Innovation and disaster with Ron Westrum

Excellent, alright, so one thing I loved about this one is lots of examples from real world organizations where you’ve seen this, so I really appreciated that. I love this idea of categorizing organizations or parts of organizations as generative, bureaucratic and pathological.

Or performance orientated, rule orientated, or power orientated. And I was just reading one of the articles you had where you actually go into a bit more detail about how to identify them. 

Difference between pathological is when the messenger gets shot, bureaucratic is when the messenger is ignored and generative is when the messenger is trained. So, I can look at that table and I can score the type of organization and see whether it felt right, and it did. 

The other thing you talked about is, those pathological bureaucratic ones. Organizations set people up for failure. They give them unachievable tasks not goals. And then they’re surprised when people lie about their achievement of those tasks. Because those people are given nowhere to go. It’s do the job or get fired, but we’re not going to give you the tools. And the key thing you said was the leaders know they’re setting people up with that problem and they don’t care. They don’t solve it. They just leave it to the people. So what do they expect? 

You then talked about how leaders give signals of how people should behave. So they may say many words, but their behavior will tell you how they expect you and the organization to behave. There’s a servant leader, right? You lead by showing that behavior. And then for bureaucratical rules based organizations. The rules only deal with the common problems. They don’t deal with the exceptions. So great if you’re in a factory and nothing ever goes wrong, but as soon as something goes wrong those rules don’t fit anymore. And so that’s where we need other ways of working to solve it. It comes back to this idea that generative leaders are based on mission goals. Set the goals for the team, given what they need to be to get there and then let them get on and do their job. 

I’m intrigued around technological maestros, so high energy, detailed focus, know what questions to ask. I can see the balance between them being great leaders and great arseholes. And you’ve got a whole list of ones that we haven’t heard of, so I’m intrigued to find out about that one day.

And then I love this idea around imagining what can get wrong and mitigated up front. We’re not gold plating. What we’re doing is saying, okay in best case scenario, this is going to happen, but we know that never happens in anything with a high level uncertainty. So if this goes wrong, what can we do now to mitigate it without overthinking it? 

And then this idea of skunks works, this idea of innovation that works, but there’s organizations that either intentionally stop it. Or unintentionally stop it, let the virus eat it. So how can we do that? And the idea of an innovation lab where you go and put the best people in another room and isolate them from the organization is not the way to do it. 

And then that quote that I’m going to use a lot now, if the boss is a dope, then everybody under them is a dope or soon will be. So that’s why when we see organizational leaderships change, we’ll see a new leader come in, we’ll see them bring in their own team. And they do that for a reason. They bring in people they trust, people that worked with, people who know they think the way they think, who deliver the way they deliver and that’s what they do. But then if the person at the top’s not culturally aligned to where you or your organization is, the people they bring in won’t be either. 

And then this idea that actually trusting culture is built by people keeping their promises. If you’re working in an organization and they haven’t kept their promise to you, then that’s a culture of not trusting. They said something was going to happen, it didn’t happen, you’ve got a problem. Same as you said you were going to do something and you didn’t do it, you’ve got a problem.

So it’s a two way street. And then the last one is when the wrong person in an organization has an idea, how does the organization behave? Do they enable that person to deliver that idea or do they sideline it? Do they, put them on leave, give them special projects do a whole lot of things to stop that person being successful. 

So that’s that question of do they empower those initiatives, those skunk works, those people that are generative, or do they punish them? 

Read along you will

Shane: Welcome to the No Nonsense Agile Podcast. I’m Shane Gibson.

Murray: And I’m Murray Robinson.

Ron: And I’m Ron Westrum.

Murray: Hi, Ron. Thanks for coming on today.

Ron: My pleasure.

Murray: We want to talk to you about the culture behind innovation and disaster in organizations. But can I get you to introduce yourself to our audience first?

Ron: Absolutely. I got a, bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and a PhD from the University of Chicago, both of them in sociology. And as a sociologist, , I’ve done a lot of studies of organizations. I wrote a textbook on organizations and eventually a very large case study of a naval laboratory. That’s what I do. I study organizations. How do people create technology? How does the technology work? What happens when it doesn’t? And how do you get organizations that are good at responding to things that go wrong with technology?

Murray: You are 

quite well known in the DevOps community, which is, part of the broader Agile community because of your Westrum organization culture model. Could you tell us about that . 

Ron: So for many years, I’ve been trying to understand how culture works and I’ve been looking for a classification that would be good because in a lot of studies on culture there’s no metric. So I thought, what would a metric look like? And the more I began to work with the aviation community and studied their problems, the more I began to think , there’s got to be some organizational features that distinguishes the organizations that are good at this from those that are not. 

And I classify organizations into three types. One of them is pathological, a second category is bureaucratic and then there is a category called generative. If you look at high performance organizations. Things where situations are really critical. They have to go well. War is a good example. Generative organizations are typical of the organizations that do best. 

Murray: So, can you tell us why things go badly wrong in organizations? 

Ron: Recently there has been a study released by the Army War College, and it was about why people are encouraged to lie in the Army. And essentially what happens is that the conditions in the military are set up in such a way that it’s difficult to tell the truth. For instance, training requirements tend to build up, and if you’re the field commander, you’ve got all these training requirements, and you don’t have the time to do it. So, what do you do? 

