#sociotechnical — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #sociotechnical, aggregated by home.social.
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Innovation theatre
Context: The organisation wants to be more innovative. A hackathon is announced. People form teams over a weekend, build prototypes, pitch to a panel of judges, and the best ideas win prizes. Energy is high, creativity flows, and some interesting ideas emerge. Then Monday arrives. The hackathon winners submit their ideas through the normal process. The ideas enter the backlog, or the innovation funnel, or the strategic planning cycle. Most are never heard of again. The people who had them go back to their regular work and try not to think too hard about where their ideas went. Next year, fewer people sign up for the hackathon.
OST explains: For a weekend, a hackathon creates the conditions of a DP2 structure. People self-organise around problems they choose and set their own goals, working without hierarchy. The energy is real because the structure is real. That is the point, and also the trap. The organisation has inadvertently demonstrated what self-managing work feels like, then sent everyone back to a structure that removes every condition that made it possible. In DP1, design authority is retained above while the appearance of participation harvests value from people who have no power to act on what they contribute. The hackathon temporarily suspends those constraints; the working week reinstates them. What looks like a follow-through problem is a structural problem: the organisation has two incompatible design principles running in parallel, one for special events and one for everything else. Nobody involved stopped caring. The structure that generated the ideas has no foothold in the structure that would have to implement them. Next year, fewer people sign up. They have learned something true about how this organisation works. The hackathon told them.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #hackathon
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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Innovation theatre
Context: The organisation wants to be more innovative. A hackathon is announced. People form teams over a weekend, build prototypes, pitch to a panel of judges, and the best ideas win prizes. Energy is high, creativity flows, and some interesting ideas emerge. Then Monday arrives. The hackathon winners submit their ideas through the normal process. The ideas enter the backlog, or the innovation funnel, or the strategic planning cycle. Most are never heard of again. The people who had them go back to their regular work and try not to think too hard about where their ideas went. Next year, fewer people sign up for the hackathon.
OST explains: For a weekend, a hackathon creates the conditions of a DP2 structure. People self-organise around problems they choose and set their own goals, working without hierarchy. The energy is real because the structure is real. That is the point, and also the trap. The organisation has inadvertently demonstrated what self-managing work feels like, then sent everyone back to a structure that removes every condition that made it possible. In DP1, design authority is retained above while the appearance of participation harvests value from people who have no power to act on what they contribute. The hackathon temporarily suspends those constraints; the working week reinstates them. What looks like a follow-through problem is a structural problem: the organisation has two incompatible design principles running in parallel, one for special events and one for everything else. Nobody involved stopped caring. The structure that generated the ideas has no foothold in the structure that would have to implement them. Next year, fewer people sign up. They have learned something true about how this organisation works. The hackathon told them.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #hackathon
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Innovation theatre
Context: The organisation wants to be more innovative. A hackathon is announced. People form teams over a weekend, build prototypes, pitch to a panel of judges, and the best ideas win prizes. Energy is high, creativity flows, and some interesting ideas emerge. Then Monday arrives. The hackathon winners submit their ideas through the normal process. The ideas enter the backlog, or the innovation funnel, or the strategic planning cycle. Most are never heard of again. The people who had them go back to their regular work and try not to think too hard about where their ideas went. Next year, fewer people sign up for the hackathon.
OST explains: For a weekend, a hackathon creates the conditions of a DP2 structure. People self-organise around problems they choose and set their own goals, working without hierarchy. The energy is real because the structure is real. That is the point, and also the trap. The organisation has inadvertently demonstrated what self-managing work feels like, then sent everyone back to a structure that removes every condition that made it possible. In DP1, design authority is retained above while the appearance of participation harvests value from people who have no power to act on what they contribute. The hackathon temporarily suspends those constraints; the working week reinstates them. What looks like a follow-through problem is a structural problem: the organisation has two incompatible design principles running in parallel, one for special events and one for everything else. Nobody involved stopped caring. The structure that generated the ideas has no foothold in the structure that would have to implement them. Next year, fewer people sign up. They have learned something true about how this organisation works. The hackathon told them.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #hackathon
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Innovation theatre
Context: The organisation wants to be more innovative. A hackathon is announced. People form teams over a weekend, build prototypes, pitch to a panel of judges, and the best ideas win prizes. Energy is high, creativity flows, and some interesting ideas emerge. Then Monday arrives. The hackathon winners submit their ideas through the normal process. The ideas enter the backlog, or the innovation funnel, or the strategic planning cycle. Most are never heard of again. The people who had them go back to their regular work and try not to think too hard about where their ideas went. Next year, fewer people sign up for the hackathon.
