All right. Thanks for watching my session. this is culture is still a challenge. I am Mandy Walls. I am a developer advocate, DevOps advocate at PagerDuty. I'm always happy to chat about stuff. I'm not going to be talking about PagerDuty today. Always happy to chat if you want to reach out to me. I'm M Walls of PagerDuty. com. Or, I'm LNXCHK, mostly on Blue Sky. and you can always reach out on LinkedIn. So, this is a topic that I've been thinking about for a long time. I wrote this white paper, Building a DevOps Culture for O'Reilly in 2012. So, yeah, we've been at this a while, right? DevOps being sort of this combination of tools and people and processes and how it sometimes gets hung up. And still gets hung up, right, on the cultural bits because organizational culture is a challenge, right? It's hard. It's, it's something that, it can be different from, organization to organization. It's different in different countries. it's different in different kinds of organizations. so we're going to explore some stuff and hopefully you'll find it interesting. So the first thing to really get a grounding on is what is culture, right? Okay. You think about, if you ask your friends, like, about the companies that they work for, right? What's the culture like over there? What kinds of things do you hope to learn about when you ask that question, right? What, what is the culture, what's the cultural mean to you? about that organization. And how folks respond is going to vary hugely, right? sometimes it's going to be like unequivocally positive. It's great. We have A, B, and C. maybe they mention things like the PTO policy or the benefits or the opportunities for learning and all that great stuff. Sometimes the answer will be negative. The hours are long, the projects are poorly run, the customers want too much, and the sales team is over promised. There were no raises, you know, things like that. And, those are obviously things that are, are negative and reflect into not only the organization itself, the value, the things that your employee friend kind of values. Sometimes you get these answers like, it depends, it depends on the department. It might depend on the absolute team manager. Some people might have amazing, wonderful experiences working for the company, while others find it absolutely. demoralizing, right? So the central organizational culture is so weak or so unsupported that doesn't reach every team in the company, right? Often that is because of weak leadership or overburdened leadership, just the size of the organization. We're in an era where some of the organizations we work for are some of the biggest that have ever existed. And there's a limit to how much people can really keep track of. And that applies to our executive leadership as well as You know, a line manager that has 20 to 30 direct reports, right? There's just a lot going on. So things happen and they kind of fall apart or get frayed around the edges. So culture is felt in what the organization rewards, what behaviors it tolerates, what things it punishes, right? How it enforces customs or agreements, right? All these things. Over time, the culture becomes In addition to that, a framework for how the organization solves problems. We, as an organization, value innovation. So we may over, sort of over optimize for innovation, versus, you know, taking a harder look at maybe revitalizing an older project. Some of these things happen, right? It forms the basis of the sort of, What is, but also why is, right? It becomes a story of the organization, of the decisions that have been made, of some of the people that have been there a long time. Like, why is that person still here? Like, there might be a story there, right? so when DevOps first emerged, and we're talking about, what, 15 years ago now? it was in response to dysfunctional culture and technical organizations. Dev versus Ops, combined with this, like, pathological disdain for users because what are they doing other than messing things up for us, right? DevOps really tried to show a better way, but it hasn't, I'll say it hasn't panned out for everyone, right? so folks make changes around the things they have influence on. And if you're on a technical team, that ends up largely being things like tooling, right? And so unfortunately, Some of those teams are still struggling to make time for all the other stuff that has to go into it. So, the culture is really to be human, right? It's how we are. We are a social species. And as humans join together, they create norms and patterns and relationships and this sort of scaffolding for how things work together. And that is the culture. Culture. Right. The hard part about actually investigating it is you don't always understand like where, where it is. That's the joke with the, the fish in the fish bowl, right? An older fish swimming by two younger fish. He says, morning boys, how's the water? And the younger fish are like, the hell is water. You don't even realize you're in a culture, right? It becomes so ingrained and just the way things are that it's hard to like disarticulate, which pieces are. cultural pieces and where did that culture come from? Is it organizational? Is it national? Is