One thing you can do is simply say I’m going to do everything. But you know you can’t, so that’s not a very good solution. The other solution is realizing that some of these Requirements are much more important than others, that you do those and you fluff off the other ones. Now, the problem is that the requirements are not going to be made more easy just because they’re difficult to accomplish. So you have this constant paradox that if you tell the truth, you’re going to get in trouble. And if you don’t tell the truth, you have to be very careful about what you lie about. And people at the top know this stuff, but that doesn’t mean they give you better requirements. They give you the same load of BS, regardless of what your abilities are. And the people who get promoted, say, yeah, I can do that boss, as opposed to the people who say how do you expect me to do all of this? Because the answer to that is if you can’t do it, we’ll find somebody who can, which is a joke, of course. They won’t. So the problem is then that people who are successful know how to lie. But they tell lies favoring the kinds of objectives that are most important and ignoring those that are not so important. 

Here’s a perfect example where the organization encourages dishonesty. And it doesn’t do it , intentionally, it does it because it’s simple to put out requirements and not so simple to accomplish them.

Murray: Have you looked into the NASA disasters, the Challenger disaster or the Columbia disaster? 

Ron: I’ve looked at both of them fairly carefully. I’ve read the reports, I’ve talked to people involved in the respective cultures, and I think those are perfect examples of the kind of thing I’m talking about. So in the Columbia case, you had an organization that was very bureaucratic and the management team on the ground essentially looked at it as a matter of getting the next flight up rather than making sure that the flight you had sent was going to come back in one piece. So, the ground management team discouraged inquiry into the real state of the shuttle. And so, even though the Air Force had agreed that they would give some pictures of the shuttle, presumably from satellites the Air Force was discouraged from actually taking the pictures. That’s crazy, but this is sometimes what bureaucrats do.

Murray: So I think your view is that it’s information flow, which determines whether an organization deals successfully with adversity or not. So can we talk a bit about the information flow in the Columbia situation? 

Ron: Yes. the problem was that people who were the structural engineers got very concerned about the fact that there had been a collision with some of the foam from the shuttle. And so the head of the structural engineers literally went around in Houston knocking on doors and trying to get more information. And every time he did this he would get some version of that might be nice to know, but we really don’t need to know it. But he said, how do we know it’s okay unless we actually take a look at the shuttle and see what’s going on. 

And obviously, we know now that the shuttle was not, in good shape. That when it came down, it would probably blow up and kill everyone. But he could not get the organization to pay attention to what he was saying. This is a perfect example of the failure of information flow in an absolutely critical situation. And the most fascinating thing about it is that they took both of the weekends off during the shuttle mission. One of them was the Martin Luther King weekend, which was actually a three day weekend. So while these folks were flying around in space with a defective machine, you actually had people who felt they could take a weekend off. 

Murray: Why didn’t any of these people take him seriously? 

Ron: The reason that they didn’t is essentially that the leader of the ground mission team discouraged people from looking further and said, let’s straighten this out, let’s get this done, and, forget about all these other details. And at the same time, this structural engineer was running around trying to get people to get concerned, trying to get people to get more information. The Air Force said they would give NASA more information. If they asked for it. They canceled the request for information. So it, was a dynamics of this group. And that’s the thing that particularly interests me. They actually had a leader who was discouraging people from looking into the details. But the details are often critical when you’ve got a prototype, because all the shuttles were prototypes. 

Shane: Do you think the leader saying that this wasn’t important, wasn’t a priority. Do you think they had a whole lot of pressure on them for some objectives that were misaligned? The objective being, get it down cheaply, not get it down safely. So they were doing what they were encouraged to do, what their outcome and their objective was, but that didn’t align with, the people on the shuttle and some of the other team members. 

Ron: Well, when you have somebody whose priority is making themselves look good, which is really what we’re talking about here, then you’ve got a situation that is not good for the system itself. We need people who, can have a second thought. We need people who are willing to, worry about this in the middle of the night and then say maybe we didn’t look into this enough. 

A classic example of this is one of the skyscrapers in New York the CitiCorp building was 57 stories high. And it was so high that there was a substantial movement of this building in the wind. They had a mass damper on the top floor that prevented it from swaying too far. But the issue was, was this really a safe building? And essentially, everybody had done the job that they thought was the right job. But a student called up the consultant who had originally designed the building and said, how do you know that this is safe? And the consultant’s response was if everything was done the way it was supposed to be done, we did all the tests and, simulations, So, we have no reason to believe that there’s any danger. 

Then he had a second thought. And the second thought was, what if they didn’t do it exactly the way we did it? So, he called up the builder. 

And said, did you do this thing the way we said? And the builder said, oh, absolutely we did it exactly the way you said, but we substituted bolting for welding in this building. So, the question was, did that make a difference? The consultant then called up some serious engineers and said, okay, you need to do some studies to see whether using bolts is going to get this building to fall apart in a high wind. 

So the studies show that most of the time the building would be just fine. But every 16 years this building would encounter a wind, that would actually get the building to fall apart. Now this was a building that was already occupied. There were 57 floors of office workers. So what do you do next? You call up the place and ask everybody to get out? So they said we can fix it. And for about six months, when the secretaries went home at night, the constructors would come in and they would turn the bolted connections into welds, to reinforce the building. And part of their mind was occupied in the winds. Was there going to be a situation where they would have to evacuate the building so that the thing didn’t fall down? Fortunately, there wasn’t. They got all the work done. So when the work was finished, they said guess what? You’ve been living through a potential disaster, and now we’ve fixed it so you can go to sleep at night and not worry about it. But here’s an example where somebody decided that there needed to be a second look.

