Generative culture 🪴
A healthy evolution for your organizational culture, how to achieve it, and how to share it with the world.
A few weeks ago we wrote about engineering handbooks. From there, I got many emails with questions about culture, which is a similar but separate topic.
Engineering handbooks are like instructions for use — they tell you how to do things. Culture, instead, is about the principles that back how to write those instructions.
Incidentally, this was also the theme of our latest Mastermind session, where we discussed various themes in organizational and engineering culture, and had a long chat about how to share culture with new hires and prospective ones.
I already wrote a piece last year about engineering culture, so today I want to explore more of the organizational side, which I believe is foundational to engineering and everything else.
Also, culture is the quintessential fluffy topic — if you Google around, you find plenty of vague statements and aspirational values that are more confusing than helpful. As usual, we'll try to steer away from those and stick to practical ideas.
Here is the agenda:
🏢 Three Organizational Cultures — how culture evolves from power to rules to performance.
🪴 Generative Culture in Practice — what it looks like in engineering teams and how to implement it.
🤝 Sharing Culture — with new and prospective hires.
Let's dive in!
🏢 Three organizational cultures
When Ron Westrum first studied organizational cultures in the 80s, he probably didn't expect to create a framework that would become a cornerstone of modern tech orgs. Yet, 35+ years later, his model perfectly explains why some engineering teams consistently outperform others.
Westrum identified three types of organizational cultures that exist on a spectrum: pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. Let's see what each of them looks like, especially in tech companies 👇
1) Pathological culture is power-oriented 👑
In pathological cultures, the organization is oriented around power and fear. Information is treated as a personal resource to be hoarded for competitive advantage.
You can probably think of examples you have encountered in your career. Here are typical signs:
🤐 Information hoarding — documentation is sparse and knowledge is treated as job security.
👉 Blame culture — incidents lead to finger-pointing and people avoid taking risks.
🚫 Innovation discouraged — new ideas are crushed as they may threaten existing power structures.
The first step to evolving a pathological culture is to establish good rules and processes that prevent such extremes. This is also, however, how you end up with a bureaucratic culture 👇
2) Bureaucratic culture is rule-oriented 📋
Bureaucratic cultures are focused on rules, processes, and territories. While better than pathological ones, they still create significant friction. In engineering, this is when you see:
📝 Process over outcome — heavy change management, multiple approvals needed for anything to get done.
🏰 Silos — knowledge is documented but confined within team boundaries. Collaboration is hard and gate-keeping still exists: only at a team level instead of individual.
⚖️ Risk aversion — innovation is more or less seen as a potential source of problems, the team serves the process, as opposed to the process serving the team.
Good bureaucratic cultures gradually and eventually get leaner, and blossom into generative cultures 👇
3) Generative culture is performance-oriented 🚀
Generative cultures optimize for performance. They focus on the mission and remove obstacles that get in the way. Generative engineering teams consistently show these traits: