#opensystemstheory — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #opensystemstheory, aggregated by home.social.
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Something has genuinely been gained, though. Thorsrud and Emery described being met with open scepticism in the 1960s: the idea that workers could manage their own work, or would even want to, was widely doubted. That particular argument is over. Nobody today seriously claims that people on the floor are incapable of running their own work. But Thorsrud, twenty years into the project, made a sharper point that still holds: most people had still not understood that self-managing groups, followed all the way, are a frontal attack on the hierarchical and bureaucratic organisation, not a technique that can be adopted inside it. Emery would have put the same point differently: DP2 is not a set of practices layered onto DP1. It is a different genotype, and adopting a few of its features while leaving the genotype untouched changes very little. Progress has been real in what people believe is possible. The diagnosis of what has to change has not caught up.
Agile is not the first movement to discover that the bottom of the hierarchy is broken. It is the latest in a line that has fixed the symptom it could reach, and left the structure that produces it untouched. The coal miners' grandchildren are running retrospectives now, in much the same position: closer to being heard, no closer to the people above them changing anything.
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This argument is explored further in my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now.
https://organisationaldysfunctions.com/#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile
(2/2)
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Becoming Teal
Context: The organisation has read Reinventing Organizations. The leadership team is excited, and a transformation programme begins. Roles replace job titles, advice processes replace approval chains, and purpose workshops are held. Some teams thrive, while others are confused. Middle managers resist, and diffusion stalls. A consultant explains that the organisation is still in Orange and needs more developmental work before it can move to Teal. The leadership team commits to more coaching, more culture work, more patience. The organisation is not becoming Teal. It is becoming better at talking about Teal.
OST explains: Frederic Laloux's Teal model is an organicist framework in Stephen Pepper's sense: it treats organisations as living systems with an inherent developmental trajectory, moving through stages toward a higher form. The metaphor is appealing because it feels alive in a way that org charts do not. But organicism has a blind spot: it locates the explanation inside the organism, in its developmental stage, its readiness. When Teal fails, the diagnosis is always the same: not ready yet, more work to do. OST offers a design principle instead of a developmental stage. DP2 does not require organisational maturity. It requires a structural decision: move responsibility for control and coordination to the people doing the work. Buurtzorg's nurses did not reach a higher stage of consciousness; Jos de Blok made a structural decision about coordination in home nursing in the Netherlands (though one confined to the operational level, since Buurtzorg's own management was never redesigned the same way, so it falls short of a complete DP2 structure too). A structural choice, unlike a stage of consciousness, can be examined and made again elsewhere. The context is not transferable. The principle is. Teal describes an organism growing toward its potential. DP2 describes an open system adapting to its field. One explanation looks inward. The other looks at the relationship between the system and where it lives.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #teal
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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
We transformed, our suppliers didn't
Context: The organisation has transformed. Product teams own their work end-to-end. Self-managing groups coordinate without escalating. Then comes the enterprise SaaS contract. The vendor is large, well-regarded, and the product is good enough. The problem is everything around it. Feature requests go into a global backlog prioritised by the vendor's roadmap, not by the customer's needs. The support model is tiered, ticket-based, and optimised for volume, not for teams that expect a direct conversation. Every interface between the organisation and this vendor is built for a different kind of customer. The transformation stopped at the boundary.
OST explains: Emery and Trist observed in 1965 that in turbulent environments, individual organisations cannot adapt successfully through their own direct actions alone. J. Robins & Sons shows what happens when an organisation transforms itself but ignores everything around it. The Australian shoe manufacturer transformed itself completely, becoming the only large footwear manufacturer left in the country, competing with India and China without moving jobs offshore. Its supplier ecosystem, still optimised for the volume customers that had moved to Asia, could not support the change. The ecosystem became unstable, and J. Robins went down with it. The SaaS vendor in the context is not an existential threat, but the pattern is the same: a DP2 organisation inside a DP1 ecosystem, where every adaptive relationship built internally keeps colliding with partners who have not changed at all. de Guerre and Aughton call this the missing link. The ecosystem members remain separate organisations, and their relationships do not become adaptive by goodwill or proximity alone. The internal transformation was the right move. It was not the last one.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #partnerManagement
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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Divided for efficiency
Context: The workshop has twenty people and a full agenda. The facilitator divides the room into four groups of five, each working a different question in parallel. After ninety minutes, one person from each group presents a summary. The room acknowledges the outputs. A synthesis document appears a week later. Most people cannot clearly recall what they agreed to, or why — only that it was their group's table, not the others'.
OST explains: The reasoning behind the split is familiar: smaller groups work faster, everyone gets air time, parallel processing covers more ground. What it misses is that shared understanding cannot be transferred by a summary. It is something the group builds together, in real time, by working through difference. A summary tells you what another group concluded. It does not tell you the reasoning behind it, or the alternatives that were set aside. The integration cost is the whole conversation the groups never had. The Search Conference avoids this. The group works as a whole on the tasks that matter. Where subgroups are used at all, it is for two specific structural reasons: when the group is too large to work effectively as one, or when there are clear power imbalances and dominant voices need to be separated to allow others to be heard. Even then, integration is the main event. Where factions already exist, the split can surface them quickly and deliberately, and rationalisation of conflict becomes the tool for working through what the groups found. The crack is brought into the open, not papered over. Standard workshop facilitation splits for efficiency and hopes the outputs add up. The Search Conference splits only when the group cannot otherwise function, and treats the return to the whole as the most important part of the process.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #facilitation
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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Ny bloggpost, denne gang på norsk og på de nye Capra-sidene våre. Temaet denne gangen er en utfordring mange kanskje kjenner til, nemlig at #TeamTopologies ikke nødvendigvis gir ønsket effekt. Jeg bruker #OpenSystemsTheory til å gi en forklaring på hvorfor.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Matrices
Context: A developer has two managers. One is the engineering manager, responsible for their career, skills, and performance review. The other is the product owner, who sets their daily priorities and decides what they work on. This week the product owner needs a feature shipped by Friday. The engineering manager has scheduled the same developer for a training course on Thursday, booked months ago. Neither manager asked the other. The developer waits to see which one backs down.
OST explains: The matrix is one of the most common attempts to get the benefits of both DP1 and DP2 at once. The functional hierarchy provides control, career structure, and professional identity; the cross-functional team provides collaboration and delivery. But DP1 and DP2 are not compatible at the genotypical level. Two sources of authority over the same person produce exactly the confusion, political navigation, and accountability gaps matrix organisations are known for. Fred Emery called the matrix a mini bureaucracy. He wrote about project leaders; the same argument holds for product owners, or anyone else placed at the intersection of two hierarchies. The cells are supposed to take values independently of each other, but they cannot, because whoever holds that deciding role is never independent of the rest of the system. The role becomes the focus of inter-professional competition, and administration ends up taking sides to defend its own authority. Task orientation ends up no better than in an ordinary bureaucracy, because whether the right priorities win out is secondary to which side wins the internal power game. Emery was blunt about the ceiling on this: the coordination and motivation a matrix is supposed to produce require a strong shared commitment to override professional self-interest, and that condition cannot be manufactured by the structure itself. Only self-managing groups can produce it. The developer with two managers is not badly managed. They are correctly managed by two incompatible systems at once.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #matrix
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
What the war room proves
Context: The payment service goes down at 2am. Within minutes, an incident channel is spun up with people from three teams. For the next ninety minutes, whoever is in that channel has full authority to decide what to try, coordinate with whomever they need, and act without asking anyone above them for approval. It gets fixed faster than almost anything else the organisation does. By 4am the channel is archived. Everyone returns to the structure where none of that authority exists, and the person who diagnosed the root cause spends the next three days getting sign-off to actually fix it,.
OST explains: The war room is a concept that should not need to exist. Its existence is the evidence: the organisation has a name and a procedure for temporarily switching to DP2, which means it already knows DP2 works and knows exactly what it looks like. It reserves this mode for the moments when the cost of DP1 is most visible and least tolerable, then reverts as soon as the pressure lifts. The structure that performs best under pressure is treated as an exception. The structure that performs worse under normal conditions is the default. Placing control and coordination with the people doing the work is not something incidents require, and everyday work does not. It is something every kind of work would benefit from, not only the kind that is on fire. The organisation has already built the proof. It just refuses to draw the conclusion when nothing is on fire.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #incidents
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This post is part of the Organisational Dysfunction of the Day series. Full list here: https://lnkd.in/e_CF_zEK
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
"Sociotechnical" carries the weight of seven decades of research into work, coordination, and organisational design. Using it to mean "teams own their architecture" leaves out almost everything the tradition actually studied: who decides, what the work does to the people doing it, and how the organisation relates to what surrounds it.
