Why Automation Fails Without Generative Teams

I hear from technology leaders constantly that their network deployment and operations teams fail to adopt new automation tools (whether built in-house or purchased), preferring instead to keep using device CLIs and Excel spreadsheets. The technical capabilities exist, the business case is clear, yet adoption stalls.

The culprit? Nobody addressed the organizational culture.

The Hidden Killer of Network Modernization

Your network transformation isn’t primarily a technology problem. It’s a culture problem disguised as a technology problem. When organizations shift from traditional network operations to modern, software-driven approaches, they’re asking people to fundamentally alter how they think about information flow, collaboration and problem solving.

Sociologist Ron Westrum identified three types of organizational cultures in 1988:

Pathological (power-oriented).
Bureaucratic (rule-oriented).
Generative (performance-oriented).

Many network infrastructure teams operate in pathological or bureaucratic cultures, where information is hoarded, failures lead to scapegoating and innovation is discouraged.

Why Culture Matters More in Network Operations

The shift to software-defined networking (SDN) and AI-driven operations requires exactly the generative behaviors that pathological and bureaucratic cultures suppress:

Rapid information flow: When incidents occur, information must flow quickly to the right people. Pathological cultures hoard information; bureaucratic cultures funnel it through slow formal channels.
Cross-functional collaboration: Network automation requires coordination between networking, security, development and operations teams. Cultural silos kill this collaboration.

Learning from failure: Modern operations embrace controlled failure as learning. Post-mortems become improvement opportunities, not blame sessions.
Continuous adaptation: AI and automation tools require constant tuning. This demands a culture comfortable with experimentation.

The Individual Identity Crisis Within Cultural Transformation

There’s also a deeply personal dimension to automation resistance: individual identity attachment. Network engineers whose expertise lies in CLI mastery feel their professional identity threatened. This isn’t simple resistance; it’s defending a piece of themselves.

Generative cultures support individual transformation by reframing narratives from “automation is replacing engineers” to “engineers are becoming automation architects,” honoring existing expertise, and creating safe learning environments where admitting “I don’t understand this Python script” leads to mentoring, not marginalization.

The Psychology of Safety: Getting It Right

Psychological safety is not about being nice or avoiding difficult conversations. Psychological safety is about “permission for candor”—creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable asking questions, challenging assumptions and admitting failures.

Here are some common misconceptions that derail network transformations:

“We need to be nice about automation failures.” Wrong. Teams need honest, direct feedback about what went wrong.

“Everyone should support our automation strategy.” Also wrong. The goal is better decision making through open communication, not universal agreement.
“High standards hurt psychological safety.” This is perhaps the most damaging myth. You can maintain high performance standards while fostering psychological safety.

Three practices help network teams build psychological safety:

Double down on work goals. Reinforce that network reliability requires everyone’s input.
Improve conversation quality. Use structured problem-solving and blameless post-mortems.
Institute reflection structures. Create regular forums for teams to safely discuss what’s working and what isn’t.

The Leadership Connection

As I explored in my previous article on leading intelligent networks, transformation requires leaders who abandon traditional “hero culture” for high-performance team practices. These leaders influence performance indirectly by enabling teams to adopt effective technical practices and lean production approaches; exactly what’s needed for network automation and AI-driven operations to succeed.

Network leaders building generative cultures must embrace three shifts:

From activity to outcome focus: Measure service delivery lead time and change success rate, not just configuration changes deployed.
From individual heroes to team performance: Third-era networking demands collaborative, cross-functional teams responsible for end-to-end outcomes.
From risk aversion to psychological safety: Establish clear distinctions between acceptable risks and reckless behavior through canary deployments, rollback procedures and learning-focused incident response.

In organizations with a generative culture, people collaborate more effectively, and there is a higher level of trust across the organization and through the hierarchy. This trust becomes the foundation for the rapid information flow and cross-functional collaboration that modern network operations demand.

Practical Steps to Build Generative Network Culture

Building generative culture is about habits — repeated patterns that become “the way we do things here.”

These specific practices help establish generative habits in network teams:

1. Change How You Handle Incidents

Replace post-incident blame sessions with blameless post-mortems focused on learning.
Celebrate teams that surface problems before they become outages.

Share incident learnings across all teams, not just the affected ones.

2. Redesign Information Flow

Create shared dashboards and knowledge repositories accessible to all relevant teams.
Establish regular cross-functional meetings focused on network performance and improvement.
Implement chat-based collaboration tools that break down communication silos.

3. Reward Learning Behaviors

Recognize engineers who experiment with new automation tools.
Provide time and resources for continuous learning and skill development.
Make “failure to learn from failure” the only unacceptable failure.

4. Implement Psychological Safety Practices

Train managers to ask “How can we help?” instead of “Who’s responsible?”
Create forums where junior engineers can question senior decisions.
Establish mentorship programs that transfer knowledge across experience levels.

5. Model Bridging Behaviors

Have network leaders actively participate in DevOps and platform engineering communities.
Cross-train team members in adjacent disciplines.
Create shared success metrics that require cross-functional collaboration.

The Path Forward: Culture as Strategy

The most successful network transformations treat culture change as equally important as technology change. They invest in psychological safety alongside automation tools and measure cultural health with the same rigor applied to network performance metrics.

Your network transformation won’t succeed because you have the best automation platform or the most sophisticated AI tools. It will succeed because you’ve built a culture that can effectively use those tools to continuously improve how your organization delivers value.

The choice is yours: Continue treating culture as a “soft” concern you’ll address later, or recognize it as the foundational capability that determines whether your technical investments deliver their promised returns.

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