Performance Oriented Culture, 10x Engineer Part 2

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Ron Westrum is a professor of sociology who conducts research in aviation and medical companies, about how safety systems are related to the culture of an organization.

In Westrum’s case, he calculated safety as one of the parameters for best performers in aviation and medical companies,
later Google had the same findings the result is most of best best-performing teams, have trust, psychological safety, valuable work, and clarity.

Psychological safety is working in an environment that is “safe” from blaming games, it encourages team members to take risks for improvement.

What is meant by “safe” doesn’t mean if a production issue occurs and the company suffers a loss, you are free from responsibilities, but rather how the team minimizes the risk of production issues so that every deployment can be calculated and handled properly.

By creating psychological safety in our work environment, the failure of experimentation or improvement is not considered a loss, because it is a risk that exists in every change and we should have space for failure because it will be a valuable experience.

We can find Westrum's organizational culture from the DORA article and more or less it same information across Google.

Westrum organizational typology model

what we aim for is to make our team have a Generative culture because when we have an appropriate culture we will get the team aware of why CI/CD matters for them.

in my experience of leading a few teams, strong leadership is required to make this habit happen, this is the observation I noticed.

1. Some team members came from the Bureaucratic model even worse Pathological, mentoring is required to change someone's mindset, especially if the person is senior enough which would be difficult.
2. Different people will have different levels of professionalism.
3. Some just don’t care about the work, and we know event single contributors need to care about the team as well.
4. Creating software requires creativity, not just in the code but also in the team interaction.

we should make them understand as a team, we should go together, and care about each other, that we should care about our code repository, our application, someone should not add some dangerous things, your code is my code, your work is my work.

after all the reason why Westrum’s organizational culture is mandatory for DevOps practice, this is how we implement it.

first, we can survey the team :

result team survey

this survey will measure how your team transforms into a Generative culture.

• On my team, information is actively sought, ex: how your senior spends time mentoring the junior, how approachable the leader is, and to whom a team member expected the answer to his question.
• Messengers are not punished when they deliver news of failures or other bad news, ex: how the team or the leader reacts to the bad news, whether is it overreacting that makes the situation panic, or a helpful team will fix the bug together and re-prioritize the work.
• On my team, responsibilities are shared. ex: does your team have a pull request or merge request, do the leader or the team pair with each other, do they review the code?, do your automation test effective enough?.
• On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded, ex: do your team find the solution outside of his department, do you help them to find the right person for their query?
• On my team, failures are treated primarily as opportunities to improve the system. ex: Does your application bug provide some opportunities to learn new things or is it just a blame game, do you give them the space to learn from failure and come back stronger?
• On my team, new ideas are welcomed. ex: Do you gather together to sort things out, Does the leader asking feedback and opinions to improve the application?

and with this survey result you’ll know how to debug your team and improve them into more performance-oriented.

this Westrum culture also requires your team to implement :

1. Trunk Based Development (TBD), because needs extra care from your team member.
2. Continuous Integration is required before having TBD to make sure someone's code is safe at the basic level to merge to the master branch.
3. Continuous delivery This will make sure all deployment is done by automation with no human intervention and remove unwanted behavior from the developer.
4. After all of that practice Feature Toggle This will elevate the application to perform higher.

in my experience implementing this culture is not done in one or two months, sometimes it can take years, so be patient, do mentoring with your team members, and implement it with your heart.