The question is not whether the term should be abandoned. It is whether we are ready to look past the part of it that fits neatly into an architecture diagram, to what the term originally covered.
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This argument is explored further in my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now. http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #architecture
(2/2)
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Hired from above
Context: The team is behind. The deadline is real and the backlog is not shrinking fast enough. Management wants to help. A decision is made to bring in a consultant, someone experienced, available quickly, and with the right skills on paper. The team hears about it when the contract is already signed. The new person joins on Monday. The team now has to onboard them, explain the codebase, the context, the decisions made six months ago and why, the unwritten rules, the ongoing tensions. The work does not stop while this happens. Two weeks in, the team is further behind than before. Management considers hiring another consultant.
OST explains: Who is in a group is the most fundamental design decision a group can make. In DP2, self-managing groups control their own composition, who joins, when, at what pace, and how new members are integrated. It is a prerequisite for the group to function as a coherent unit, not a privilege. In DP1, hiring is a management function located above the team. The team is a set of roles to be filled, and filling them is somebody else's job. The consultant dropped in under deadline pressure is the extreme version of this. Brooks' Law, adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, is one of the best-known observations in software development. It is broken routinely, by well-meaning people, for structural reasons OST can name. The same dynamic operates in every organisation where teams have no meaningful say in who works alongside them. At best they get to interview candidates and offer an opinion. The decision is made elsewhere. In OST terms, the group that cannot design its own membership cannot fully own its own work. The onboarding cost that Brooks identified is primarily a social system problem, not a knowledge transfer problem. A new person disrupts the group's established patterns of coordination and trust. Those patterns take time to rebuild, and they cannot be rebuilt on demand or to somebody else's schedule. The consultant who eventually left had never really joined.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #recruitment
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The values on the wall
Context: The organisation has values. They were developed in a workshop eighteen months ago, facilitated by a consultant. People wrote on post-its, and the output was synthesised into five words: Courage, Trust, Impact, Collaboration, Excellence. They are on the website, in the onboarding deck, framed in reception. Leadership references them in all-hands. A few people have them in their Slack profiles and email signatures. Most people cannot name all five without looking. None of this is unusual. It is, in fact, the standard outcome.
OST explains: Fred Emery identified shared values as the only viable coordination mechanism for organisations in turbulent environments, conditions where the complexity of change exceeds what any hierarchy can process. In Towards a Social Ecology (1972), he and Trist made the argument precise: in Type IV, individual organisations can no longer adapt through direct action alone, and what holds a field together is the emergence of values with overriding significance across the whole system. Emery went further in Futures We're In (1977), distinguishing between values, which are context-bound preferences, and ideals, which are ends that can always be approached but never fully reached. These are not words a leadership team selects; they are already present in everyone, and what lets people adapt together is recognising ideals they already hold in common, not agreeing to five words someone else chose for them. Values guide behaviour; ideals are what people strive toward. The values on the wall were specified: a consultant ran the workshop, leadership signed off on the wording, and the result was handed down the same way a policy is handed down. Values that arrive that way carry the DP1 filter with them, weighted by the sender's position rather than by what they mean to the people expected to live by them. You cannot laminate your way to shared direction. The organisation gets five words. It does not get an ideal anyone is actually seeking.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #values
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The blind decision
Context: The organisation is replacing the system that runs its core operations. A large evaluation project is set in motion: people from the floor who use the current system every day, specialists who understand the technical requirements, a project lead who coordinates the process. Options are assessed, vendors are interviewed, workshops are run. Three candidates emerge. The team prepares a thorough brief, comparing each option across every relevant dimension, and presents it to the CTO with a clear recommendation. The CTO reads it, asks a few questions, and signs off. Everyone moves on. Later, someone wonders what the CTO actually decided.