it something that is, you know, regional to the place where you're actually located? And, and some of those things can be, super hard to deal with. But, the good part is, it's been around for a while, right? So, going back, and not just back 15 years to the beginning of DevOps, let's go back to the Hundred Years War. And this is 13th century France, all right? And I will admit that because I am an American and had, U. S. high school history, did not learn anything really about European history after the fall of Rome until 1492, because obviously the most important thing the Europeans ever did was send ships to the New World. Right? Because why would you care about what happened in between? so, the Battle of Crecy was part of the Hundred Years War. I first heard of it on an episode of Midsummer Murders, if you're familiar with that TV show in the UK. and it was all about the, the descendants of people who had fought in the battle. But we'll get there. So, the Battle of Crecy, was related to the secession of England. the kingdom of France. So the French king died, he didn't have any sons or nephews from his brothers. He had a nephew from his sister who happened to be the king of England at the time, right? And England In the 13th century is kind of the poor relations, of France. and then you've got the, his cousins, the dead king's cousins in France, a whole bunch of them, plus a number of other, like, dukes and rulers, and for some reason the king of Bohemia was there because he was bored. You know, it's just kind of crazy. But, so the English arrive in northern France, right? They cross the Channel, They land in northern France, and they're just kind of marching through. They know there's going to be a battle at some point, it's not like these things are planned, right? It's just kind of like when the armies merge, there's going to be a fight. And they're burning and pillaging along the way, but they come upon Crecy. And you can see from the picture, there's this hill in this, in this area, and they take this up as their defensive position. They know they're not far from the amassed French army. And they found this defensive position, just happens to be here, and they're like, this is where we're going to pitch our battle. This looks like a good place to do it. So, they put up their defensive positions, they've got, you know, some siege engines of some sort, but like also, cavalry and their secret weapon. Which, funnily enough, their secret weapon is the Welsh. So, you can see from the picture there in the foreground, are, dudes with bows, right? Not just any bow. This is the Welsh Longbow. The Welsh Longbow is about two meters tall, it's about six feet, and it takes like 85 foot pounds of pressure to pull the thing. It really, really requires a lot of strength. Out of that weapon, though, The projectiles are amazing. legendary, archer could, shoot a man on horseback, go through his leg, through, through his saddle, kill his horse, right? That's how powerful these things were. The French did not know about the Welsh Longbow when they marched into the field to start this battle. They arrive sort of midday. The English are expecting them to be like, Ah, we'll start the battle tomorrow. It's gonna be dark soon. You know, you know, it's too late. We'll start the battle in the morning when everybody's fresh and had breakfast. The French are like, No, we're doing this now. And they just start marching onto the field. Um, the Welsh just start pulling arrows after arrow after arrow. And, A well trained longbowman can fire like a dozen or more of these things a minute, right? They're just like going straight at it. It's amazing, right? And they're just plowing through the French and the French have no idea what to do. There's some walkie talkies. They've got all these like weird leaders. They're not really allies of a permanent sort. They're kind of like temporary alliances while this battle is being fought against the English and then they're going to fight against themselves later anyway to figure all things out. So, they're not really an army the way we think of it, right? There's no one person definitely in charge of absolutely everything. There's Philip, who is sort of the presumptive heir, and he's marginally in charge, but he's not in the front. So some of his cousins, some of these other folks, are out in the front, and the French culture at the time, much like we find other sort of medieval sort of cultures that, you know, you kind of think about in sort of an infectual term, is to die in battle is to die with honor, and they just go for it. And they are mowed down like they are grass. And Phillip's like, Well, we should probably retreat. There's no way to do that. They don't want to do that anyhow, because to die in battle is to die with honor. So, in the end, of course, the French lose. Right? They had not expected to lose. They outnumbered the English somewhere between 7, 000 and 15, 000 militants. No one really knows how many folks were there because some of them are just like farmers who were out for a jaunt and it was like it was August so it's kind of slow time on the farm or whatever. The French had amassed an army of like 20 to 30, 000 