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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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