OST explains: In DP1, formal authority over decisions rises with seniority. By the time a decision of this scale reaches the top, the real judgements have been made by the people who understand the domain. The CTO cannot override a well-argued recommendation from a cross-functional team without triggering a political crisis. They can ask questions, request revisions, delay. But the substance of the decision is beyond their reach, because the knowledge required to make it sits below them in the hierarchy. Herbst, who worked alongside Fred Emery, described this systematically: in DP1, the higher the level, the more purely a person becomes a decision-maker without tasks to perform; the lower the level, the more purely an executor without decisions to make. The decision authority and the decision knowledge are in different places, and the hierarchy ensures they stay there. The CTO signs for an organisation that has already decided.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Playing politics
Context: Getting things done requires knowing the right people. Decisions that should be straightforward end up depending on who you know, who owes whom a favour, and who has the ear of which senior leader. People learn quickly that the formal process is not really how things work. Some become skilled at navigating this; others find it exhausting and demoralising. Everyone knows it is happening. Nobody talks about it directly.
OST explains: Political behaviour in organisations is a structural output, not a personality trait. When formal authority is concentrated at the top and resources are scarce and competed for, informal influence becomes the only reliable way to get things done. People are being sensible given the system they are in. OST shows that this pattern is a direct consequence of the hierarchy of personal dominance, where power over others is the primary currency. Herbst, who worked alongside Fred Emery, put it directly: the bureaucratic model may not allow an organisation to function and survive without the development of informal practices and relationships. The informal network is what the system requires to work at all. DP2 removes the precondition: when coordination belongs to the group, there is no concentration of authority worth lobbying.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #bureaucracy
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The bureaucracy that became the work
Context: You track your time. Not because you want to, not because anyone measured your productivity, but because the organisation requires it. Every hour logged against a project code, every meeting justified by a deliverable, every decision documented for the record. By the end of the week, a significant part of your time has gone into reporting on time, attending governance meetings, preparing status updates, and getting approvals for things that have already been decided. You were hired to design systems. You spend most of your time administering the administration. The work is still there somewhere, but it is no longer what the day is actually about.
OST explains: Herbst, who worked alongside Fred Emery, is direct about this. Treating bureaucratic structure as the only way to organise work has a central consequence: the structure stops serving the task; the task serves the structure. As the internal turbulence and costs of DP1 increase, the organisation's actual work slips into the background and becomes a boundary condition for maintaining the bureaucratic structure. Parkinson described the mechanism in 1955: administrative work expands to fill available time, officials create work for each other, and the apparatus grows regardless of the work. The reporting, the governance meetings, the approval rounds are the cost of the structure, not the cost of the work. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The work happens around it.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #bureaucracy
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
The architecture problem Inverse Conway is trying to solve is real. Conway's observation is correct. But the prescription assumes you can change one internal variable and have the system reconfigure around it. Organisations are not like that. The boundaries between team structure, hierarchy, budget authority and career development are not separate things you can redesign in isolation. They are the same structure, expressed in different forms.
If your Conway problem is deep enough to matter, the team chart is the least of it.
In a DP2 organisation, with its self-managing teams, this is close to trivial. The genotype has changed. The phenotype can take many forms without threatening the underlying design principle. In a DP1 organisation, you are forcing a DP2 phenotype onto a DP1 genotype. The form changes; the logic underneath does not. And the logic always wins.
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This argument is explored further in my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #ConwaysLaw
(2/2)
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The IT-business divide
Context: The product organisation and IT have been working more closely together. There are shared ceremonies, embedded engineers in product teams, and a product manager attached to the platform group. The collaboration is better than it was. The roadmap is still owned by product. The technical decisions are still owned by IT. The budgets are still separate. Nobody is measured on whether the combination produces value for the business.
OST explains: DP1 separates the people who understand the technology from the people who understand the market, and places coordination above both. The division runs deeper than team ceremonies or embedded engineers can reach: ownership of the roadmap, ownership of the technical decisions, and the budgets that govern both remain separate. What a CPO and a CIO cannot integrate separately, a CEO cannot hold alone. In DP2, the integration happens where the complexity lives: either through multi-skilled groups where that is possible, or through shared coordination among specialists as peers, with the CEO as a boundary rider facing outward toward the environment. The IT-business divide survives every transformation that stops short of a complete change of design principle.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #IT
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Everything is fine
Context: The quarterly review goes well. The numbers are slightly below target but the explanations are solid, the mitigations are in place, and the overall message is positive. Leadership leaves the room feeling informed. Six months later something fails badly — a deadline missed, a client lost, a system down. The post-mortem reveals that the warning signs were there for over a year. People knew. Reports were written. Concerns were raised. Somewhere between the team and the boardroom, the picture changed. Nobody lied exactly. Everything was technically accurate. The information just arrived differently than it left.
