#sociotechnical — Public Fediverse posts

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Nobody wants to own this

Context: There is a service that seven teams depend on. It was built three years ago by a team that no longer exists. The code lives in a repository that has eleven different people listed as contributors. When it breaks, everyone notices. When it needs updating, everyone waits. Slack messages go out asking who owns it. The answers are variations of "we use it, but we didn't build it" and "I think that was the old platform team." Someone eventually fixes the immediate problem. Nobody fixes the underlying one. The service is not on anyone's roadmap or in anyone's OKRs. It is not neglected because nobody cares. It is neglected because the structure has no place to put it.

OST explains: DP1 organises work by splitting it into owned pieces, services to teams, components to people, functions to departments. The logic works for things that fit neatly into boxes. It breaks down entirely for things that are shared, the platform everyone uses, the legacy system too expensive to replace, the cross-cutting concern that belongs to the whole organisation rather than any part of it. These things fall into the gaps between the boxes and stay there. Nobody is incentivised to invest in something that appears on nobody's performance review. In a DP2 structure, where a team owns its whole task end-to-end, the boundary location principle requires that the team controls everything it depends on to do its work. Shared dependencies are a structural signal that the boundaries are wrong, that the work has been sliced in a way that leaves essential things ownerless. The abandoned service is not a prioritisation failure. It is a design failure. The organisation drew the lines in the wrong places and then wondered why nothing fills the gaps.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The talent myth

Context: "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done." This principle from the Agile Manifesto is one of the most quoted and most acted upon in the industry. Hiring processes are designed around finding motivated people. Managers are coached to give them space and trust. Perks, autonomy, and purpose are offered as the environment and support needed. And yet engagement surveys keep returning the same dispiriting numbers. The motivated individuals either leave, quietly stop being motivated, or were never quite as motivated as the interview suggested. The organisation concludes it needs to find better people, or do a better job of retaining the ones it has.

OST explains: The manifesto gets the outcome right but the mechanism backwards. Motivation in OST is an emergent property of the structure people work in, not a precondition you select for in hiring. It emerges when six structural conditions are met: elbow room to make your own decisions, continual learning through room to set your own goals and get accurate, timely feedback, enough variety in the work, mutual support and respect from colleagues, meaningfulness through work that is socially valued and lets you see the whole product or service, and a sense of a desirable future rather than a dead end. These are properties of the work, not personal traits. You cannot find motivated individuals and protect their motivation; you design a structure that produces motivation as a natural output for whoever works within it. OST flips the manifesto's framing. The group is the basic unit, the design principle is the primary determinant, and motivation is what happens when the structure is right. The manifesto points in the right direction but stops one step short of the structural answer.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://organisationaldysfunctions.com

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day 



The efficiency drive

Context: The organisation is restructuring. Agile transformation, flatter structure, fewer layers. It makes sense on paper. A list of roles is drawn up for redundancy. Visibility and measurable output are the criteria, and they sound reasonable enough. A senior developer goes. So does a project coordinator, and a tech lead who spent half their time helping others out. The people who remain are productive, focused, and clearly valuable. Six months later, things that used to happen automatically have stopped happening. Onboarding takes twice as long, and cross-team coordination stalls. Institutional knowledge that nobody knew existed turns out to have lived in three people who are no longer there. The efficiency drive was a success. The organisation is measurably less capable.

OST explains: In a DP1 structure, value is measured by visible, individual output. The redundancy of parts logic demands replaceable, countable contributions, things like tickets closed or hours billed. The work that holds organisations together- knowledge transfer, informal coordination, translation between teams, the memory of why things are the way they are- is structurally invisible in this measurement regime. Glue workers, as the industry has come to call them, do not fit neatly into DP1 accountability frameworks precisely because their contribution is to the whole, not to a part. When downsizing criteria are applied, they are systematically exposed. The formal structure survives the cut. The working structure, the informal network that made the formal one function, does not. Parkinson observed that bureaucracies protect themselves by multiplying subordinates. The corollary is less discussed: when they cut, they cut the connective tissue first, because connective tissue has no job title.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #lean

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The efficiency drive

Context: The organisation is restructuring. Agile transformation, flatter structure, fewer layers. It makes sense on paper. A list of roles is drawn up for redundancy. Visibility and measurable output are the criteria, and they sound reasonable enough. A senior developer goes. So does a project coordinator, and a tech lead who spent half their time helping others out. The people who remain are productive, focused, and clearly valuable. Six months later, things that used to happen automatically have stopped happening. Onboarding takes twice as long, and cross-team coordination stalls. Institutional knowledge that nobody knew existed turns out to have lived in three people who are no longer there. The efficiency drive was a success. The organisation is measurably less capable.

OST explains: In a DP1 structure, value is measured by visible, individual output. The redundancy of parts logic demands replaceable, countable contributions, things like tickets closed or hours billed. The work that holds organisations together, such as knowledge transfer, informal coordination, translation between teams, and the memory of why things are the way they are, is structurally invisible in this measurement regime. Glue workers, as the industry has come to call them, do not fit neatly into DP1 accountability frameworks precisely because their contribution is to the whole, not to a part. When downsizing criteria are applied, they are systematically exposed. The formal structure survives the cut. The working structure, the informal network that made the formal one function, does not. Parkinson observed that bureaucracies protect themselves by multiplying subordinates. The corollary is less discussed: when they cut, they cut the connective tissue first, because connective tissue has no job title.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #lean

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com