuclear power, to medicine, to the Coast Guard, emergency teams, and so forth.

Here is an example basically of essentially generative organization. Then we actually generalize this principle to networks: electrical grids, nuclear power plants, a variety of different areas. This idea of high reliability came along. What is high reliability? How do you get high reliability?

The answer is basically you have a generative system for developing the information that you have got, because if people do not communicate, you cannot get these electrical grids and aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants and so on to work effectively. High reliability was another one of these applications, and all of this suggested that you need to develop some sort of knowledge and classification of crew interaction that would allow you to tell when you had an organization that would share information.

Generative systems work in research and development, on shipboard, on aircraft, and all kinds of teams. The key principle is information flow.

Along the way, I remember a day I was at Bell Telephone, or one of the spin-offs from what had been Bell Telephone. I thought this idea of basically an organization's ability to use the information it has. I thought at the time, well, what if you could quantify this? What if you could define this factor called information flow? What is it that would allow you to measure information flow?

The most obvious thing, at least to me, was: information flows, so it requires collaboration of the crew, collaboration of the team, collaboration of the organization. Organizations that can manage their information flow are going to be better organizations.

This is where I got the classification. In the process of doing this, which was fairly complicated, I got some of these categories before I got others. I realized that in addition to generative cultures, where there was high information flow, and bureaucratic cultures, in which information flow was not particularly valued except of course using the regular channel, there was a third category: pathological organizations.

Pathological organizations have a stilted information flow because basically they have a culture which is a culture to protect the higher members of the team. The bosses basically have a desire for the organization to serve their needs.

Pathological organizations come about through people who want power, who want recognition, who want access to the resources, and are going to privilege their own success, their own glory, and their own rewards over those of the organization's mission, over those of the organization's workers, and so forth. Pathological organizations represent a serious threat.

How many pathological organizations are there? How many of you have worked in a pathological organization? If you have been in a pathological organization, you know it. How do you know it? It is the gut feeling that you have.

I heard about it the first time when one of my students said his father drove to what was then Fisher Body, part of GM, and every day he would get sick going to work. If you work in a pathological environment, getting sick going to work is not an unusual experience, because you are scared, because you think bad things are going to happen to you at work.

I will not take some contemporary examples, but I think those of you who have been in pathological organizations, you know what I am talking about. You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach, that all sorts of bad stuff could happen to you, and then it does happen to you.

I have colleagues in the United Kingdom who also have been using this system to measure all sorts of organizations. For instance, one of the studies that they did in the UK showed that in the pharmacies, the first set of studies was in pharmacies, the people in pharmacies did not believe they were generative organizations.

One of my students said to me one time, my God, it does not have to be bad. He said, there are work environments that are generative, where I can actually do well, I can be supported, I can have a good time, and so forth. Absolutely.

You have a choice of cultures. This choice of cultures has a major role in the fulfillment of the organization's mission. The thing about generative organizations is that because of the focus on mission, the organization is able to put aside ego, pathological organizations, rules, bureaucratic organizations, and concentrate on the mission.

A good example of this, by the way, was how we decided to go to the Moon using the system that we got. I do not know how many of you know this story, the story about how we decided to go to the Moon using a lunar orbiter and lander.

There was a scientist named John Houbolt, and he was convinced the only way we would get to the Moon was having the system that we chose, having a lunar orbiter and having a lander. In the beginning, basically, that was not a very valued alternative. One of the possibilities was a big rocket ship, and I mean a big rocket ship, that would be powerful enough to take off from Earth, then land on the Moon, and then come back. It is called Nova, and it was favored by Wernher von Braun. The second possibility was having some sort of Earth orbiting.

Host Interjection

Just trying to keep the training on time. Can you conclude and finish the anecdote? Thank you.

Dr. Ron Westrum

Okay. The reason they picked Houbolt is that Houbolt went around the bureaucratic system. He wrote a letter to Seamans, who was the vice chairman of NASA, and that is how we decided to go to the Moon.

Generative organizations often do have some sort of messenger who can go around the formal bureaucracy. Thank you very much. Have a good day.

Host Outro (Gene Kim)

Give him a big round of applause. Can we all show Dr. Westrum how much we appreciate his work?

By the way, I am also so delighted that Dr. Westrum will be around later today at a time and place that Jeff Gallimore will put into Slack. Thank you again for doing that. I think it is 3:05. Perfect. Thank you so much.