OST explains: Project managers call it watermelon reporting: green on the outside, red on the inside. The term is widely recognised but the cause rarely is. Emery and Emery described it as the filter and amplifier system of DP1: a status gap between communicants creates an inherently unstable medium, always ready to amplify or attenuate messages in ways that have nothing to do with a truthful correspondence of source events and message. The mechanism runs in both directions. Upward, inferiors distort communications to make themselves look good, make competitors look bad, or simply avoid delivering news that will make the next conversation harder. Failing to inform is a powerful way of waging organisational war, vertically as well as horizontally. Downward, superiors often prefer not to know what they cannot act on, or request reports precisely because requesting them looks responsible — regardless of what the reports contain. The result is that the higher up you are in a DP1 structure, the more confident you are, and the further from reality. In DP2, where people share accountability for outcomes and have no structural reason to shade the truth, accurate and timely feedback is in everyone's interest. The filter does not disappear because people become more honest. It disappears because the structure that created it does.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #bureaucracy
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The facilitator's toolkit
Context: The facilitator is experienced and well-prepared. The workshop opens with an icebreaker to warm up the room. Post-its go up on the walls. Groups rotate through stations. After lunch, there is an energiser to lift the energy back. Priorities are set by dot voting. The debrief is structured and timed. Every element has been chosen carefully. The facilitator is skilled, the tools are familiar, and the day runs smoothly. The outputs are adequate. Something harder to name is missing. Participants were present but not quite in it. The facilitator reflects on which tools to adjust for next time.
OST explains: Every tool in the toolkit carries an implicit answer to the most important question in the room: who owns this? The facilitator who opens with an icebreaker, directs the post-it debrief, calls the energiser, and closes the dot vote is the one who owns it, regardless of how collaborative the tools feel. Merrelyn Emery was precise on this: most facilitation tools come from the first educational paradigm, which is DP1-based, and introducing them into a workshop that is trying to be DP2 does not produce a hybrid; it produces confusion about who has control, and Bion's defences activate in response. The participants arrived willing to work. The toolkit told them, before the first exercise was finished, that they were not in a self-managing space. They adjusted accordingly. Dependency and flight are not failures of engagement; they are accurate readings of the design principle actually operating in the room. The toolkit is not the problem. The design principle operating in the room is.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #facilitation
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub. Link in the comments.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The code review that became personal
Context: The pull request has been open for two days. Then the review arrives. The technical points are mostly valid, but the tone is not. "This is needlessly complex." "Why would anyone do it this way?" One comment just says "no." The author responds defensively. The reviewer doubles down. What started as a code review is now something else. A senior developer steps in to mediate. The PR eventually gets merged, but something lingers. The two avoid each other in standups. Their next code review goes the same way. After a few rounds, everyone on the team knows: do not assign those two to the same work. It gets filed under personality clash and left there.
OST explains: Merrelyn Emery documented a pattern that most managers find difficult to believe until they see it: the same people who have chronic personality conflicts in a DP1 structure find that those conflicts attenuate, and often disappear entirely, when the structure changes to DP2. Not because they have been through therapy or learned to communicate better, but because the structural conditions that were amplifying their differences have been removed. In DP1, asymmetry, egocentrism, and the 'them and us' syndrome create a hothouse where small personality differences are consistently magnified. Every interaction carries status implications. Every difference in style is filtered through a competitive lens. The same qualities that create conflict in that environment – directness, caution, and pace – are simply differences in a DP2 structure where people share accountability for outcomes and have no structural reason to compete. The personality conflict that felt permanent was structural all along. The people were not the problem. They were the symptom.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #conflict
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The leadership team that isn't
Context: The leadership team meets every two weeks. There is an agenda, usually too long, and a chair, usually the CEO. Each member presents an update from their function: engineering, product, finance, people, sales. Questions are asked. Decisions are deferred or made by the CEO. Between meetings, coordination happens in bilateral conversations, Slack threads, and corridor agreements that not everyone is party to. When something cuts across functions, it lands on the CEO's desk because there is no other place for it. The leadership team is, in practice, a reporting structure with a round table.
