Westrum’s Organisational Culture

Westrum’s Cultural Typologies

Dr Ron Westrum wrote in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal in 2004 about The Three Typologies of Organisational Culture. He was looking at how information flows through an organisation, and he considered that because information flow is influential and indicative of other aspects of culture, how information flows between people and teams can be used to predict how organisations (or parts of them) will behave when problems arise. That is to say, organisations, like any complex system, consist of the relationships and interactions between components (people, technology, etc), not just the components themselves. Westrum was focussed on real-world physical safety measures in the realm of healthcare and aviation in his paper, but I believe the typologies can apply to all types of organisation and other kinds of safety. Westrum states that “organisational culture bears a predictive relationship with safety and that particular kinds of organisational culture improve safety” – here he was referring to physical safety, but I believe that the same could be said of psychological safety too, and I’ll explain why 🙂

The Three Cultural Typologies:

Pathological (power-oriented): These organisations are characterised by low cooperation across groups and a culture of blame. Information is often withheld for personal gain.

Bureaucratic (rule-oriented): Bureaucratic cultures are preoccupied with rules and positions, and responsibilities are compartmentalised by the department, with little concern for the overall mission of the organisation. Refer back to Safety I vs Safety II to see how this happens.

Generative (performance-oriented): The hallmarks of a generative organisation are good information flow, high cooperation and trust, collaboration (“bridging”) between teams, and conscious inquiry.

In 2015, Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly wrote the book “Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale”, which highlighted how culture is critical to organisational performance, and mentioned Westrum’s Typology model: “Instead of creating controls to compensate for pathological cultures, the solution is to create a culture in which people take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.” Westrum’s Typologies subsequently appeared in Nicole Forsgren’s book “Accelerate” in 2018, where Forsgren showed that generative cultures were associated with improved software delivery performance (the four Accelerate Metrics) and other organisational capabilities for learning.

Surveying your Cultural Typology

By surveying people across the organisation, you can establish the broad typology in which your organisational culture sits, and identify potential actions to make improvements. Ask respondents to rate their agreement on a 0-5 scale (0 being not at all, 5 being complete agreement) with the below statements:

• On my team, information is actively sought.
• On my team, failures are learning opportunities, and messengers of them are not punished.
• On my team, responsibilities are shared.
• On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded.
• On my team, failure causes enquiry.
• On my team, new ideas are welcomed.

These 6 statements are from Dr Nicole Forsgren’s research into high performing teams at DORA. Add up the answers and average them across respondents, or in a workshop, ask people to examine their own answers in order to set up a discussion. Specifically note any particularly high or low scores*, or statements where people disagree: these are where the valuable discussions lie.
*Note: I really don’t like using the word “score” in this context, but I don’t know a better word to use!

The table below shows Westrum’s Three Cultural Typologies and how they’re characterised:

I believe that it’s evident from the table above that a Generative culture is a psychologically safe culture. Cooperation, bridging, and novelty is rewarded, risks are shared, and failure leads to inquiry rather than blame.

I recently ran a workshop where we wanted to have a constructive discussion about organisational culture, and I used Westrum’s Typology Assessment as above. I’m really pleased with the results, because we used Westrum’s assessment to spark a really powerful conversation, and ended up learning and discussing some really impactful topics that I’m not sure we would have done otherwise. 

I’m interested to hear if you find this useful, and whether your organisations are pathological, bureaucratic, or generative! 
 

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Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

This is excellent, really excellent. A write up by Dmytro Yarmak about his journey from Agile coach to military officer in the Ukrainian Army. He talks about providing clarity for making decisions, creating a psychologically safe environment for making mistakes, and raising competence help people to be ready for taking responsibility. This is really worth a read. Dmytro exemplifies what it means to be a generative, effective leader in the Army, with zero training. 
 

This week was US Mental Health Week, and I was really honoured and excited to join the awesome Shuchi Sharma, Jill Shaul and Francis Chow at Red Hat for a panel on psychological safety, mental health, neurodiversity, and burnout. It was an internal event, so I can’t share a link to the recording, but it was so good that it’s worth a call out! Thanks to Taylor Bikowski for being a fantastic facilitator! 🙂 

On the subject of mental health, here’s a great article and audio from McKinsey on Leading With Compassion: prioritising mental health, with Poppy Jaman, who is the global CEO of the MindFoward Alliance and previous CEO of City Mental Health Alliance UK.

Thanks to Amy Edmondson (a few months ago!) for sharing this about reframing failure, which I feel I should have included in the Safety I and Safety II issue, as the “Traditional” frame very much reflects Safety I, and the Learning Frame somewhat reflects Safety II.

Still on that failure topic, here’s an interesting article from Fresh Strategy about “innovation culture”, and I particularly want to highlight the “types” of failure they describe: Preventable mistakes, complexity-related mistakes, and intelligent failures. According to the article, “preventable mistakes” are “totally blameworthy“… I can’t say I agree with that, but read the article and see what you think!

Here’s a good podcast episode – Story Talks, with Sona Sherratt on psychological safety and this “new” phenomenon of quiet quitting. 

Things to do and try:
Confidence voting, or “Fist of Five”

A really powerful and psychologically safe way to get a “temperature check” on a decision, proposal, or project is to use a confidence vote. Also known as “Fist of Five”, this is a great way to facilitate everyone being involved in a decision – a fist means zero confidence, a no-go. Whereas a full five means full commitment and confidence.

0 fingers (a fist): No way, terrible choice, I will not go along with it. A way to block consensus. If you are running a vote to decide and move forward, it is important explain that fists are a way to block consensus.

1 finger: I have serious reservations with this idea, but I vote to move forward, but I’d prefer to resolve the concerns before supporting it.

2 fingers: I have some concerns, but I’ll go along and try it.

3 fingers: I will support the idea.

4 fingers: I like this idea, sounds good.

5 fingers: Absolutely, best idea ever! I’ll champion it.

Thanks to Tim Beattie and Matt Takane for this write up of confidence voting in the Open Practice Library.

This week’s poem:

Dreams, by Robert Herrick

Here we are all, by day; by night we’re hurl’d
By dreams, each one into a several world.

Mission statement

The mission of this newsletter is to make the world of work a better, safer, more inclusive and equitable place. We work towards this by sharing, as widely as possible, new research and opinion, case studies, news, practices and methods related to psychological safety. 

This includes topics such as inclusion, human factors, facilitation, safety critical environments, systems thinking, leadership and management, diversity and equity, mental health, organisational dynamics, culture, ethics, and more. 

A core goal is to amplify the voices of minoritised groups and those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of colour, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.

Another goal is to share insights and best practices across different domains: for example, so that those of us in tech may learn from healthcare, and those of us in education can learn from aviation.

I believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access. This excludes content behind paywalls, research papers that are not open-access, and proprietary tools that don’t open source their algorithms (preventing us from observing how systems make decisions about us). There may be some exceptions to this principle in practice, for example, where authors are able to share original texts of papers.

Whilst this statement will evolve this over time, the core principles of equity, amplification, and progressive & humanistic leadership shouldn’t change.