Shane: If we go back to the shuttle example, do you find that it’s the person, the organization, or a combination of their training and the organization that makes a leader fall into one of those pathological versus bureaucratic camps. 

Ron: So the leader tends to give by signals what they would like to see. So if the answer is Hey, what I’d like to see is stuff that makes me look good, or it’s going to enhance my power. That would be really good. 

Bureaucratic leader would say what we need to do is we need to take care of our department. So everything is going to be done according to rules. And we’re going to stay within the lines. Of course, the rules are typically written for the non exceptional situation. When the exceptional situation comes around, if you try to do the rules, you’ll get crushed or bad things will happen. 

So the generative leader tends to argue instead that the most important thing is not power. It is not bureaucratic rules. It is the mission. So the mission means that what we do is not dependent upon our place in the organization or what department we’re in. It is to get the job done properly. 

Murray: What’s really interesting about that is that NASA seemed to have changed a lot over the years, so in the Apollo program they were a very mission focused organisation. How did they go from being mission focused , generative and innovative and problem solving to this bureaucratic or even somewhat pathological organisation?

Ron: Apollo was a perfect example of an organization that was run by technological maestros. So, when you have a technological maestro, they’re not going to settle for second best. They want to do the best. They want it to go well, and mission is of great importance. And technological maestros have a series of characteristics, and I’m going to go through them for you because this is the difference between the Apollo program and the Shuttle program. So maestros, , have a very high energy level. They are good at spotting the key problems. They are good at keeping up on the key details. They tend to do management by walking around, So, they’re very hands on. They have very high standards. And they tend to do projects right because their energies are bound up in doing the right thing. 

So what happened is the Apollo program was loaded with people like this. The people who were the flight directors, as well as the engineers for the most part tended to be extremely high standard. Encouraging people to do the best work. Apollo was also a program that was very well supported by money. .

If you really want to understand how Apollo worked, look at Apollo 13. When they had a blowout in space on the way to the moon. Because here was a situation which had two very interesting characteristics. The first was that many of the problems that they were going to have had been anticipated in the design of the spacecraft. If something bad happened that lost a lot of energy for them, they could use the lunar lander as a lifeboat. And specific traits of the lunar lander were made so that they could use it as a lifeboat. They put extra supplies in and so forth. And that was the one of the key things that allowed it to be brought back. 

The other thing was the fact that the best people in NASA and the best people around the world were all interested in getting this shuttle to come back. And so there was an outpouring of energy. If you’d had pure scientists who were doing this work. Could they have done all the complex maneuvers necessary to get this thing back to Earth? Probably not. You needed people who had a very high standard of performance under stress, because obviously this is the most stress you can imagine, the idea that you’re going to stay in space instead of get back to Earth. 

So it is these features, the requisite imagination, to imagine what would go wrong so that you could plan to avoid it. The best people who are working on the solution, the fact that you had a team where essentially, failure is not an option, meant that those guys were going to be retrieved.

Murray: I worked for a large telecommunications organization where an executive was well known for getting angry with people who brought in bad news, and, that sounds more pathological.

Ron: It is pathological. A good information flow is a tremendously protective thing for the organization. If people tell the truth, they are much more likely to get success. 

Now we have seen this recently in the struggles that Boeing has had to get its operation back in shape. The interesting thing is that an airliner has got about half a million parts. So how do you get everything to work well together. Essentially Boeing specialized in the ability to put these incredibly complex things together and make them work. And this happened again and again at Boeing. It happened with the 707, it happened with the 747 happened with the 777 and so forth. Now, the problem is that getting everything to work well can be the goal, or making money can be the goal. And what happened is Boeing got acquired by McDonnell Douglas and they decided to have a different business model. 

A good example of this is where they put the headquarters. They took the headquarters out of Seattle and they put it in Chicago. Everything about engineering suggests that you need to have the bosses near the workers. And the reason is because that’s the way you find out what’s going on. And you communicate to the workers that you’re happy to back, their second thoughts if it’s important to get the job done right. If you communicate that doing the job right is not the priority, which is exactly what they did, then guess what’s gonna happen to the workforce Sooner or later, whatever wrong with the workforce is gonna show up in the planes. If planes fall out in the sky, somebody has done something wrong.

Murray: I watched a great documentary about this called Downfall the case against Boeing, where they said that after McDonnell Douglas took over and the headquarters was moved to Chicago, almost the first thing they did was implement a share price bonus scheme for all of the staff. And that became their top priority for everybody. And they had it everywhere, they educated everybody on it, and it became the new focus of the organization. Replacing the previous focus on quality.

Ron: That’s a damn shame. When you think about Boeing in World War II the Congressional investigation suggested that maybe Boeing had gotten too much money from the work that they did. So the president of Boeing got up and he said, I want you to know, We got a 1 percent profit from the job that we did. And actually it’s illegal to get, more than a 10 percent profit on the work that we do. I want you to know, that we really, did not in fact do this as a profit making thing, but to allow the allied armies to win. So one of the congressmen got up and he said, I think, we’re wrong to criticize you because maybe without Boeing, we wouldn’t have won the war. And that’s the right spirit. That was the important thing to Boeing, that everything was going to work well. 

What the hell happened to them? 

Murray: Yeah, I know it’s very disappointing and also the fact that panels are falling off airplanes right now says that the problem is still there in some way. 