OST explains: At the strategic level, full multiskilling is not always possible; it depends on the nature of the work. Where specialisation makes multiskilling impossible, the basic DP2 module is modified: control over specialist domains remains with the individual, but responsibility for coordination and shared goals belongs to the group as a whole. The dysfunction occurs when one or more members stop coordinating with the others. When that happens, the CEO has to step in and resolve it. Sometimes the coordination breaks down because the strategic goals are out of date and need renewing. The difference between a leadership team and a collection of functional heads is whether they have goals that none of them can achieve alone, and whether they coordinate as peers to meet them.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Four weeks, four essays. If you missed any of them over the summer:
— "We already know what's wrong", why the field is full of frameworks that name dysfunctions accurately but cannot explain why they keep returning: https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116883048919772572
— "OST is just structuralism", why that objection is wrong, and why DP2 is more genuinely poststructuralist than most theories that claim that label: https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116922582715829787
— "The three-layer dynamic", why pilots succeed, middles freeze, and copies fail, and what that means for anyone trying to change an organisation: https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116962319921602460
— "OST neglects the individual", why that objection is wrong, and where the individual actually sits in a theory built around groups and structural outputs: https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/117002059118474265The dysfunctions are back tomorrow. The series is now past sixty entries and still going. New entries will make their way into v1.1 of the book in September.
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The objection gets the theory backwards. OST identifies, more carefully than most, what the individual actually needs to develop, to belong, and to matter. It is only in DP2-based structures that people can be fully themselves at work.
The question was never whether the individual matters. The question is which structure lets them.
***
Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains is out now.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Every time an organisation tries to democratise its work, the same three-layer dynamic plays out.
The first layer is the people closest to the experiment. They work hard, they believe in it, and results follow. The pilot succeeds. The case study is written up. Leadership is encouraged.
The second layer is the people one step removed — the middle of the organisation, the managers and coordinators who were not part of the experiment. Something odd happens here. They do not actively oppose the change. They slow it down, quietly, without quite meaning to. Their formal role has lost its purpose, but nothing has replaced it. They are neither coordinating in the old bureaucratic way nor participating as peers in the new one. OST calls it paradoxical inhibition: the structural response of a layer that has been made redundant without being redesigned. The frozen middle is not a people problem. It is what happens when the design principle changes in one layer and not the others.
The third layer is the people furthest out — other organisations watching. They see the success story. They copy the topology, the roles, the vocabulary. They do not see the structural conditions that produced the results because those are invisible from the outside. The Spotify model spread across the industry this way. Team Topologies is spreading the same way now. Both describe what good looks like. Neither changes the design principle underneath. The copies produce the original's surface without its substance.
All three layers follow structurally from the same thing. The pilot works because DP2 conditions were created locally. The middle freezes because DP1 remains intact above and around it. The copies fail because the form is adopted without the principle.
The only way to avoid the pilot trap is not to pilot. OST methods are designed to change the whole system at once, for exactly this reason. You cannot sneak DP2 past DP1 one team at a time.
Three dysfunctions from the book cover a layer each: The pilot trap (https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116696304124043996), The frozen middle (https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116475267077470990), and Team Topologies, the wrong way round (https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116594341102988605).
www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/
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v1.01 of Organisational Dysfunctions is out today.
The three summer essays — «We already know what's wrong», «OST is just structuralism», and «The three-layer dynamic» — are now in the book as part of a restructured Intermezzo. Part Two and Part Three have been substantially updated, and the glossary has grown with entries for Unique Designs, Human ideals, and Maladaptive responses.
No entries have been added or changed. The sixty-three dysfunctions are still the sixty-three dysfunctions. For now.
v1.1 is planned for September, ahead of KanDDDinsky in October. New entries, more essays, and further updates to the theoretical framework. The series keeps going, and so will the book.
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DP2 is actually more genuinely poststructuralist than most theories that claim that label. Poststructuralism insists that meaning and order are not given by a fixed system above the actors, but are continuously negotiated within and through their relations. DP2 makes exactly that claim, and then operationalises it. Order is not imposed from above. It emerges from within, continuously, as part of the work itself.
OST does not tell you what your organisation should look like. It tells you where responsibility should sit, and then asks the people involved to figure out the rest. A condition for self-determination, not a blueprint. Contextualism, not mechanism.
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This argument is explored further in my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Merrelyn Emery just released a retrospective on the infamous '65 causal texture paper, showing how impactful it has been to our understanding of systems and their environment.
