Corporate culture and it's roles - DevOps Basics - Part 2
What is an organization’s culture?
Organization’s culture is like a shadow of the organization. The processes, behaviour and tools used by the organization shape it’s culture, just like a person’s clothing, dressing sense and body language shapes them. This “shadow” cannot be changed directly and abruptly, without changing the “object” casting the “shadow”.
To change culture, we need to change the organization’s processes, behaviour and tools. This is a long term process and requires a lot of effort and time. Not to mention, the financial aspect of it. It cannot be done that easily just by announcing a new policies or new tools.
Cultural Evolution and LaaaaaaaLouuuwwwuuu model
The cultural evolution is a process of change in the culture of an organization. It is a process of change in the organization’s processes and behaviours. The cultural evolution model suggested by Frederic Laloux is a good model to understand this - it has different stages of cultural evolution and stipulates that it’s necessary to go through all the stages to reach the final stage of the evolution and be successful.
Laloux’s (pronounced as typed in the heading :P) model classifies culture in several different levels. These are:
-
Red: The mafia gang organization, driven by individuals with power. -
Amber: Typical command and control hierarchy, with a lot of rules and regulations, similar to the military. -
Orange: The competition for success is the underlying driver. -
Green: This focuses on the empowerment of the employee, and the focus shifts from shareholders to stakeholders. An idealistic family business is a metaphor for this. -
Teal: A culture of a full-self organization, very much like a living organism.
A lot of DevOps adoption is focused on the
Green stage, with organization having empowered teams that can organize themselves to achieve the most benefit. Problem is large organizations have people and processes much closer to the
Amber and
Orange stages, where the hierarchy in
Amber and the processes in
Orange are dominant . Trying to jump straight to the
Green stage with self empowered teams who deploy to production themselves is too far stretched, instead focus should be to master
Orange stage first and then slowly move to
Green stage and eventually to
Teal stage.