men, right, and they were just decimated during this battle. They had nowhere to go with their assumptions. They assumed they were going to go on to this field of battle and it would be hand to hand melee. Because that's what they were doing. That's what had been the path of battle for, hundreds of years, right? Because the French and English have always been at each other's throats. Instead, no. Whole new paradigm. Whole new paradigm. Changed the format, changed the face of war in Europe until the introduction of gunpowder like 150 years later. These longbows. So, changed all assumptions. about how you were going to approach the problem of going into battle with English. But the French had no prior experience or prior scaffolding to make new decisions based on the change of circumstances when they were met with this new weapon. So there's a whole other story, about this. I found it really interesting. it was in an episode of a podcast. I will link to it at the end of the episode, the end of my talk, so that, you can listen to it as well. But it's super interesting, right? But like As you're thinking about this, you're thinking, Ah, that's a, that's a 13th century, man. That's hundreds of years ago. And, at the time, the biggest organizations on the planet were probably the Catholic Church and these armies. And these armies weren't permanent standing armies. They were just kind of like, you grabbed who you could grab, who was available on some campaign you decided to run. They weren't drilled armies. Right? The Longbowmen, the Crossbowmen, the Cavalry, they'd been trained, but most of them weren't professional soldiers, right? They were just kind of a ragtag bunch of folks that got caught up in it. So, a lot of things about organizations, organizational behaviors, even go back as far as, like I say, the 13th century. So that makes it hard, right? That gives us a place to sort of hang our expectations of what we can learn from organizational behaviors. So We know there's a lot of things that end up being super difficult about culture, and you have probably lived this, especially if you are sort of mid career, right? And we know that McKinsey has looked at this, and McKinsey, interestingly enough, Like, whatever you think about McKinsey, they've been in everybody's business for over 100 years. Like, they've been studying all of this stuff for a very long time in the modern era, right? In the era of the emergence of large corporate structures, right? So, post industrialization, this corporatization, all these kinds of things that come into play, right? And there's a lot of different research, especially mid century, mid 20th century research on how Different kinds of organizations and different kinds of management styles all relate to this, right? Because you've got, like, hierarchical structures that sort of adopt from military and, like, all kinds of other things. So there's been a lot of work on this. So, McKinsey, though, really has found a lot of sort of interesting data on why culture actually matters. And it's not like we're all going into battle, right? But culture does correlate with performance. 60 percent higher returns. For folks that they've found have better cultures on whatever their scales they're looking at, 200 percent of the bottom quartile. Like, there's just a lot of things that lead into better performance of an organization based on how the culture operates, right? What you reward, what you punish, how you establish norms, those kinds of things all play into that. Culture, very hard to copy. Products and services. Super easy to copy. I can sell you the same thing, but I might not be as successful as you are because the culture of my organization is poor. And that relates to, it sort of trickles down into bad employee experience, bad customer experience. All those kinds of things are downstream of that, right? McKinsey has found that as well. Healthy culture facilitates adaptability. You want to be adaptable. When the battle changes, when the circumstances change, if your culture says we only value the things we have always done, it's not going to help you, right? 70 percent of change initiatives fail. That's a big number. 70 percent of those are for cultural reasons. So, You can do the math. 70 percent of 70 percent is half of all change initiatives fail because of culture. You may have lived through this, right? Like, I am sure there are people watching this now who have absolutely lived through failed changes, failed transitions, failed initiatives about whatever because some piece of the culture was standing in the way, some value. that was being strongly held was in opposition to the change that needed to be made. Happens all the time, right? And then unhealthy culture leads to underperformance or failure. Happens often enough, right? Things just kind of fall apart. So, culture, top of mind. It is a topic of discussion and research. There's dozens of articles published in business journals. all the time, right? About impacts of culture, how to influence culture, how to change your organization's culture. There's no magic quadrant for culture, right? It just kind of arises from any and all of your interpersonal relationships. And