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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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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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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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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
Empowerment
Context: Leadership has announced that teams are now empowered. There are communications about it, a new set of principles, perhaps even a manifesto. The manager has been rebranded as a coach or a servant leader. Controls have been loosened, warm and friendly communication is encouraged, and people are told they have more autonomy. For a brief moment, there is energy. Then people try to actually use this empowerment, run into the existing approval processes, budget controls, and management expectations, and quietly conclude that nothing has really changed. The word starts to feel like a joke. And then something goes wrong — a missed deadline, a budget overrun, a production incident — and the coach suddenly starts acting a lot more like a manager. The mask slips, and everyone realises it was always there.
OST explains: Research on organisations that have adopted agile and similar approaches identified a specific and common structural form: the trainer, leader, or coach (TLC) model, where controls are loosened and warm communication encouraged, but the design principle has not actually changed. Workers often prefer this form as it can provide greater autonomy, until things go wrong, at which point the legal DP1 bureaucracy structure kicks back into life. This is not bad faith on the part of the manager; it is the structure asserting itself. The design principle was never changed, so in a crisis, it reasserts the only legitimate authority available. Empowerment in OST terms is not a communication style or a management philosophy; it means the team genuinely controls the coordination and the goals of its own work. That is a structural change, not a cultural one. Announcing empowerment without changing the structure does not create DP2; it creates laissez-faire. The confusion of appearing to have freedom while the real constraints remain exactly where they were, waiting for the next thing to go wrong.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
People resist change
Context: The transformation programme has stalled. Change management consultants are brought in. Their diagnosis is familiar: the organisation has a change resistance problem. People are comfortable with the status quo, risk-averse, and slow to adopt new ways of working. The solution involves communication campaigns, stakeholder management, and training to help people become more comfortable with uncertainty. Leadership frames the resistance as a cultural issue — the organisation needs to become more adaptive. The change programme continues to stall.
OST explains: A survey of the software industry found that 82.6% of people who had not experienced any organisational change were dissatisfied with the lack of it. They wanted change. What people consistently object to is not change itself but having change imposed on them — a completely different thing. When people are invited to participate in designing the change they need to make, the resistance largely disappears because there is nothing to resist; the change is theirs. OST's methods, i.e. the Search Conference and the Participative Design Workshop, are built entirely on this insight. The change management industry, with its stakeholder maps and communication cascades, often reflects a reluctance to involve people in designing their own work. It is treating the symptom of DP1 with more DP1.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changeManagement
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
People resist change
Context: The transformation programme has stalled. Change management consultants are brought in. Their diagnosis is familiar: the organisation has a change resistance problem. People are comfortable with the status quo, risk-averse, and slow to adopt new ways of working. The solution involves communication campaigns, stakeholder management, and training to help people become more comfortable with uncertainty. Leadership frames the resistance as a cultural issue — the organisation needs to become more adaptive. The change programme continues to stall.
OST explains: A survey of the software industry found that 82.6% of people who had not experienced any organisational change were dissatisfied with the lack of it. They wanted change. What people consistently object to is not change itself but having change imposed on them — a completely different thing. When people are invited to participate in designing the change they need to make, the resistance largely disappears because there is nothing to resist; the change is theirs. OST's methods, i.e. the Search Conference and the Participative Design Workshop, are built entirely on this insight. The change management industry, with its stakeholder maps and communication cascades, often reflects a reluctance to involve people in designing their own work. It is treating the symptom of DP1 with more DP1.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changeManagement
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The Sunday email
Context: The organisation has a genuine commitment to work-life balance. It is in the values mentioned in onboarding, and comes up regularly in all-hands meetings. Flexible working is encouraged. Mental health is taken seriously. And then the email arrives. Sunday evening, 21:47, from the director. Not urgent. Just something they wanted to get out of their head. No response expected, of course. Nobody says that, though. By Monday morning, three people have replied. Others noticed and said nothing. Over time, the pattern becomes clear. The people who get ahead are the ones who are always available. The policy says one thing. The calendar says another.
OST explains: In the bureaucratic DP1, the person at the top carries personal responsibility for outcomes they do not fully control. The higher the position, the larger the gap between accountability and agency. That gap produces anxiety, and anxiety produces overwork. Not because leaders are workaholics by nature, but because the structure places an unreasonable individual burden at every level of the hierarchy. The Sunday email is not a character flaw. It is a structural symptom. The deeper problem is that modelled behaviour always outcompetes stated values. People read the environment, not the handbook. What the boss does on Sunday communicates more about what is expected than any well-being policy. In DP2, responsibility is distributed across the group. No single person carries the weight of outcomes alone, so the chronic anxiety that drives performative overwork largely disappears. Work-life balance stops being a value that needs defending and becomes a natural consequence of a structure that does not place impossible individual burdens on anyone. The Sunday email stops because nobody needs to send it.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The customer we never met
Context: The team is building a product. They have a backlog, a product owner, and a roadmap. A user story ap describe what users need. Personas represent who those users are. Analytics track what people do. Every few months, there is a user research report from the UX team. The team works hard, ships regularly, and hits their sprint goals. They have never spoken directly to a customer, though. The product owner does that, and the UX researcher. But the engineers, the people making hundreds of small decisions every day that shape the product, have not. They are building for an abstraction. A persona on a wall, a ticket in Jira, a data point in a dashboard.
