4. Open Culture

Many development teams, operations teams, and even cross-functional product teams have a tendency to jump straight into the technological aspect of the project. Let's set up pipelines, let's automate our infrastructure, let's write some code! It's such a natural temptation to dive straight in without investing at least some time in establishing a cultural foundation. It can also lead to ineffective and unnecessary complexity.

Don't worry, we will get to the technology in Chapter 6, Open Technical Practices – Beginnings, Starting Right. But, before we do, we want to talk about open culture and open leadership. In this chapter, we are going to explore what open culture is and why it proves to be such a critical enabler for development and operations.

Open culture stems from a performance-oriented approach to collaborative work. It provides motivated teams of individuals with an environment where they can be continuously inspired...