it can be influenced by things like where you grew up, your faith community, your educational background, foundational experiences that you've had. You know, influenced your values and beliefs, and that all plays a part in how you fit into a culture, what you bring to a culture, and how you're able to influence that culture. And sometimes in tech, we think about, you know, organizations that start out as maybe a monoculture. This is all Silicon Valley kind of organization. It's half a dozen white guys who all went to Stanford. They're bringing in a limited number of perspectives and a limited amount of knowledge about the world at that point, right? And that influences the culture and, and things that are there. but organizations now sort of know that, you know, it's kind of important. That's why all these headlines are here. They're all taken from the Harvard Business Review. I think I have more here. Yep, this one, this one right here is from July, August 2024. The headline is Build a Corporate Culture That Works, right? One that isn't broken. and this one is November, December 2024, so only a few months later. And this one is We're Still Lonely at Work. It's Time for Companies to Take a Different Approach to Culture, right? They're everywhere. Culture is important to somebody writing papers. but the hard part is like, noting that McKinsey's findings That half of all transitions fail for cultural reasons. Recognizing that culture is hard to change. Like all these articles that have this promise to help you build a more learning culture, or build more curiosity into your culture, or more resilience, or whatever the vocabulary word of the day is. It's going to be hard, right? It's going to be super difficult. And there's a good chance that it's not going to work. So, what are some of the Components when we're thinking about culture, maybe we're thinking about how this culture isn't working for our goals, right? What are the things that we're looking at that are symbols of the culture? So, this model is from Edgar Sheen. There is, I will say, dozens of models about culture. You can pick your favorite. I'm going to talk about another one in a minute. This is just an interesting one. Eggersheen was a, psychologist and, professor. He did a lot of the foundational research in what we now refer to as organizational behavior, right? So, again, something that kind of started middle of the 20th century, really got going in the 80s. You're thinking about, like, the goal and, Toyota and all those kinds of things. All that, Deming kind of era really started to bring a lot of focus in on this and a lot more, academic attention, we'll say that. so Sheen organized culture into three levels. Basic assumptions make up the foundation of your organization's culture. These get formed over time as team members work together, how they interpret behaviors when they're interacting, things like events and activities, they're deeply embedded, right, to the point where they're almost taken for granted. it's a main part of like the water in the fishbowl, right, the team members don't even really recognize. they're going to be things that have been in the organization a very long time that most folks don't consciously notice. They're just, you know, they're there. A new person might recognize them, right? And maybe comment on them. So. Before I joined PagerDuty, I was at Chef. And if you were a part of the sort of DevOps movement when Chef was around, you know, Chef was very sweary, right? Adam, Jacob was very sweary, so we kind of all took lead from that and kind of, kind of sweary culture. PagerDuty not so much, right? Like, it's kind of different. And as someone who does a lot of public speaking, you want to, you know, I want to sort of recognize the culture of the company that I represent. And so, you know, I was like, oh, well, we're, do we swear here? Am I right? Can I use a swear word? I don't know. Maybe. Might be okay. But not something that they had consciously recognized when I asked about it, right? Because it hadn't really been part of the culture. Then you've got values, that middle layer, right? These are the things the company says about itself. Sometimes mission statements, things like that, right? But also public statements that they make. They're visible things, right? they might be aspirational in some ways. These are often the part of the organization that we unconsciously sort of associate with the word culture. things like commitment to diversity, work life balance, commitment to the environment, maybe they are B Corp or triple bottom line kind of place. Like those things are all part of their values. And the most visible layer of culture sort of floats on the top there. And these are artifacts that are produced, right? A lot of them are easily recognized by people even outside of the organization, right? Like commercials or advertisements, right? But they're also identifiable to people within the organization. Not only because they wrote them, maybe, but because they're part of the whole feeling of, of things inside. these can be your mission statements. They can be formal procedures. They can even be things like the Walmart cheer or dress