Ron: Oh, yes. 

Shane: So that culture of the organization drives how everybody behaves. And when you move from keeping everybody safe as our number one priority, and we make money because of it, to making money as our number one priority, and we just happen to build airplanes, that will dynamically change the culture of the organization because we’re saying, what is the most important thing for everybody to focus on, right? 

Ron: Absolutely. The work that I did on the Sidewinder missile team was very much the same way. The Sidewinder missile was designed at China Lake, which is in the middle of Mojave Desert. It’s a big R& D laboratory, but it’s out in the middle of nowhere. I talked to one of the leaders of the organization.

He said, people don’t come out here to work in the desert. What they do get, if they come here is they have this tremendous sense of responsibility. Because before a group would deploy to Vietnam, the CAGS the commanders of the air groups would come in and we would brief them on the missiles and what the missiles would do, and what the missiles wouldn’t do. And we knew that six months later, the same CAGS would come back and they would tell us what worked and what didn’t. And , how we saved their lives. And he said, that’s the richest reward you can get that’s why we do the work that we do, because we know those guys are going to be up there in the sky shooting it out with the other folks, and if they’re not better, they’re going to get shot down. 

Shane: So one of the things that’s come through the many podcasts is that the organizations created before 2000 , seem to naturally be bureaucratic, rules orientated, fixed mindset, maybe pathological, maybe not. And organizations that were created after 2000 seem to be more generative, performance orientated, adopt agility, adopt a growth mindset. Is that what you’re seeing or is it just that those are the people I’m talking to? 

Ron: One of the things that I did in the process of trying to write this book about information flow, which hasn’t appeared yet is I looked at some of the people and specifically the technological maestros. So one of them was William Knudsen and Knudsen is not a common household name, it’s not something you think about in relationship to the automobile, but Knudsen was a terrifically brilliant engineer.

He started in Denmark. He came over as an immigrant. He got a job in a bicycle factory, the Keim factory. And then he worked his way into the Ford motor company where he helped invent the assembly line. But Knudsen really cared about doing the job right. And by the time World War II came along, he was running General Motors, which at that time, had something like a 50 percent share of the automobile market. Franklin Roosevelt asked him to come to Washington and help me straighten this out. So he went to Washington and what happened is that within a year he had essentially put together the industrial assets to get this to work, and then he got fired. 

So, at that point there were people around Roosevelt who realized that this is the last guy that you should fire because Knudsen knew all this stuff. So, Knudsen got in touch with the White House and he let them know that He would work for whoever they had put in charge instead of him if they would make him a lieutenant general. The White House, realized that they had made a huge error, and they said, yes, you come in and do it. So General Knudsen basically went around the different parts of the American war machine and tuned up this and tuned up that, . When problems arose, they would call in Knudsen and Knudsen would fix it, whether it was a B 29 or a tank or whatever it was. Knudsen would come in, he could look at an assembly line and know it was right or wrong just by looking at it. So, here is the kind of guy who, essentially built General Motors, and the reason he became president was because he was brilliant and really good at building the organization. that’s One kind of guy. There are still guys like that, or gals, around today, I don’t see a huge changeover. What’s happened is the rhetoric has become inflated. There are always buzzwords and people who are good at slinging them around. And then there are people who actually know how to do the job. At General Motors, I quickly began to sort out who were the people who were really, concerned to do a good job versus those who weren’t.

And I found out a variety of interesting things about, what people thought was important versus what was important. For instance, many of General Motors innovations came from internal skunk works. The guy that I worked for had a skunkworks and every time they caught him doing something, they would shut him down. But before they shut him down, he almost always innovated something. So, here was General Motors busy destroying the sources of innovation. I had a big discussion with one of the vice presidents, who was a very smart woman. I said, studies show that skunkworks are really inexpensive, and they’re very effective, and she said, Oh, I don’t think that’s true. I think skunkworks are really expensive. So, I brought her some stuff from the RAND Corporation, some reports that showed that skunkworks were enormously efficient. And of course, I knew that because that’s what I studied. I’m sure those reports ended up in the circular file because this is not General Motors policy. 

So the interesting thing is you have big organizations like this and they often had no clue about how they, innovate or make money. 

Murray: So Shane’s question really was, are organizations fundamentally different after 2000 than before 2000? And I think your answer is no, there’s always been generative organizations, the Apollo program was very generative, then it became bureaucratic. Perhaps what’s happening is that people have got better at the rhetoric. 

Ron: Yes 

Shane: Or is it a case of, as organizations get larger, they move from being generative to bureaucratic or pathological . So they started off being an organization that moved fast, an organization that adopted skunk works and that idea of, technological maestros are the ones that help us drive our business, because we’re growing a business. Then they bring in the middle managers, and the organization culture changes to those other two cultures that seem to be negative. 

Ron: If you want to be persuaded of the opposite view, read the biography of General Marshall, the head of the American Armed Forces during the Second World War. He was a person of resolute integrity and absolute believed in public service as being number one. And he knew the people who were really good at doing things and he put them in charge. And then after having won the Second World War, Marshall became, the Secretary of State. And he created the Marshall Plan. It did some amazing things for Europe. Kept a lot of Europe from becoming communist, provided economic growth security and a whole variety of things. And he was a large scale leader who knew what they were doing and could do the job. My Hero Jack Rabinow, who was an inventor, said if the boss is a dope, everybody under him is a dope, or soon will be. Leadership is the most important principle. So, it is not size, but it is the integrity and honesty of the people that you pick. And if you pick people who are not that way, then they’re not going to do a good job. 

