"Ron Westrom is a wonderful sociologist. I mean, he was studying organizations and culture in organizations and how people work. And he started off with the idea there were two cultures. There's a generative engineering culture where people build things, and that was because he was working with engineering organizations. And then there was a more bureaucratic culture."
"What Ron figured out really was that when we're talking about culture, we're talking about the way in which people handle information, how information flows between people. And in some organizations, it's hoarded."
Adrian Peryer, a facilitator who designs and conducts meetings for technology companies, discusses Ron Westrom's foundational work on organizational culture. Westrom, a sociologist, developed a framework identifying three distinct culture types within organizations. Initially, he recognized generative engineering cultures where people actively build and create, contrasted with bureaucratic cultures. Later, Westrom identified a third pathological culture type. The core of Westrom's research centers on how organizations handle and distribute information. Information flow patterns fundamentally define organizational culture—whether information is shared openly, controlled systematically, or hoarded restrictively. This framework has influenced significant works including Accelerate, the Phoenix Project, and DORA research.
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