codes, right? every now and then a big corporation kind of pops up with somebody rebelling against their dress code. it's part of the cultural artifacts there, right? When we look at culture more generally, we often find that, It may be easier to divide cultural characteristics into what's visible and invisible, right? So you might get like a dotted line in between, sort of down the middle of that values layer. it's sort of less of a breakdown than what Sheen has made in this particular, model. We see the visible characteristics of local culture, like actual society culture all around us, right? You're going to get things like the arts, history, religion, all have cultural impacts, the built environment even, right? If you're like a fan of 99 percent Invisible Podcast, like there's a lot of good chunks in there about, oh, well, this park has benches, but there's armrests there, so nobody can sleep on them. Like that's a choice based on culture prioritization, right? You also get invisible things like work ethic, decision making, social rules, gender roles, even kinship. Like some places, have closer relationships with kin that are sort of further out in their, family tree. Like that's all part of, of culture that things are sort of just are. They've evolved over time, probably with reason, but they're just kind of there. But we do have a place where. You want to think about occupational versus organizational culture, and this is super interesting. the work that Sheen did with this, he was looking at chemists. So people with the white powders and the clear liquids and the mixing and the munching and the spectrometers and all that great stuff. They sort of find that a particular occupation, might have its own set of cultural characteristics independent of the organization any of those particular practitioners might belong to, right? So you've got chemists, they are doing their work in a lab, right? And a chemist that works for, say, Eli Lilly versus Merck versus maybe Johnson Johnson, they probably have more in common to each other. than they do to other folks in other departments of their organization, right? And you see this when you maybe attend conferences, right? Software engineers, other folks in our, tech industry have our own sort of norms and things that we find interesting, tools that we use that have nothing to do with anyone else in our organization. And one of the One of the interesting pieces about having large organizations is you get a lot of these, right, sort of micro, occupational cultures. so it's, it's another place where things sort of have like a push pull relationship, like the organizational culture versus what I actually identify with as, say, a software engineer, right? Because even the folks in this picture here, right, I have no idea what they're working on. This is a stock photo that we picked up somewhere, right? And Even though I have no idea what they're actually working on, like that dude on the right, he's got his laptop and he's got two screens up. On his rightmost screen, looks like an IDE, right? So I can have some idea of how he's actually doing his work, based on the tools that he's using, right? Because I can relate to that, as a, as another professional in that industry. And you can get pictures in your mind of, You know, this sort of generic software engineer, but you can also do that with nurses or lawyers or auto mechanics or the folks that work in your finance department, right? They kind of have this idea of how they do their work and what they sort of relate to. And I think this is part of where sort of DevOps has gotten hung up, right? we've been trying to change sort of occupational cultures in a way that not everyone's been maybe on board with, right? Right. And it takes time, it probably takes generational shift, like it does for other things in society, right? You want to change the cultural norms around how women are treated, or how, homosexuals are treated, or anything else. Like, it takes generational change. and if you think about what a software engineer might have expected to be doing as their job in, say, the late 1980s, versus what it looks like now. Things are drastically different, right? We're no longer putting software on CD ROMs and putting it in a box and shipping it to the customer and saying, good luck. And if you have help, if you need help, there's this consultant over here that you can pay 1, 000 an hour and they will help you with this thing because we're not going to do it, right? And most of us are no longer shipping that kind of software. We're now shipping things that are available sort of as a service that changes the relationship, right? Changes how we interact with our users because they're no longer at the other end of a shipped box of software, right? They're at the other end of a network connection and it's much more real time, right? And so that has required a lot of change across the industry for, especially for us folks who've been here for a while. And hopefully we start to see with newer generations and younger folks joining the industry that things are just done this way because it's the way we've always, we now do them, right? We now have SRE teams and we have dev and ops