Murray: So, the obvious question then is why do boards and senior executives pick leaders who don’t tell the truth and don’t encourage other people to tell the truth?

Ron: Who are the people who are picking them? That’s the key. If you, look at the people who picked the folks to run the organization, my question is how are these people intellectually, how are they ethically? At Boeing, there were always people at the top who could pick the people who were good. And they would until McDonnell Douglas. And all of a sudden the culture changed. And what happened was a disaster, air crashes, and the doors that pop off airplanes in the air. That’s a symptom of the kind of organization you get when you get people who don’t care.

The people who are picking, the folks who are running things, do not have, talent and wisdom as their guiding principles. That’s the biggest issue. At Boeing the people on top and the board and so forth were in fairly great accord about what needed to be done. And invariably, people tended to migrate toward the people who were really good at building airplanes. And how did you know that they were good at building airplanes? Because you knew how to build airplanes yourself, and you understood things about organizations. What happened is, once you give this up, once you introduce people in the organization who don’t care, they pick other people who don’t care. And it’s a very difficult disease to root out once it gets into the system. And that was Boeing’s biggest mistake. If you have a good culture, that’s enormously valuable, but you can destroy it by being careless about the personnel choices you make.

Murray: How do you create 

a culture of honesty and trust? 

Ron: The answer is very simple. People keep their promises. When the walk matches the talk, you’re likely to get honest information. If it doesn’t, then you have a problem. If you remember this principle, that people who keep their promises are, the definition of honesty, then those are the kind of people who will encourage people to be psychologically safe. And they will deal with the bad feedback, if it is bad feedback, and say, okay, maybe I made a mistake and I need to pull up my socks

Murray: Yeah. In a large bureaucratic organization I worked for, if I think about the executives or senior managers I worked with, there were some who were very bureaucratic. They were following the rules, protecting the department, doing audits and things like that. But there was a good 30 percent in that organization who were pathological. They were very personally focused, power focused, their number one criteria was make me look good, don’t surprise me, don’t say anything that makes me look bad, and tell me what I want to hear. And there was also a small number of people in that organization, maybe about 20 percent who were mission focused engineering types. And those were the people who were great at helping you get things done and solving problems.

What I’m saying is that in every bureaucratic organization, there seems to be a contest between different types of people. And I noticed that the pathological power seeking people were the ones who did the best, because they were prepared to say what was needed to be said, to stab their competitors, who also worked for the organization, in the back, and, tell their senior executives what they wanted to hear. feel like, every organization has these different types of people in it.

Ron: It does. One day I had a bunch of people from General Motors who were the human factors engineers. About 50 different factories. I said, how many of you work in a pathological organization? How many of you work in a bureaucratic organization? How many of you are in generative organization? It was 30 percent pathological no more than a 10 percent generative. On the average, what you described is correct. 

And when I did this study of the laboratory out in the Mojave Desert, one of the interesting things about the organization is how generative it was. Because China Lake, the people who did the Sidewinder missile, at that time, they did things that no other laboratory in the Navy system could do. They made a habit, essentially, of taking people’s not working devices and getting them to work. Essentially showing up other people. So, this laboratory, because it was so, high performing, became the focus of threats and eventually changes from above. Because you can’t have an organization that’s making other organizations look bad. Instead of copying China Lake, what they did is they tried to suppress it because China Lake was an outlier. 

Shane: So nine times out of ten, in my experience, from an agility point of view a generative leader comes in. They realize their team’s not working as well as they could. They’ll want to change the way they work. They’ll set up an environment that’s safe. Let the team experiment. They’ll hold the rest of the organisation back for a period of time. And then what happens is that team gets seen as successful, and then the organisation starts to attack it.

So rather than look at it and say, wow, let’s scale that out, let’s see how they were successful and let’s adopt that, they just start getting attacked. And, then, the team either survives or they die. So have you seen that? 

And if you have, what’s the alternative. How do you bring in these generative practices, which you said are only about 10 percent of an organization, typically? How do you bring those into an organization and have a chance of that generative behavior surviving and permeating through the rest of the organization before it’s killed?

Ron: It’s very tricky. 

You’ve got a high performing team in the organization, and it’s making other people look bad. And so the first, recourse for the standard pathological or bureaucratic leader is, how do we kill it? There’s almost a catalog of things that you would do in situations like that to make the challenge go away. You need to sideline these people as quickly as possible and you can send them off to Europe. You put them on vacation or you put them in an advisory role and so forth. You find ways of sidelining the people who are threatening your part of the world. Unfortunately we see all these devices are used to keep innovators out of the faces of people who are doing a mediocre job.

Shane: So one of the patterns we see in a bureaucratic or pathological organisation is the idea of an innovation office, an innovation hub. And we isolate a bunch of people over there to innovate for the organisation. I could say that is a generative skunkworks approach, or it’s a political game to isolate it, pretend we’re being innovative, but make sure innovation doesn’t permeate, my bureaucratic or pathological behavior because that’s what I’m comfortable with. Okay, and you’re saying that innovation hubs, things where we isolate them, put them out there, is actually an anti pattern for generative organizations. 

