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185 results for “trondhjort”
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Dear followers and "fellow kids,"
In hopes of landing an interesting and fulfilling gig next, I just wanted to let you know that I'm ready for new assignments. Preferably helping companies with digital transformations that keep people at the centre. My 25 years of experience in the IT industry have taught me one essential thing: efficiency and quality are achieved only when happy people work closely together, within and across teams in the whole enterprise.
#SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #SystemsThinking
More on LI: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trondhjort_gruppedynamikk-sosioteknisk-saeokkonferansen-activity-7427627571858681856-rVko -
@trondhjort on self organizing organisations at #fastflowconf
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The summer holiday slumber is a great time for some more rabbit-hole deep dives. 🤓 Like Fred Emery and Eric Trist's conceptualization of a system's environment.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trondhjort_the-summer-holiday-slumber-is-a-great-time-activity-7221524987285803008-BPaJ
#OpenSystems -
The summer holiday slumber is a great time for some more rabbit-hole deep dives. 🤓 Like Fred Emery and Eric Trist's conceptualization of a system's environment.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trondhjort_the-summer-holiday-slumber-is-a-great-time-activity-7221524987285803008-BPaJ
#OpenSystems -
The summer holiday slumber is a great time for some more rabbit-hole deep dives. 🤓 Like Fred Emery and Eric Trist's conceptualization of a system's environment.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trondhjort_the-summer-holiday-slumber-is-a-great-time-activity-7221524987285803008-BPaJ
#OpenSystems -
The summer holiday slumber is a great time for some more rabbit-hole deep dives. 🤓 Like Fred Emery and Eric Trist's conceptualization of a system's environment.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trondhjort_the-summer-holiday-slumber-is-a-great-time-activity-7221524987285803008-BPaJ
#OpenSystems -
The summer holiday slumber is a great time for some more rabbit-hole deep dives. 🤓 Like Fred Emery and Eric Trist's conceptualization of a system's environment.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trondhjort_the-summer-holiday-slumber-is-a-great-time-activity-7221524987285803008-BPaJ
#OpenSystems -
I blog from time to time and hope people find them useful. Watch this link https://www.linkedin.com/in/trondhjort/recent-activity/posts/ or this space for posts on #socioTechnical, #OpenSystems, #DDDesign, #SOA, #agile, #entArch, #softArch and such. ☺️
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@trondhjort @kandddinsky you forgot to tag your post with #togaf
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@trondhjort @newcrafts Great talk. Nobody explains #TOGAF better than you.
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@trondhjort @marick @newcrafts @kentbeck I'm just wondering if we could use Ward's Federated Wiki for this: possibly writing this book together? #FedWiki #FederatedWiki @k9ox
We have some experience with supporting collective writing of books.
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@trondhjort @marick @newcrafts @kentbeck I'm just wondering if we could use Ward's Federated Wiki for this: possibly writing this book together? #FedWiki #FederatedWiki @k9ox
We have some experience with supporting collective writing of books.
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@trondhjort @marick @newcrafts @kentbeck I'm just wondering if we could use Ward's Federated Wiki for this: possibly writing this book together? #FedWiki #FederatedWiki @k9ox
We have some experience with supporting collective writing of books.
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@trondhjort @marick @newcrafts @kentbeck I'm just wondering if we could use Ward's Federated Wiki for this: possibly writing this book together? #FedWiki #FederatedWiki @k9ox
We have some experience with supporting collective writing of books.
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@trondhjort @marick @newcrafts @kentbeck I'm just wondering if we could use Ward's Federated Wiki for this: possibly writing this book together? #FedWiki #FederatedWiki @k9ox
We have some experience with supporting collective writing of books.
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RE: https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116617159142908240
Entwickelnde Personen MÜSSEN Kontakt mit den nutzenden Personen haben.
Sonst entsteht Verschwendung auf verschiedensten Ebenen.Scrum Master, die "das Entwicklungsteam" von der "Außenwelt" abschirmen, haben ihren Job nicht verstanden.
Wirklich nicht. -
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116617159142908240
Entwickelnde Personen MÜSSEN Kontakt mit den nutzenden Personen haben.
Sonst entsteht Verschwendung auf verschiedensten Ebenen.Scrum Master, die "das Entwicklungsteam" von der "Außenwelt" abschirmen, haben ihren Job nicht verstanden.
Wirklich nicht. -
"Human-centred system design" by @trondhjort #NewCrafts #NewCrafts2024 #sketchnote
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@kenny_baas @yellowbrickc @RuthMalan @Heimeshoff @selketjah @trondhjort @virtualddd @dianamontalion @weltraumpirat I'd be totally up to pay this contribution to be part of #VirtualDDD #OpenSpace 🤩 (yet as I mentioned at #KanDDDinksy, on that specific date I might prioritize other activities 🎂 - not fully sure yet)
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Hey folks!
