Ron Westrum wrote Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake, and people in safety and DevOps know him for his typology of organizational cultures. Mark “Moose” McGrath and I asked him how information flow decides whether innovation survives.
The Sidewinder
Ron tells how a small team at China Lake built the AIM-9 Sidewinder. Smart knowledge and a protected space let them work around the bureaucracy. We also hear how the Navy’s fighter weapons school got started with very little official help.
Mavericks and imagination
Innovators often meet resistance, and Ron has studied what happens to them. He introduces requisite imagination, which means designing a system to anticipate how it could fail.
Information flow
Generative cultures give creative people a chance to speak up and show their work. Ron ties this to the OODA loop and to updating our models as we learn. We even touch on UFOs and how bureaucracies hold information back.
I first found Ron’s Sidewinder book in a Navy library on a quiet reserve weekend. Talking with him about it years later was a real pleasure.
How does bad news travel in your organization, and how fast?
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