sort of working together to make better products for our users because it's just, that's just the way we've always done it, right? So, the occupational culture is super interesting and as that work sort of continues in academia, I hope it will continue. see a lot more, interesting things out of that. Another model that I hope you have heard of, right, because it comes up quite a lot, I like this one because It, to me, it feels like, again, show my age, the equalizer on a stereo, right? You can pump the treble up and move the bass here, and like, there's the mids, and you can kind of structure yourself, what does your team look like based on, all of these, sort of characteristics on this Western model as well. it's, and I think this one too is helpful For folks at many levels in an organization, because it, it, it sort of refocuses you on your actual team and the things that your team is doing. And for, especially for individual contributors, I think there's a lot of pieces here that are approachable for individual contributors. Versus needing a lot of executive buy in for things. So if you haven't looked at the Westrom model before, it's three basic levels, or three types, categories of, cultures. And Westrom pulled this out of research that was done in, medicine, right? So again, not in tech, right? She was talking about chemists, this was talking about healthcare, right? But thinking about, three different kinds of cultures, he breaks them down as pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. And pathological seems psychotic, almost, right? No cooperation. If you've got, you know, bad news, like it's your fault that you brought the bad news to them. Nobody takes responsibility for anything. Nobody's allowed to talk to anyone else in their department until they go up to their manager, and they talk to their manager, and they talk to their manager, and then has to go back down the other side, right? Very dysfunctional. Super dysfunctional. bureaucratic. Rule oriented. Maybe you've worked a place like this. Maybe it feels that way because you work in finance or something like that. It's kind of like more rigid than other places. there's a little bit of coordination sometimes. A little bit of cooperation. Messengers are kind of ignored. It's going to be somebody else's problem or like some executive has to make a decision. We're not going to even think about it right now. You have very narrow, well defined responsibilities, and you're not really allowed to get out of that box, right? You're kind of doing your thing. Bridging may be tolerated. You can talk to folks on the other team in service of important things, but, like, don't get too close, right? Don't collaborate. Like, you could maybe talk to them a bit. Failure leads to justice, and novelty leads to problems. Like, you know, Thinking about innovation and change and those kinds of things is like, smack down. kind of hints to why 50 percent of change initiatives fail for cultural reasons. The last one, generative, performance oriented, right? High cooperation. You don't know what you don't know, but the person in the next team might know something, right? So you want to be able to, Freely associate with anybody who might have the information that you want or need for your project. Messengers get trained. How do we find information that needs to be shared? How do we appropriately share it? What is the pathway for things being, put together? Risks are shared. Bridging is encouraged. Failure leads to inquiry. Why did this happen? This is your, learning organizations, right? This is where you've got incident management comes into play. We wrote a postmortem. What did we learn about this thing? And novelty gets implemented. We want to try it, right? We value culture, or value innovation in our culture, so we're going to try some things out, right? So we're working on it that way. As you read through these, you can kind of get a picture of, yeah, as an individual contributor, Like, you can do some of this stuff without, like, an explicit thing kind of pounded into your head by a director. You can talk to people in other teams. You can publish the things that you've learned during a failure, right? You can put it on the wiki, you can talk about it, you can put it in a Slack channel. Like, all of these things are really approachable, so if you haven't read through the Western, paper, the original paper is only like five or six pages long, super good to get a handle on that one. And just kind of Look at it from the perspective of, yeah, we want to get to generative, recognizing that we might be pathological or bureaucratic about different things. You might already be generative about some things, but it all helps sort of move things along and get you to a place where the culture is working for you and not against you as your organization continues to grow. So. Part of the, the, the issues then that, that sort of come up, I mentioned as, as part of the occupational culture, but tech in, in most places is really, it's outcome based, right? culture is judged by a lot of employees based on how they're able to deliver on their tasks. Can they get work done? It's a simple answer, yes or no, most of the time, right? Are there arbitrary or capricious blockages? Is somebody just sitting in your way for the hell of it, right? Like, oh, we've got a change review board, but it only meets once a quarter. That's useless, right? Do goals and priorities change all the time? You're not really sure what you should be working on and all these million different things that come at you. We have a lot of resources and tools to help us diagnose and Get around some of those stumbling blocks and impediments we find in a lot of organizations. But culture is really a slow moving ship, right? Like I said, it might take generational change. Some places, right, there might need to be some turnover in some teams. you find a lot of folks who identify with, you know, culture version 1. 