Together with @trondhjort, we have a workshop that is focused on on open system thinking, how how it can be applied to set strategic goals and evolve the organisation structure.
We are looking for conferences where we can run the workshop. Do you have any suggestions?
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Join us for the "Intentional Architecture" workshop with @trondhjort and me in Milan on June 5th and 6th in collaboration with Avanscoperta.
Explore how to create a sensible organization design for self-management and technology optimization.
Get your tickets here ➡️ https://buff.ly/3vMGgsF
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Excited to share about our 2-day workshop, "Intentional Organizations," at the @newcrafts in Paris with @trondhjort! 🎟️🇫🇷✨
Check out the link for more info and tickets. Join us! ⬇️
https://buff.ly/3TBYqXa#NewCrafts #Workshop #IntentionalOrganizations #ParisConference
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Tyranny of the majority
Context: The workshop is wrapping up. There are too many ideas on the wall, and a decision needs to be made, so dot voting is introduced. Everyone gets three dots and places them on their favourites. The tallied results are clear, and the facilitator announces the winners. Most people seem satisfied. A few do not. Their priorities were lost, their concerns were not addressed, and the vote moved on before the reasoning behind the minority view was ever really heard. They leave with a decision they had no real part in making. In meetings, the same pattern plays out through a show of hands, anonymous polls, or simply the loudest voices drowning out the quieter ones. It feels democratic. It is not.
OST explains: Dot voting and majority voting are representative democracy mechanisms, which really are DP1 in disguise. They produce a winner and, by definition, a loser, and the minority does not just lose the vote; they lose the ability to influence the outcome, making them unlikely to commit to implementing something they actively disagreed with. Fred Emery called the alternative rationalisation of conflict: instead of forcing a resolution through voting, the group stays with the disagreement long enough to understand it. The goal is not the most popular option, but the option nobody has a reasoned objection to. A higher bar that takes longer, but produces genuine shared ownership that majority voting never can. A decision reached that way does not need to be enforced; people carry it forward because they helped make it.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #collaboration
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Since many of you are enjoying a day off, I’m hitting 'pause' on my Dysfunctions series. Instead, I want to address a common objection to OST: the idea that while these principles work in manufacturing, IT is 'too unique' for them to apply.
Here is my take (and the #OST perspective):
The design principles are about where responsibility for coordination and control sits. They are content-agnostic. They apply equally to stitching shoes, nursing, and writing software, because they describe the structural relationship between people and their work, not the work itself.
Knowledge work actually requires DP2 more than routine work does. The whole argument for self-management is variety: when work demands judgment, context, and adaptation, you cannot pre-specify it from above. DP1 is a worse fit for knowledge work than for assembly lines, not a better one.
Big software companies are full of DP1 patterns dressed in agile clothing: product managers who own the goals, engineering managers who own the headcount, architects who own the tech, PMOs who own the process. The product manager role itself is often a DP1 supervisor function relabeled.
My International Workers' Day speech.
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I look forward to returning to Berlin and the wonderful #kanDDDinsky conference this week. It is one of my definitive highlights of the year, and I am really happy to be able to speak there again. This time, I will challenge the approach many companies have to what they regard as self-organisation, like when attempting an agile transformation, like rolling out Team Topologies or similar attempts at "empowerment."
Decades of research in the social sciences have clearly shown how this ought to be done. Unfortunately, most in the IT industry seem to be ignorant of this. Hope to change that. It is surprisingly easy, but it will require systemic changes in thinking. 😊
#systemsThinking #sociotechnical #selfOrganisation #agile #teamTopologies #orgDesign #KanDDDinsky
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Professional leadership
Context: The organisation has invested heavily in leadership development. There are programmes, frameworks, coaching, 360-degree feedback, and a clear leadership model on the intranet. The managers are well-intentioned, many of them genuinely skilled, and they take their responsibility seriously. However, the teams below them are still not performing as hoped. Engagement is middling, decisions are slow, and the best people keep leaving. Some even because of their manager. Leadership quality is clearly not the bottleneck, so what is? In many industries, supervisors are expected to know the craft they oversee. Not so in most IT organisations, where the manager's job is people and process, not technology. That gap has been growing.
OST explains: The problem is not the leaders; it is the existence of the role itself. DP1 as bureaucracy requires leaders because control and coordination are handled by a layer above the real productive work, be it managers in the line, project managers, product managers, or even architects. You therefore need good ones, and training them makes sense within that logic. But no amount of leadership quality fixes the structural problem that the people doing the work are not in control of it. In DP2, the need for professional leadership largely disappears because coordination and control are handled by the group itself. The resources currently spent on developing leaders should instead be invested in developing the team's self-managing capacity. That is not a small shift; it is a fundamentally different theory of how organisations work. A DNA swap.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Burned by design
Context: People are burning out. Not one or two, but a pattern across the organisation. The response is usually more support: capacity planning, better prioritisation, blocking time for work, reduced meeting loads, encouragement to take time off, and reminders that it is okay to set boundaries. Some people recover. Others leave. New people arrive and, after a while, show the same signs. The organisation is aware that this is not sustainable but frames it as a consequence of a demanding industry or a difficult period. It will get better soon; we just need to pass this hurdle.