Ron: China Lake was a laboratory that was innovative with stuff that was left over from World War II. They had trucks that barely ran and they actually stole things from the local rail depot to, to build buildings. They had to innovate because they didn’t have all the, grade A stuff. What they did have is a sense of how to do it. It’s not, the fact that you need an innovation palace. In fact, that’s probably the opposite of what’s going to happen. 

Instead, you need to pay attention to innovation when and where it occurs and find some way of getting it into the organization.

I recently had a guy who was going around the US Navy and looking for innovation. The real question was, would the Navy be ready for all the new things that we would have to deal with, like hypersonics and AI and so on. And having been down this road before, I said the biggest thing you need to look for is when the wrong person in the organization invents something. How does that person get a hearing? Organizations that are going to be successful are good at getting the people who are smart, who have the ideas, into a situation where they can develop that idea. 

There is a wonderful book about World War II called engineers of Victory. And he goes through a series of middle level people who got a chance to do the things that they were really good at. For instance, developing the Mustang fighter. The Mustang was the plane that really made a big difference for fighters, because you could have Mustangs escorting bombers, and they would shoot down the Luftwaffe . The deal is, often the great innovators were middle level people, but they got a chance to do their thing. 

That’s how it works. 

If you create a situation where you empower the innovators, then they will rise up and do something. The Sidewinder was an example of something that nobody had asked for. In fact, China Lake was told not to do new missiles. So they had to do everything in a skunkworks fashion where they hid the nature of the work that they were doing. And it was only when the missile was well developed enough so they could bring people in and do demonstration for them that they were allowed to get away with their project.

Murray: So if somebody is mid level, they’re innovative, mission focused, talented, they’re going to be a problem for the bureaucrats because they’re not following the rules. And they’re stealing stuff from Railway Depots get things done. And they’re going to be a problem for the pathological liars in your management team because they’re calling out the problems and revealing that the emperor has no clothes. Because they’re being honest. So, they absolutely hate them.

So they’re gonna get squashed in most organizations. 

Murray: So, basically innovation isn’t going to happen in pathological and bureaucratic organizations. 

Ron: will, but it has to be hidden. 

Murray: But if they find it, it’s going to be squashed. 

Ron: Yes, as I said, General Motors had a policy of finding the skunkworks and wiping them out, but the mid level engineers told me that most of the key innovations went into GM cars over the years that I was there basically had to do with skunk work stuff that somebody figured a way to make look like what they’ve been asked to do.

Murray: So innovation really happens when you’ve got some tech maestros. People who are honest, mission focused, talented, skilled technically, and you have some senior executives who support them, and give them opportunities. 

Ron: Yeah, so just a typical example of this. Wernher von Braun was a really good rocket engineer. One of his early projects, the Redstone missile, went off course and crashed. And Von Braun said we need to figure out what went wrong. But they couldn’t and didn’t. And so, he said we’re going to have to redesign the Redstone now. And one of the engineers Finally came to him and said, I think I caused a crash. I put a screwdriver up to one of the circuits, got a spark and I checked the circuit and it was okay, but maybe that was the problem. It turned out that was the problem. So, what does Von Braun do to the engineer? He sent him a bottle of champagne. That’s a message. They sent him a bottle of champagne because he had solved the problem they had, been puzzling over. 

Shane: One of the other themes that’s come through quite strongly is this idea of moving towards mission command. This idea of moving teams away from tasks to goals. This is the goals that we’re after. This is what we need to achieve. These are the constraints or the rules that are immutable. These are the things you can’t break. Everything else is, you’re the experts. You know how to do your job. You’ve been trained well, you’ve been given the resources you need, go and achieve that goal, and no plan ever survives the first engagement kind of thing. And a lot of what you’re talking about for those generative organizations sounds very much like mission command to me.

Ron: I recommend a book called It’s Your Ship by a guy named Abrashoff, because he actually was given a pathological crew on a destroyer because the previous captain had been less than adequate. And the interesting thing is to see how you create a generative organization from a situation which was basically pathological. The Interesting thing about Abrashov is that the Navy had actually done a study of the best captains. And the best captains typically practiced the same things that Abershoff did. What Abershoff was doing is standard good captaining. He empowered the crew. He trained people very highly. He allowed them to take responsibility. He encouraged their initiatives and he looked after them as people. 

The thing is, the Navy already knew this. So why was his ship being captained by somebody who was doing the opposite previous to Abershof? I think that the problem is that pathological people are very good at getting themselves promoted. And if you’re, careless, they’re going to rise up in the organization. 

Even at China Lake, there was an instance where they promoted somebody because they didn’t know what else to do with them. That was a horrendously bad thing to do. Because Rabinow’s law, if the boss is a dope, everybody under him is a dope, or soon will be. Once you introduce the virus to the organization, it multiplies. 

Shane: But also, culture is relatively invisible. So I do like the table you have to be able to identify the type of organization you’re working with or for. But often culture changes as people get added, so that move to a pathological type of organization is often gradual. People invite people that look like them. And therefore, the culture may be generative to begin with, but end up being pathological, and you didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect you could. 

Ron: I worked for a technological organization where I was a consultant. They didn’t have a CEO at the time. And everybody thought well, when the new CEO comes, everything’s going to work fine. But the new CEO turned out to be a guy who was not fine. And then the chief operating officer was basically Darth Vader. One day we’re, looking for a new CEO. Next day we have the new CEO and he’s scary. And then he hires other people who are like him. This is how it is. If you’ve seen it, you know what it looks like. 