OST explains: An open system maintains its health by actively engaging with its environment. For a product team, the primary environment is the people using what they build. The DP1 bureaucracy is a closed system and mediates that relationship through roles: the product owner translates customer needs into requirements, the UX researcher translates behaviour into insights, and the engineer receives the output of both translations. Each translation loses something. The judgment, the context, the friction, the moment when a real person says something that changes how you understand the problem entirely. In DP2, the group owns the whole task, which includes understanding who it is for. Teams with direct customer access make qualitatively different decisions than teams working from second-hand accounts. Not because engineers are better researchers, but because unmediated contact with the environment is not a nice-to-have. For an open system, it is the condition for staying alive.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The collaboration that isn't
Context: Two teams decide to work together. A shared initiative, a joint project, a problem neither can solve alone. There is enthusiasm on both sides, and a genuine excitement about what they might build together. Everyone has a picture in their head of what that looks like and what they want to get out of it, and everyone assumes the others have the same one. Who owns what, and what success looks like for each of them, is left open. Good intentions and regular syncs will be enough. For a while, they are. Then something goes wrong. Credit lands unevenly. Decisions get made by the louder team. One side feels their contribution has been absorbed rather than shared. Trust erodes quietly. The collaboration continues in name but not in spirit.
OST explains: Two teams are two social systems, each with its own purpose, its own design principle, its own internal logic. The shared purpose is assumed rather than agreed upon. There are two clean ways to work across that boundary. A clear transactional relationship: a contract, explicit deliverables, arm's length. Or deliberately create a new, shared system with a common purpose both sides have actually agreed to, a structure for how the collaboration works and is coordinated, and a design principle governing the joint work. What tends to happen instead is neither. The teams proceed as if goodwill substitutes for structure. The result is laissez-faire more often than not. No clear location of responsibility, no purpose anyone has committed to, no shared system. DP1 (bureaucracy) fills the vacuum, as it always does: the team with more power, more visibility, or a stronger brand quietly starts setting the terms. The other finds itself inside someone else's system without ever agreeing to join it. The same dynamic plays out between companies, just with invoices adding a harder edge to the same underlying confusion. The collaboration was real. The shared system never was.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #systemsThinking
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The collaboration that isn't
Context: Two teams decide to work together. A shared initiative, a joint project, a problem neither can solve alone. There is enthusiasm on both sides, and a genuine excitement about what they might build together. Everyone has a picture in their head of what that looks like and what they want to get out of it, and everyone assumes the others have the same one. Who owns what, and what success looks like for each of them, is left open. Good intentions and regular syncs will be enough. For a while, they are. Then something goes wrong. Credit lands unevenly. Decisions get made by the louder team. One side feels their contribution has been absorbed rather than shared. Trust erodes quietly. The collaboration continues in name but not in spirit.
OST explains: Two teams are two social systems, each with its own purpose, its own design principle, its own internal logic. The shared purpose is assumed rather than agreed upon. There are two clean ways to work across that boundary. A clear transactional relationship: a contract, explicit deliverables, arm's length. Or deliberately create a new, shared system with a common purpose both sides have actually agreed to, a structure for how the collaboration works and is coordinated, and a design principle governing the joint work. What tends to happen instead is neither. The teams proceed as if goodwill substitutes for structure. The result is laissez-faire more often than not. No clear location of responsibility, no purpose anyone has committed to, no shared system. DP1 (bureaucracy) fills the vacuum, as it always does: the team with more power, more visibility, or a stronger brand quietly starts setting the terms. The other finds itself inside someone else's system without ever agreeing to join it. The same dynamic plays out between companies, just with invoices adding a harder edge to the same underlying confusion. The collaboration was real. The shared system never was.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #systemsThinking
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The collaboration that isn't
Context: Two teams decide to work together. A shared initiative, a joint project, a problem neither can solve alone. There is enthusiasm on both sides, and a genuine excitement about what they might build together. Everyone has a picture in their head of what that looks like and what they want to get out of it, and everyone assumes the others have the same one. Who owns what, and what success looks like for each of them, is left open. Good intentions and regular syncs will be enough. For a while, they are. Then something goes wrong. Credit lands unevenly. Decisions get made by the louder team. One side feels their contribution has been absorbed rather than shared. Trust erodes quietly. The collaboration continues in name but not in spirit.
OST explains: Two teams are two social systems, each with its own purpose, its own design principle, its own internal logic. The shared purpose is assumed rather than agreed upon. There are two clean ways to work across that boundary. A clear transactional relationship: a contract, explicit deliverables, arm's length. Or deliberately create a new, shared system with a common purpose both sides have actually agreed to, a structure for how the collaboration works and is coordinated, and a design principle governing the joint work. What tends to happen instead is neither. The teams proceed as if goodwill substitutes for structure. The result is laissez-faire more often than not. No clear location of responsibility, no purpose anyone has committed to, no shared system. DP1 (bureaucracy) fills the vacuum, as it always does: the team with more power, more visibility, or a stronger brand quietly starts setting the terms. The other finds itself inside someone else's system without ever agreeing to join it. The same dynamic plays out between companies, just with invoices adding a harder edge to the same underlying confusion. The collaboration was real. The shared system never was.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #systemsThinking