OST explains: Burnout is not primarily a capacity or resilience problem; it is a job design problem. The conditions most strongly associated with burnout, like lack of control, unclear demands, and absence of meaningful feedback, are structural features of the bureaucratic DP1; not unfortunate side effects. Many do not burn out immediately; they switch off first. Presenteeism, being physically present but mentally absent, is the earlier stage of the same structural problem, and burnout is what happens when even the switching off stops working. The numbers are striking. The WHO projected that by 2020 depression would be the second leading cause of disability globally. Gallup reports that 20% of employees experience daily loneliness, in a setting where people actively come together to produce something. One documented DP1 to DP2 transition showed a 28% decrease in absenteeism and an 81% increase in engagement in the first year, with no major technical changes. Adding support resources helps individuals cope with a system that is harming them, but does not change the system. The tree was planted in the wrong soil; repotting is not optional.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
DORA, the wrong way round
Context: The DORA metrics have become the gold standard for measuring engineering performance. Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. The four key metrics. Teams build dashboards around them, set quarterly targets, and run improvement initiatives to move the numbers in the right direction. Some teams genuinely improve, while others find the numbers are stubborn or that improvements one quarter quietly reverse the next. Leadership concludes that the teams need more discipline, better tooling, or another round of training. What gets called cargo culting (for lack of a better term) in the industry, copying the visible practices without the underlying conditions, is exactly this pattern.
OST explains: DORA was designed as a research instrument, not as a target system. The metrics are downstream signals of healthy delivery, not the drivers of it. Healthy delivery is when self-managing teams own the whole product, make decisions without escalation, and have tight feedback loops with the people they serve. Take those structural conditions away, and the numbers regress, no matter how many dashboards you build. Treating DORA as a goal in DP1 (bureaucratic) is exactly the goal displacement Goodhart warned about: the moment a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. In DP2, the self-managing-group structure, the same numbers emerge naturally as side effects of work well done. You do not need to chase them. You need to build the conditions that produce them.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The error factory
Context: Something goes wrong. A post-mortem is held, a root cause is identified, and a fix is put in place. A few months later, the same thing goes wrong again, in a slightly different form. The organisation responds with more process, more checklists, more training. The error rate stays stubbornly high. Leadership concludes that people are not following the processes correctly, so more oversight is added. The errors continue. Nobody questions whether the structure itself might be amplifying the mistakes rather than catching them.
OST explains: The research is mathematically precise on this. In a DP1 (bureaucratic) structure, if five people each make sound judgements eight times out of ten, the probability they give you correct unanimous advice is only one in three. The more you control through hierarchy, the deeper you move into error. In a DP2 structure with the same five people and the same fallibility, wrong unanimous advice occurs only three times in ten thousand. In DP1, errors get amplified because asymmetry and competition mean people filter information to serve their own position rather than the truth. In DP2, the same errors become learning opportunities because everyone has shared responsibility, and it is in nobody's interest to hide a mistake. The diagnosis of inadequate training and the prescription of more training will not reliably reduce error rates; that requires attention to the underlying structural cause.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Fixing people
Context: "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." Gerald Weinberg's Second Law of Consulting is good advice. It is a reminder that the human dimension is always present, that purely technical diagnoses miss something essential, and that the people involved always matter. Most managers and HR professionals would recognise themselves in it. Someone on the team is struggling. Maybe they are disengaged, not delivering, clashing with colleagues, or just not showing up in the way they used to. The organisation's response is to fix the person: a performance improvement plan, a coaching programme, a personality assessment, or a quiet word from HR. Sometimes it works for a while. But the same problems keep reappearing, often with different people in the same role. The carousel of interventions never quite stops.
OST explains: Weinberg is right that it is always a people problem; people's experience, motivation, and well-being are always at stake. OST does not disagree; it adds the next step. When the same dysfunction shows up repeatedly across different people in the same role, the problem is not those individuals; it is what the system does to whoever occupies that position. DP1 structures (manager-led), with their competition for recognition and dependency on management for decisions, produce exactly the disengagement and avoidance that organisations then try to coach out of people. Fixing the individual while leaving the structure intact contains a deep paradox: elevating the individual as the problem, isolated from the structure shaping their behaviour, goes beyond blaming the victim; it creates them. So yes, it is always a people problem. The question OST asks is: what is the structure doing to the people?