#orgdesign — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #orgdesign, aggregated by home.social.
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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
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 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
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
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 -
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.
***
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)
-
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.
***
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
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
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 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 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/ -
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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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. DP2 is the structural condition under which 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/ -
The objection gets the theory backwards. OST identifies, more carefully than most, what the individual actually needs to develop, to belong, and to matter. DP2 is the structural condition under which 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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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.
-
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.
***
This argument is explored further in my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
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.
***
This argument is explored further in my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Die Effizienzgewinne von Zentralisierung in Organisationen werden in der Regel aufgefressen von den Reibungsverlusten zusätzlicher Schnittstellen und Übergaben.
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Die Effizienzgewinne von Zentralisierung in Organisationen werden in der Regel aufgefressen von den Reibungsverlusten zusätzlicher Schnittstellen und Übergaben.
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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.
***
This argument is the foundation of my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now. http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign
(2/2)
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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.
***
This argument is the foundation of my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now. http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign
(2/2)
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Most companies have AI pilots. Few can scale them.
The difference isn't technology. It's organizational discipline.
We built a free 10-minute self-assessment across 5 dimensions: strategic coherence, organizational enablement, platform governance, staff readiness, and adaptive learning.
Take it. See where you actually stand.
https://scorecard.joaorosa.consulting/is-your-company-ready-to-scale-ai -
Most companies have AI pilots. Few can scale them.
The difference isn't technology. It's organizational discipline.
We built a free 10-minute self-assessment across 5 dimensions: strategic coherence, organizational enablement, platform governance, staff readiness, and adaptive learning.
Take it. See where you actually stand.
https://scorecard.joaorosa.consulting/is-your-company-ready-to-scale-ai -
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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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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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.
-
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.
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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.
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This made my day.
Someone read the dysfunctions series, found it useful as an internal compass against bias and instinct, built it into a Claude skill, and shipped it to their company AI hub.
That is exactly what the series is for. Not a framework to implement, but a lens to think with.
Sigurd even made an open version, attributed to the series, for anyone who wants it: https://github.com/sorensensig/organisational-dysfunction
If you build something on top of this work, I would love to hear about it.
-
This made my day.
Someone read the dysfunctions series, found it useful as an internal compass against bias and instinct, built it into a Claude skill, and shipped it to their company AI hub.
That is exactly what the series is for. Not a framework to implement, but a lens to think with.
Sigurd even made an open version, attributed to the series, for anyone who wants it: https://github.com/sorensensig/organisational-dysfunction
If you build something on top of this work, I would love to hear about it.
-
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The output nobody owned
Context: The workshop uses post-its. Everyone writes, sticks them up, and the facilitator clusters them into themes. By the end of the day, there are hundreds of them on the wall. Even the plenary review, where the groups walk through their output together, cannot hold it all. Participants follow for the first twenty minutes, then the sheer volume overtakes their capacity to track. Something you wrote is up there somewhere. Whether it survived the clustering, whether it was merged into something adjacent or simply lost in the mass, you cannot tell. The facilitator synthesises. The output looks clean. The trust in it is thinner than it looks.
OST explains: Solomon Asch identified four conditions that must be present for communication to actually work: openness, basic psychological similarity, a mutually shared field, and trust. The last is a product of the first three. Post-its structurally undermine the first and third. They can be removed, merged, reworded, or lost without detection. The field is no longer shared and open; it is curated, and everyone in the room senses this even when they cannot name it. The Search Conference tradition addresses this with deliberate bluntness: everything goes on large sheets of paper fixed to the walls, written in full view, staying there for the entire event. Nothing is summarised by a facilitator. Groups consolidate their own work before it is brought to the plenary, so the authors are present when it is presented and can verify it. The open record is not a formality; it is the mechanism by which trust accumulates. Merrelyn Emery called butchers' paper the ultimate guarantee of openness, precisely because it is virtually impossible to change without the room noticing. The post-it is convenient. It is also the perfect tool for a workshop where nobody quite trusts the output and nobody can explain why.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The output nobody owned
Context: The workshop uses post-its. Everyone writes, sticks them up, and the facilitator clusters them into themes. By the end of the day, there are hundreds of them on the wall. Even the plenary review, where the groups walk through their output together, cannot hold it all. Participants follow for the first twenty minutes, then the sheer volume overtakes their capacity to track. Something you wrote is up there somewhere. Whether it survived the clustering, whether it was merged into something adjacent or simply lost in the mass, you cannot tell. The facilitator synthesises. The output looks clean. The trust in it is thinner than it looks.