0. Right? That you want to deprecate. the folks who stand in the way of sort of every decision. Right? And sometimes that even means running outdated versions of software they can't secure anymore. Or paying a long term contract to the vendor because you don't want to get off of something old. and I often refer back to John Willis CAMS or CALMS model. Right? It was originally CAMS and he added lean to it for CALMS. you can still find this post, on the Chef blog from 2011, right? What DevOps means to me was the title of that, right? and when we think about where we want to get to with DevOps, where we want to get to as practitioners, as members of organizations, as folks who want to facilitate Improvement, innovation, and resilience, and all these things that we talk about from the technical side, right? What needs to come along with us on the cultural side? That C in that model is absolutely the hardest one, right? I often find that teams are good at the other pieces because it's based around tooling, right? When we don't know what to do, we can buy a new tool, right? If we're stuck, we can maybe try and buy a new tool. Folks can find themselves a language or platform to focus their automation efforts into. There's lots of that stuff now, right? You can follow recommended practices for metrics and observability. And it's changed! Like, things are way different now than they were in 2011 when the original post was written. Absolutely. But they are, in many ways, so much better. And there's so much more variety and things available that you can make use of. You can also publish. Like, sharing is much easier now, right? Everybody's on some kind of chat tool all the time. And it may have been HipChat or, or whatever in 2011, you know, pour one out. But, you've probably got a wiki. You probably have some way to publicly post something. You might have an internal engineering blog where you can share things, right? We want to get do not repeat yourself from the micro level in code to the macro level in the things that we're learning, right? And that all comes from creating metrics and sharing things. And that hopefully comes out, right? You can do posts and reviews, you can do brown bag discussions, you can create a community of practice. Even if it's just like half a dozen folks in a Slack channel like sharing posts, they're fine, right? All that good stuff comes out of it, right? Yeah. So that challenge sticks there in that, let's see, that culture. Especially for small teams and large organizations, culture kind of feels like an impetuous barrier that you're like banging up against all the time. and fortunately we can use some of these description models to help us improve things at maybe a micro cultural level. Westrom's model. To figure out what things we can change and influence to improve our culture. We can use some of the things from Sheen's model to say, Okay, here's what the organization is telling us. Here's what it's published. Here's how that fits or doesn't fit with what we need to do to make our, make our goals, right? There's also some additional interesting things, that have come out in the last, I think, 10 years, dozen years. one of those is microcultures. And, this is a place where things are sort of related to occupational cultures, but in a more, less organized sort of way. It's, it's super interesting in, in a couple of ways in that, some of the early research on microcultures was actually done on Slashdot. If you're old enough to have been on Slashdot in the early days, because it was a large community distributed, but completely opt in, right? We think about the things that, that, Influence us the pieces of culture that we kind of inherit as, as we live through our lives. A lot of that stuff is sort of non opt in, non optional, right? You live in it, right? You didn't pick where you were born. You didn't pick what country you lived in as a child. You didn't pick what your faith community was as a kid. All those things sort of like built up into your sort of internal representation of culture. When we get to large online communities, though, which influence a lot of what we do in technology anyway, I think Reddit or Y Combinator and other things like that, even online, Twitter or Blue Sky, whatever, that's all opt in, right? Everyone who's there has sort of chosen to be there for some reason or another. And that sort of twists the way the cultural norms kind of happen. And