Engineering Culture by InfoQ Information Flow: The Hidden Driver of Engineering Culture
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Mar 13, 2026 Adrian Perrier, a facilitator who designs and runs meetings for tech teams to improve information flow and culture. He discusses Ron Westrum’s three culture types and how information flow shapes team behavior. Short, practical steps for mapping and treating information as a product are explored. He also highlights how to detect weak signals and carve time for reflection to spot important anomalies.
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Information Flow Is The Core Of Culture
- Organizational culture is primarily shaped by how information flows between people.
- Ron Westrum's three cultures show hoarded information breeds fear, official channels create turf protection, and generative cultures prioritise timely, shared information for performance.
Use Failure Response To Diagnose Culture
- Evaluate your team's response to failure to identify culture: blameless inquiry signals generative culture while scapegoating signals pathological culture.
- As a leader, encourage people to surface bad news and run system-focused postmortems rather than hunting blame.
Startups Shift From Generative To Siloed With Growth
- Small teams tend to be generative by nature, protecting a force field of collaboration as they scale into specialist silos.
- Adrian notes startups often start mission-focused then fragment when finance or marketing teams are added.