OST explains: Solomon Asch identified four conditions that must be present for communication to actually work: openness, basic psychological similarity, a mutually shared field, and trust. The last is a product of the first three. Post-its structurally undermine the first and third. They can be removed, merged, reworded, or lost without detection. The field is no longer shared and open; it is curated, and everyone in the room senses this even when they cannot name it. The Search Conference tradition addresses this with deliberate bluntness: everything goes on large sheets of paper fixed to the walls, written in full view, staying there for the entire event. Nothing is summarised by a facilitator. Groups consolidate their own work before it is brought to the plenary, so the authors are present when it is presented and can verify it. The open record is not a formality; it is the mechanism by which trust accumulates. Merrelyn Emery called butchers' paper the ultimate guarantee of openness, precisely because it is virtually impossible to change without the room noticing. The post-it is convenient. It is also the perfect tool for a workshop where nobody quite trusts the output and nobody can explain why.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The corridor conversation
Context: The meeting goes smoothly. Nobody challenges the proposal, nobody raises the obvious concern, nobody points out that this is the third time the same idea has been tried. Afterwards, in the corridor or on Slack, people say exactly what they did not say in the room. They knew the plan was flawed. They chose not to say so. Some are protecting their chances of promotion. Some have simply learned that speaking up costs more than it is worth. Some genuinely like their manager and do not want to make things awkward. The result is the same: the people with the most operational knowledge stay quiet, and the people with the least make the decisions.
OST explains: This is Bion’s basic assumptions in one of their most common forms: dependency and flight. In a DP1 structure, the career of the person below is genuinely in the hands of the person above, so rational people learn to manage upward: agreeing, deferring, smoothing things over rather than challenging. The underlying mechanism is asymmetry, one of the three characteristic features of communication in DP1 (the others being egocentrism and a persistent them-and-us divide), where orders flow down, and responses flow up with no real conversation between equals; it is the communication pattern of an operator and a machine, and it is no coincidence people in these structures describe themselves as cogs. Over time, this becomes habitual and unconscious: the people who should be providing the most useful feedback have the most to lose from doing so. In DP2, where all communications are negotiations between peers, the asymmetry dissolves. People speak because the goal is shared and accountability is mutual, not because they have been told it is safe to do so.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The corridor conversation
Context: The meeting goes smoothly. Nobody challenges the proposal, nobody raises the obvious concern, nobody points out that this is the third time the same idea has been tried. Afterwards, in the corridor or on Slack, people say exactly what they did not say in the room. They knew the plan was flawed. They chose not to say so. Some are protecting their chances of promotion. Some have simply learned that speaking up costs more than it is worth. Some genuinely like their manager and do not want to make things awkward. The result is the same: the people with the most operational knowledge stay quiet, and the people with the least make the decisions.
OST explains: This is Bion’s basic assumptions in one of their most common forms: dependency and flight. In a DP1 structure, the career of the person below is genuinely in the hands of the person above, so rational people learn to manage upward: agreeing, deferring, smoothing things over rather than challenging. The underlying mechanism is asymmetry, one of the three characteristic features of communication in DP1 (the others being egocentrism and a persistent them-and-us divide), where orders flow down, and responses flow up with no real conversation between equals; it is the communication pattern of an operator and a machine, and it is no coincidence people in these structures describe themselves as cogs. Over time, this becomes habitual and unconscious: the people who should be providing the most useful feedback have the most to lose from doing so. In DP2, where all communications are negotiations between peers, the asymmetry dissolves. People speak because the goal is shared and accountability is mutual, not because they have been told it is safe to do so.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The short-termism machine
Context: The organisation says it is playing the long game. The strategy deck has a five-year horizon. The values mention sustainability, legacy, and purpose. And yet every significant decision bends toward the next quarter. Investment in capability gets deferred. Technical debt accumulates. People are restructured rather than developed. The leaders who make these decisions are not cynical or short-sighted by nature; they are responding rationally to the incentive structure they operate within. Their position, their bonus, and their reputation are all measured on timescales that do not reward patience. When they leave, the consequences follow someone else.