Murray: Does the leader need to 

be a tech maestro? Or could the leader be somebody who’s not a tech maestro but supports tech maestros? 

Ron: It could be the latter as well. Yes, absolutely. The thing to recognize is that Werner von Braun, in his own shop was not the top engineer, but he was the person who understood how to deal with people. And he then would step aside for the other people who were smarter than he was to let them do their job. That’s why he was a maestro, he had good instincts, but the most important instincts that he had were how to deal with the smartest people to show what they could do.

Murray: There’s a real humility there. 

Even though I know a lot, I’m honest enough to be humble. When I see something new or somebody who knows more than I do.

Ron: Look about how they got the lunar orbiter and lunar lander system. Somebody low down in the NASA organization came up with this idea. His name was Huboldt. And he was Chief of Dynamic Loads at one of the space centers. He wrote a letter to a guy named Siemens, the vice president of NASA, and Siemens said let’s get this guy in and see, what he’s got to say. Eventually they did get him in and people made fun of him because some of the numbers weren’t right, but he kept coming back with new numbers. And eventually Wernher von Braun said, we all can see now that this is the right way to do it. So this is what we’re going to do. And that’s what they did. 

Murray: So is generative leadership what we would perhaps call servant leadership? 

Ron: Absolutely. Yes, I think the perfect example of this is Herb Kelleher the guy who used to be head of Southwest Airlines. He was one of these people who was not unwilling to restack the napkins if he needed to do that. Kelleher was the person who put Southwest on the map. They had for, 40 years, never a bad quarter. People were struggling to get into the organization, for every opening they had 200 applicants because everybody liked Southwest Airlines. Unfortunately, Kelleher got older, and he retired. The biggest problem, was who was going to be the replacement. And they got some people who were convincing replacements, but recently they had a big screw up and you think they looked good, but maybe, they weren’t really that good after all. It really matters who’s in charge. 

Murray: Yeah. I want to ask you about Elon Musk. I have read his biography recently. Elon Musk hates people to be dishonest to him. He’s very mission focused. He walks the assembly line, but the thing is that he’s scary and, he seems to be very exploitative, which you can see in the biography. So, on the one hand, he definitely is a tech maestro. On the other hand, it’s questionable about whether he creates psychological safety around him. 

Ron: doesn’t. He does the opposite, actually. It’s interesting to compare somebody like Elon Musk with George Marshall, because George Marshall is just the opposite. He created a situation where people felt comfortable telling the truth, and he expected everybody to tell the truth. 

Murray: Yeah, Musk is well known for firing people who don’t tell him the truth. And they’ll tell him the truth, and he’ll yell at them, so but then eventually he’ll be persuaded by the truth. , That seems to be what the biography says about him.

Ron: The problem is that technological maestros come in different flavors , A good example was a guy who was head of the nuclear Navy Hyman Rickover, who essentially got the U. S. Navy into having nuclear engines and submarines. But Rickover was not a nice guy, and was known to especially favor particular technological individuals as leaders, and if you came from the wrong leader, He would actually try to get you fired just on the basis that you’re having the wrong mentor. But his technical qualifications were unbelievable and he was quite creative. I would say that about 80 percent of the time the high performing organizations are generative, but there are also these other guys or gals who are kinds of SOBs, who are going to be a problem.

Another one was Curtis LeMay, who was head of the Air Force at one time and developed the nasty systems for bombing that they used over Tokyo in World War II. So, LeMay was not the kind of guy that I would like to work for, but he was really smart. So there’s a moral dimension to maestros. Really good maestros have the people skills and they also have the technical skills. 

Murray: Musk partners with people who have very good people skills that he trusts. Like, the head of Space X, is a woman who really helps him deal with the people side of things because I think he recognises that he’s too inflammatory. 

Ron: Yeah. So I think Musk is one of those people who dips into darkness . And I think there are maestros who are that way. 

Murray: The Dark Triad. 

Ron: The dark side. Yeah.

Murray: that’s interesting. 

We better go to summaries, Shane. What you got? 

Shane: Excellent, alright, so one thing I loved about this one is lots of examples from real world organizations where you’ve seen this, so I really appreciated that. I love this idea of categorizing organizations or parts of organizations as generative, bureaucratic and pathological.

Or performance orientated, rule orientated, or power orientated. And I was just reading one of the articles you had where you actually go into a bit more detail about how to identify them. 

Difference between pathological is when the messenger gets shot, bureaucratic is when the messenger is ignored and generative is when the messenger is trained. So, I can look at that table and I can score the type of organization and see whether it felt right, and it did. 

The other thing you talked about is, those pathological bureaucratic ones. Organizations set people up for failure. They give them unachievable tasks not goals. And then they’re surprised when people lie about their achievement of those tasks. Because those people are given nowhere to go. It’s do the job or get fired, but we’re not going to give you the tools. And the key thing you said was the leaders know they’re setting people up with that problem and they don’t care. They don’t solve it. They just leave it to the people. So what do they expect? 

You then talked about how leaders give signals of how people should behave. So they may say many words, but their behavior will tell you how they expect you and the organization to behave. There’s a servant leader, right? You lead by showing that behavior. And then for bureaucratical rules based organizations. The rules only deal with the common problems. They don’t deal with the exceptions. So great if you’re in a factory and nothing ever goes wrong, but as soon as something goes wrong those rules don’t fit anymore. And so that’s where we need other ways of working to solve it. It comes back to this idea that generative leaders are based on mission goals. Set the goals for the team, given what they need to be to get there and then let them get on and do their job. 