"Fifty Years On: The Far Reaching Consequences of The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments"
https://www.socialsciencethatactuallyworks.com/wp-content/uploads/documents/ost-environments-and-the-future/Fifty%20Years%20On%20-%20The%20Far%20Reaching%20Consequences%20of%20The%20Causal%20Texture%20of%20Organizational%20Environments%20-%202026.pdf
#OpenSystemsTheory -
The same is true of the longer lists. Gossip, turf wars, taking undue credit, paranoia, isolation: every item is the individually rational response to a structure where people are organised as replaceable parts with no structural stake in each other's success.
This is not a criticism of Lencioni. The maps are accurate. What they lack is a theory of the territory. OST is not another list. It is the explanation for why the lists keep describing the same things, in the same organisations, decade after decade, regardless of which intervention was tried last time.
If the dysfunctions are people problems, you fix them with better people or better behaviour. If they are structural outputs, you fix them by changing the structure. The intervention is completely different depending on which explanation you accept. The lists do not tell you which it is. OST does.
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This argument is the foundation of my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now. http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The agenda that sabotaged itself
Context: The agenda looked good on paper. An opening keynote to align everyone on context, small group work to generate ideas, a panel of senior leaders to react and give feedback, and then a vote to prioritise. Energy is high at the start. The keynote is engaging. The groups work well for an hour. Then the panel arrives, and something shifts. Questions become pointed. A few people go quiet. The vote produces winners and losers rather than consensus. By the time people leave, the energy has curdled. The facilitator was experienced. The participants came in good faith. Nobody can quite explain what happened.
OST explains: What the agenda described was a textbook Mixed Mode event: a structure that alternates between DP1 and DP2 within the same session. The keynote is DP1: an expert transmits to an audience. The group work is DP2: participants own the task. The panel reinstates DP1: authority figures evaluate what the groups produced. Merrelyn Emery was precise on this: mixed mode is not a synthesis or a balance between the design principles. Every time the design principle shifts within a session, it disrupts the group’s sense of who is responsible, and Bion’s basic assumptions are triggered fresh. The keynote primes dependency. The group work briefly generates genuine creative work. The panel reactivates hierarchy and invites fight or flight. This is not bad luck, and it is not a facilitation problem. It is the structural consequence of building incompatible design principles into the same event. The only reliable path is a workshop that stays on one design principle throughout. Prevention is straightforward. Recovery, once the room has turned, rarely is. The problem is not in the room. It is on the agenda.
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Most organisations are trying to fix the wrong things.
🎉 Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains is out today!
This book is written for developers and architects who have felt the friction without the language to describe it, for team leads and agile coaches who have watched transformation programmes produce the opposite of what they promised, and for managers and executives who have invested in change and wondered why so little of it stuck.
Most lists of dysfunctions catalogue symptoms and suggest interventions for each one separately. This is a different kind of argument: one core explanatory mechanism that produces all of the symptoms, and one structural change that removes them.
Foreword by Merrelyn Emery, co-developer of Open Systems Theory, and Alexandra Stokes, author of Empowered Agile Transformation.
Diagnosis before treatment. Most organisations skip the first step.
For anyone who has ever sat in a meeting and known exactly why it was failing, but not had the language for it.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Rearranging the furniture
Context: The organisation wants to improve engagement. HR runs a job design initiative. Roles are reviewed and enriched: more variety, clearer ownership, better learning opportunities, stronger feedback loops. Individual development plans are updated. Some people respond well. The numbers improve slightly. A few years later, the same initiative runs again under a different name. The underlying dynamic has not changed. People are still doing work defined by someone else, in structures designed by someone else, toward goals set by someone else. The enrichment made the cage more comfortable. The cage is still there.
OST explains: This is not a new experiment. The Norwegian Industrial Democracy Programme in the 1960s, in which Fred Emery played a central role, tested exactly this. Job enrichment worked in some contexts, particularly where the technology and task structure allowed individual roles to be redesigned meaningfully. But it consistently produced weaker results than the alternative: groups that collectively designed their own work. The critical distinction is not how much autonomy a person is given. It is who defines the work in the first place. In job enrichment, management or HR redesigns the individual role. The person receives a better-designed job. In a self-managing team as understood in OST, the group designs its own work, its own coordination, its own goals. Nobody hands it down. The six psychological requirements for productive work, things like genuine learning, real decision-making, and meaningful social support, can be partially addressed by enriching individual jobs. They are fully addressed only when the group owns the design of its work. Job enrichment is a DP1 solution applied to a DP1 problem. It improves the parts without changing the system.