OST explains: Short-termism in DP1 is not a governance failure or a cultural problem. It is a structural output. Individual leaders at the top of a hierarchy optimise for their own tenure and their own metrics. The organisation's long-term health and its personal incentives are only accidentally aligned. Boards try to fix this with longer vesting periods, clawback clauses, and ESG targets, patching the incentive structure without changing the underlying design. In DP2, self-managing groups operate at all levels, including the strategic. A group that collectively owns the purpose and the outcomes does not have the same exit incentives as an individual executive. Nobody in the group is positioning for the next job. The consequences of decisions stay with the people who made them. That is not a guarantee of wisdom, but it is a fundamentally different relationship with time. Dee Hock built VISA as something close to this and described the result as an organisation that could outlast any individual within it. Short-termism is not human nature. It is what DP1 selects for.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The short-termism machine
Context: The organisation says it is playing the long game. The strategy deck has a five-year horizon. The values mention sustainability, legacy, and purpose. And yet every significant decision bends toward the next quarter. Investment in capability gets deferred. Technical debt accumulates. People are restructured rather than developed. The leaders who make these decisions are not cynical or short-sighted by nature; they are responding rationally to the incentive structure they operate within. Their position, their bonus, and their reputation are all measured on timescales that do not reward patience. When they leave, the consequences follow someone else.
OST explains: Short-termism in DP1 is not a governance failure or a cultural problem. It is a structural output. Individual leaders at the top of a hierarchy optimise for their own tenure and their own metrics. The organisation's long-term health and its personal incentives are only accidentally aligned. Boards try to fix this with longer vesting periods, clawback clauses, and ESG targets, patching the incentive structure without changing the underlying design. In DP2, self-managing groups operate at all levels, including the strategic. A group that collectively owns the purpose and the outcomes does not have the same exit incentives as an individual executive. Nobody in the group is positioning for the next job. The consequences of decisions stay with the people who made them. That is not a guarantee of wisdom, but it is a fundamentally different relationship with time. Dee Hock built VISA as something close to this and described the result as an organisation that could outlast any individual within it. Short-termism is not human nature. It is what DP1 selects for.
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The dysfunctions in this series of mine are set in software organisations. Standups, retrospectives, backlogs, and agile transformations. That is the world I work in, and where the examples are most concrete.
However, the underlying structural patterns are not really about software. Nor work.
A retrospective that produces lists nobody acts on is not a Scrum problem. It is what happens when the people in the room do not actually control the things they are discussing. A strategy that dissolves between the boardroom and the team is not an IT problem. It is what happens when the people expected to carry it out had no hand in building it. The research on this goes back to the 1940s and has been replicated across industries and continents ever since.
Open Systems Theory describes these patterns at the structural level, which is why they travel well. The design principles are about where responsibility for coordination and control actually sits. Content-agnostic, as it turns out — they apply equally to writing software, delivering healthcare, or running a logistics operation.
The design principles turn out to apply to all forms of human organisation, not just workplaces. Family, community, voluntary organisations. Wherever people coordinate around a shared purpose, the same structural dynamics appear.
Doctors have the International Classification of Diseases, a shared language for naming what is wrong, grounded in a common understanding of how the body works. Organisations have never had the equivalent. Plenty of lists of symptoms, but no shared mechanism underneath them.
If you work somewhere other than software and keep recognising what is being described here, that is not a coincidence.
🚀 Check out the book launching on 3 July. Follow on Leanpub if you want to be notified.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign -
The dysfunctions in this series of mine are set in software organisations. Standups, retrospectives, backlogs, and agile transformations. That is the world I work in, and where the examples are most concrete.
However, the underlying structural patterns are not really about software. Nor work.