I’m intrigued around technological maestros, so high energy, detailed focus, know what questions to ask. I can see the balance between them being great leaders and great arseholes. And you’ve got a whole list of ones that we haven’t heard of, so I’m intrigued to find out about that one day.

And then I love this idea around imagining what can get wrong and mitigated up front. We’re not gold plating. What we’re doing is saying, okay in best case scenario, this is going to happen, but we know that never happens in anything with a high level uncertainty. So if this goes wrong, what can we do now to mitigate it without overthinking it? 

And then this idea of skunks works, this idea of innovation that works, but there’s organizations that either intentionally stop it. Or unintentionally stop it, let the virus eat it. So how can we do that? And the idea of an innovation lab where you go and put the best people in another room and isolate them from the organization is not the way to do it. 

And then that quote that I’m going to use a lot now, if the boss is a dope, then everybody under them is a dope or soon will be. So that’s why when we see organizational leaderships change, we’ll see a new leader come in, we’ll see them bring in their own team. And they do that for a reason. They bring in people they trust, people that worked with, people who know they think the way they think, who deliver the way they deliver and that’s what they do. But then if the person at the top’s not culturally aligned to where you or your organization is, the people they bring in won’t be either. 

And then this idea that actually trusting culture is built by people keeping their promises. If you’re working in an organization and they haven’t kept their promise to you, then that’s a culture of not trusting. They said something was going to happen, it didn’t happen, you’ve got a problem. Same as you said you were going to do something and you didn’t do it, you’ve got a problem.

So it’s a two way street. And then the last one is when the wrong person in an organization has an idea, how does the organization behave? Do they enable that person to deliver that idea or do they sideline it? Do they, put them on leave, give them special projects do a whole lot of things to stop that person being successful. 

So that’s that question of do they empower those initiatives, those skunk works, those people that are generative, or do they punish them? That’s what I got. Murray, what about you?

Murray: Yeah, I think your template, pathological, bureaucratic, and generative, or what we might call mission focused, agile, creative, innovative organizations. I think that’s really helpful. At the core of it is what does the organization do with information, and particularly bad news. In a pathological organization, they Ignore it, shoot the messenger, lie about it.

In a bureaucratic organization, they focus on following the rules and protecting the department. In a mission focused organization, they treat it with respect. They reward the person who brings the bad news or the information. And they gather around to solve the problem together. So, a generative organization has a high value for honesty, humility, talent, education. It’s an organization that invests in its people and, focuses a lot on high quality skills. Those organizations have a lot of technical maestros, and they really value them, don’t have to be led by a technical maestro. They can be led by somebody who is a really good servant leader, who has those attributes of openness and honesty, and is good enough to recognize and understand the value of the information they bring, and is very Mission focused. 

Then if you appoint pathological leaders, they’re going to make the organization pathological. If you appoint bureaucratic leaders, they’re going to make it bureaucratic. If you appoint mission focused leaders, they’re going to make it mission focused. Within large organizations, there’s a competition between those three types of leaders. And typically the ones who win are the pathological. Their enemies are the mission focused people, unless they can use them in some way, I suspect. 

Also it really shows how critical it is to have a free flow of information when you’re looking at disasters and safety issues. For leaders to encourage openness and honesty and humility within the organization, because in all of these disasters we’ve talked about, there’s always been somebody who knew and tried to say something and that information did not get to the people who should have made the correct decision or those people ignored it. So, information flow is critical. 

I think also that staff know who their managers are. They know if their manager is pathological or bureaucrat or mission focused. So I reckon you could do a survey of your engineers and they’ll tell you exactly who’s who and who you should be firing. 

There’s unfortunately not many organizations that are mission focused. It’s very interesting though that this idea keeps coming back. Because it was von Clausewitz who talked about, mission focused and mission command in the prussian army about 1820. You see it in turn the ship around . It’s your ship You see the same thing in team of teams. The whole DevOps institute has done a lot of research which shows that this is real.

I guess I would encourage all the engineers who are listening to this, to focus on focus on a generative leader. if you want to achieve your mission, which is not about personally getting promoted, but getting the Apollo 13 safely back to earth, or getting man on the moon, or whatever it is, if you want to achieve your mission, then focus on openness and honesty and humility, and bravery, because you’ve got to be able to say to people who don’t want to hear the news, What the bad news is, So, you can do something about it. 

And there is some techniques you can use, which are what you called preparing for disaster. Having what’s sometimes called a pre mortem risks and issues thing with everybody beforehand to say, how could this fail? What could we do about it? What if it does fail? What are we going to do? 

I would like to know more about the sociology of organisations. The only other book I’ve read similar to yours is a book called Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall it’s all about the dark side of corporation politics. 

All right. So how can people find out more about your ideas, Ron? 

Read my book on the Sidewinder Missile. it’s not just about the missile. It’s about the culture of China Lake, how you built people, then how you built ideas. That’s why I did the research. I wanted to find out why was this laboratory so, productive? How were they able to do things other people were not able to do. Just amazing. Absolutely amazing stuff. And how can people contact you? 

Ron: They can send me a message at my university, Eastern Michigan University. That’s probably the best way of getting a hold of me. I’m on LinkedIn, and many people have gotten a hold of me that way.

Murray: All right, great. Thank you very much for coming on. 

Ron: It’s my pleasure.