Right? They're not necessarily there because they were part of a social requirement, or it wasn't because there were food borne illnesses, right? The culture around food consumption can change. Any of those kinds of things might have been like completely set up in opposition to whatever prevailing culture might have been there at the time. So, super interesting. There's a lot more work being done in microcultures. but they're narrowly focused, right, on smaller groups of people organizing around smaller sets of shared interests. And, a microculture might be easier to influence and make improvements on, right? because you've got, like, maybe, you've got a microculture maybe on your team, or, maybe your team and, like, a handful of other teams that work on the same sort of platform. Right? If you're an application engineering team working in Python, maybe you've got another half a dozen teams that also work in Python. They're just working on different kinds of applications. There might be a place there to influence a microculture around behaviors for how you work on Python and how you deploy those things. And there's a lot of, you know, Western model components that can help you there, right? The, the bridging and cooperation and all that kind of stuff can all help improve things along the way. So, it's a lot of work, right? if you're struggling with how your organizational culture is impacting you, impacting your job, unfortunately, most of the time, the easiest thing to do is to find a new place to work. Because changing microculture in an organization, super, super difficult, right? Because it's probably been that way a very, very long time. Or you can work to improve your microculture and your local team and, be kind of safe and secure there. So there's, you know, there's options, right? Hopefully, for you out there. so, lots of interesting things to think about. lots of reasons why we're still thinking about them. Right? 15 years on. And, and why, we're still kind of getting hung up on stuff. And nothing makes me sadder than reading the DevOps subreddit. And listening, er, reading about some people's struggles, in, in the practice. And knowing that, yeah, we've been at this for a while, but there's still a lot of work to do. So, culture. It's how your organization connects, right? It's how people connect as humans. It is in your organization. It is in your personal life. It is everywhere, right? It's built on assumptions, values, artifacts. You can improve it, but not always across the entire organization. So you can make, you know, changes to your local team culture a lot more easier. And some things about it are just silly. You know, this screen capture is a social media post and the top line is you can gauge a company's culture by how robust and unhinged the Slack emoji repertoire is. And the bottom one is this joke, right? It's another screen capture from Slack that is someone posting, Hey team, I have some bittersweet news. After an incredible one year at Ramp, this company, I decided to continue working at Ramp. Like, you totally, they had you in the first half. You thought they were leaving, right? So, the whole thing is a joke that, I'm leaving on Friday, I'll be back on Monday. And, but it's just kind of framed up as a departure, post. And then, the emojis are insane, right? They're everywhere. It's all kinds of stuff. so. Lots of ways to sort of gauge culture, how fun it is, how robust it is, and lots of ways to influence it down the road. So some resources for you, if you'd like some homework. you've got Cautionary Tales, The French Knight's Guide to Corporate Culture, from Tim Harford. again, this is a great podcast series, it runs a couple of series a year. Tim Harford is an economist based in the UK. and, very knowledgeable on a lot of things. And it was, there was a derivative of that on a different show. and that one is titled Blood and Gold. And that's Dan Snow's, podcast. And I forget what his show is actually named. and then you've got a whole institute from, Professor Sheen. He sadly passed away in 2023. But his son keeps this running. And his, papers and, and other resources are there. very much. at sheenocli. org. Culture, four keys to why it matters from McKinsey. Another interesting one to take a look at. Sort of a foundational paper from the folks at McKinsey there. The, summary paper from, about Westrom from IT Revolution. the original paper at NCBI, then National Library of Medicine at NIH. And another sort of basic one, right? What is organizational culture and why should we care from HBR. So, Those are sort of some basic ones that I like to give to people. If you haven't read the Westrom stuff, start there. That's the easiest one to kind of grok and get a look at. So, hopefully that was helpful for folks. I'm always happy to chat with folks who are struggling with things around their culture, especially since I'm a PagerDuty now, around incident management, automation, post incident reviews, going on call, you know. Even as a basic sort of assumption, because lots of folks aren't into that. So hopefully you enjoy the rest of the sessions you watch at, Conf42 DevOps, and I'll see you somewhere else. So, take care.