A retrospective that produces lists nobody acts on is not a Scrum problem. It is what happens when the people in the room do not actually control the things they are discussing. A strategy that dissolves between the boardroom and the team is not an IT problem. It is what happens when the people expected to carry it out had no hand in building it. The research on this goes back to the 1940s and has been replicated across industries and continents ever since.
Open Systems Theory describes these patterns at the structural level, which is why they travel well. The design principles are about where responsibility for coordination and control actually sits. Content-agnostic, as it turns out — they apply equally to writing software, delivering healthcare, or running a logistics operation.
The design principles turn out to apply to all forms of human organisation, not just workplaces. Family, community, voluntary organisations. Wherever people coordinate around a shared purpose, the same structural dynamics appear.
Doctors have the International Classification of Diseases, a shared language for naming what is wrong, grounded in a common understanding of how the body works. Organisations have never had the equivalent. Plenty of lists of symptoms, but no shared mechanism underneath them.
If you work somewhere other than software and keep recognising what is being described here, that is not a coincidence.
🚀 Check out the book launching on 3 July. Follow on Leanpub if you want to be notified.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The market we think we shape
Context: The organisation is genuinely engaged with its market. There is a customer advisory board that meets twice a year. The head of product speaks at industry conferences. The company publishes case studies, contributes to working groups, and has a reputation for being thoughtful about the space it operates in. Leadership talks about being a market shaper, not a market follower. Internally, roadmap decisions are still driven by competitive analysis, quarterly OKRs, and what the sales team is hearing from prospects. The advisory board gives feedback on features that have already been decided. The conference talks describe what the company has built, not what the industry needs. The working groups produce documents nobody implements. The organisation is present in the field. It is not shaping it.
OST explains: An open system survives by maintaining an active relationship with its environment, not just absorbing signals from it but acting on them. Most organisations in turbulent fields are reasonably good at the first: they scan, survey, monitor, and respond. What they systematically underinvest in is the second: actively shaping the field. Responsiveness alone is reactive. The US auto industry watched fuel prices rise, saw consumer values shifting, and kept building SUVs. The signals were there. The field was not taken seriously as something to act on, only to respond to. In turbulent conditions that gap is fatal, because the field changes faster than any planning cycle can track. Shaping a field at its fullest means contributing to conditions under which customers, partners, and the broader system can develop sustainably. That requires treating the future as a puzzle to be explored together, not a problem to be solved internally. The advisory board, the conference talk, the working group document are all problem-solving instruments. None of them is puzzle-solving. The organisation is not shaping its environment. It is describing it, at a safe distance, and calling that strategy.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The market we think we shape
Context: The organisation is genuinely engaged with its market. There is a customer advisory board that meets twice a year. The head of product speaks at industry conferences. The company publishes case studies, contributes to working groups, and has a reputation for being thoughtful about the space it operates in. Leadership talks about being a market shaper, not a market follower. Internally, roadmap decisions are still driven by competitive analysis, quarterly OKRs, and what the sales team is hearing from prospects. The advisory board gives feedback on features that have already been decided. The conference talks describe what the company has built, not what the industry needs. The working groups produce documents nobody implements. The organisation is present in the field. It is not shaping it.
OST explains: An open system survives by maintaining an active relationship with its environment, not just absorbing signals from it but acting on them. Most organisations in turbulent fields are reasonably good at the first: they scan, survey, monitor, and respond. What they systematically underinvest in is the second: actively shaping the field. Responsiveness alone is reactive. The US auto industry watched fuel prices rise, saw consumer values shifting, and kept building SUVs. The signals were there. The field was not taken seriously as something to act on, only to respond to. In turbulent conditions that gap is fatal, because the field changes faster than any planning cycle can track. Shaping a field at its fullest means contributing to conditions under which customers, partners, and the broader system can develop sustainably. That requires treating the future as a puzzle to be explored together, not a problem to be solved internally. The advisory board, the conference talk, the working group document are all problem-solving instruments. None of them is puzzle-solving. The organisation is not shaping its environment. It is describing it, at a safe distance, and calling that strategy.