Generative Cultures
Our work on generative cultures is deeply rooted in the foundational research of Professor Ron Westrum, a pioneer in organizational culture and system safety. We're proud to collaborate with Professor Ron Westrum and partner with organizations seeking to cultivate generative cultures: high-performing, safety-conscious and innovative environments. Our approach synthesizes Ron’s research and invaluable insights with a growing set of practical methodologies and tools. This collaboration utilizes our co-creation meetings as a catalyst, enabling leaders to explore how to start proactively fostering generative cultures that are not only more productive, but also more resilient and adaptable. We’ve delved into this critical topic through podcasts and webinars, offering accessible discussions and practical advice on transforming organizational cultures.
To help organizations understand their current cultural landscape, we've developed a proprietary survey tool. This simple but powerful diagnostic enables us to pinpoint the current organizational culture and specific areas where the culture needs to start to evolve towards a more generative position, one characterized by high trust, open communication, and continuous learning. We’ve written numerous papers exploring different facets of generative cultures and our work on leadership development is firmly rooted in helping to develop leaders of generative cultures.
Generative Cultures with Ron Westrum Podcast
Generative Cultures with Ron Westrum is a series based on conversations with Professor Ron Westrum, one of the world’s leading experts on organizational culture. The “Westrum Continuum” of generative, bureaucratic and pathological organizational cultures is the most widely used foundational framework for understanding organizational culture.
Season one covers a variety of topics, from Ron’s upbringing to his initial research and three books, as well as diving deeper into his research.
Season one is available to stream now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Episode 12: The Leadership of Technical Maestros
This is a bonus episode discussing the leadership of technical maestros. This completely unplanned episode was recorded during a break when Ron began discussing General Motors, and then touched on some fundamental topics on how generative cultures are led by technical maestros. We then move to talking about how cultures are created during the ‘becoming’ phase, but often move into a bureaucratic culture. While unplanned, we found this conversation to be both interesting and highly valuable.
Episode 11: Sidewinder Part 2
This week marks the final episode of the first season of Generative Cultures with Ron Westrum. This episode is the second half of our conversation about Ron’s third book: Sidewinder. This time, we discuss how China Lake engaged with manufacturers as well as their customers, the empowerment and unusual authority of technicians. We then explore what happens when you have become an expert, but you become stale and see the organization decline.
Episode 10: Sidewinder Part 1
As we move towards the end of season one of the Generative Cultures podcast, this week’s episode is the first half of a conversation about Ron’s bestseller Sidewinder: Missile Development at China Lake. This book is written about his study of a remote base in the Mojave Desert that fostered technical creativity and operated far outside the normal envelope. In this episode, we discuss getting the right people, technological leadership, illegal prototypes, sensitive inquiring systems, and how people in China Lake were empowered.
Episode 9: First Two Books
This week’s episode of Generative Cultures covers Ron’s first two books. We delve into the topics of his research, including complex organization growth, struggle and change, as well as technologies and the shaping of people and things. We also discuss independent inventors and how he discovered that ⅓ of them were successful and making money, contrary to the popular belief that only a few succeed.
Episode 8: Hidden Events Work (Part 3)
This week's episode is the third episode in which we discuss hidden events. Ron dives deeper into topics such as the ozone hole and UFOs, and we explore how he became interested in the field of safety. Ron explores the importance of thinking through two minds, problematic attitudes in the scientific community, and the impact of near death experiences. Ron also leads a discussion on the uncomfortability of the unknown that is key to understanding hidden events.
Episode 7: Hidden Events Work (Part 2)
This is an uncomfortable episode on hidden events with a discussion on why people are resistant when faced with uncomfortable topics, and why engaging in ‘opinionated persistence' can be both beneficial and problematic. As we explore arrogance in thinking and what Ron calls ‘the fallacy of centrality,’ the uncomfortable topics we touch on include child sexual abuse and UFOs. We explore how to manage some of these tensions and reference Roger Martin’s ‘knowledge funnel’ where people move from complex mystery through heuristics to simple algorithms.
Episode 6: Hidden Events Work (Part 1)
This week's episode dives into "hidden events" or what Ron calls "weird stuff" that scientists and society have historically struggled to accept, and how we deal with anomalous phenomena, such as Sea Serpents and UFOs. The history of meteorites reveals the tremendous resistance to dealing with things that are uncomfortable and require us to change our worldviews.
Episode 5: PhD and Hidden Events (Part 2)
This episode links Ron Westrum’s initial research into sea serpents and to his wider thinking about the whole process of reporting, information collection, and information flow. It covers how his research into sea serpents turned out to be his first study of hidden events. The connection for Ron was discovering the history of the "battered child syndrome," and how initial discomfort was overcome when Henry Kemp built alignment across a multi-disciplinary team, revealing these hidden events to a wider world. We discuss the evidence that suggests that reported cases are often the tip of an iceberg of hidden events.
Episode 4: PhD and Hidden Events (Part 1)
This episode is the first part of a deep dive into Ron Westrum’s PhD dissertation, the first sentence of which reads “In the next two decades, the patterns of organizational communication are likely to undergo major changes due to innovations in technology.” We discuss why instead of reducing stress, these changes increased the speed of systems.
Episode 3: Intellectual Partnerships (Bonus)
This short bonus episode was a completely unplanned conversation surrounding Intellectual Partnerships. Off camera, Ron had been asked about leaders in technical cultures. He began describing how both him and his father experienced smart people attracting other smart people, describing this as a dance. We had already begun rolling and had therefore captured and have kept this fascinating conversation as a short bonus episode.
Episode 2: Family of Origin (Part 2)
This episode is the second half of the conversation exploring Ron’s family of origin and education. We discuss Ron's academic journey and some influential early mentors, as well as his engagement with the Rand Corporation. The theme of the importance of multi-disciplinary perspectives emerges and influences Ron's decision to pursue a career as a professor.
Episode 1: Family of Origin (Part 1)
This conversation explores Westrum’s family of origin, giving some background and context to how he fell into his profession. We discuss why Ron’s father is the first technical maestro he looked up to. This conversation further discusses his parents, members of the Manhattan Project, as well as why he didn’t end up working for the RAND Corporation, but instead chose to become a professor.