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!