OST explains: For a weekend, a hackathon creates the conditions of a DP2 structure. People self-organise around problems they choose and set their own goals, working without hierarchy. The energy is real because the structure is real. That is the point, and also the trap. The organisation has inadvertently demonstrated what self-managing work feels like, then sent everyone back to a structure that removes every condition that made it possible. In DP1, design authority is retained above while the appearance of participation harvests value from people who have no power to act on what they contribute. The hackathon temporarily suspends those constraints; the working week reinstates them. What looks like a follow-through problem is a structural problem: the organisation has two incompatible design principles running in parallel, one for special events and one for everything else. Nobody involved stopped caring. The structure that generated the ideas has no foothold in the structure that would have to implement them. Next year, fewer people sign up. They have learned something true about how this organisation works. The hackathon told them.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #hackathon
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Innovation theatre
Context: The organisation wants to be more innovative. A hackathon is announced. People form teams over a weekend, build prototypes, pitch to a panel of judges, and the best ideas win prizes. Energy is high, creativity flows, and some interesting ideas emerge. Then Monday arrives. The hackathon winners submit their ideas through the normal process. The ideas enter the backlog, or the innovation funnel, or the strategic planning cycle. Most are never heard of again. The people who had them go back to their regular work and try not to think too hard about where their ideas went. Next year, fewer people sign up for the hackathon.
OST explains: For a weekend, a hackathon creates the conditions of a DP2 structure. People self-organise around problems they choose and set their own goals, working without hierarchy. The energy is real because the structure is real. That is the point, and also the trap. The organisation has inadvertently demonstrated what self-managing work feels like, then sent everyone back to a structure that removes every condition that made it possible. In DP1, design authority is retained above while the appearance of participation harvests value from people who have no power to act on what they contribute. The hackathon temporarily suspends those constraints; the working week reinstates them. What looks like a follow-through problem is a structural problem: the organisation has two incompatible design principles running in parallel, one for special events and one for everything else. Nobody involved stopped caring. The structure that generated the ideas has no foothold in the structure that would have to implement them. Next year, fewer people sign up. They have learned something true about how this organisation works. The hackathon told them.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #hackathon
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ -
Freeman's own prescription for what a healthy structure needs (delegated authority, responsibility to the group, distributed power, rotation, information available to everyone) reads like someone arriving at DP2's territory from a completely different direction. She was not making the case against non-hierarchical structure. She was arguing for the same structural insight this book keeps returning to: deliberately designed, accountable non-hierarchy, from a tradition with no apparent contact with Emery's work.
The people who cite her against DP2 have not misread Freeman. They have skipped the half of her essay that would have told them DP2 is her answer, not her target.
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This argument is explored further in my book, Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains, out now.
https://organisationaldysfunctions.com#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #structures
(2/2)
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The change they stopped believing in
Context: The organisation has been through four transformations in seven years. Agile. DevOps. Product thinking. Now a platform strategy. Each time, a consultant arrived, a framework was introduced, roles were renamed, and the deck said this time it was different. Each time, the same people learned new tools, attended new ceremonies, adapted to new reporting lines, and rebuilt working relationships that the reorg had broken. Real disruption. Real cost. And each time, the same people did the same work in the same structure, now with new vocabulary. The current initiative has better executive sponsorship than the previous three. The teams are quiet. Not hostile. Just quiet. They fill in the surveys, attend the workshops, and wait for it to pass.
OST explains: The people in the room are carrying two things. The first is the accumulated cost of repeated disruption: workflows relearned, tools replaced, relationships severed by reorganisations, expertise rendered obsolete by the next methodology. These costs are real, and they compound. Even a well-designed change can produce a net loss when it arrives as the fourth disruption in seven years, the cost of relearning outweighing whatever the change itself was meant to fix. The second is the mounting evidence that the disruption does not produce the promised improvement. Vocabulary, consultants, and frameworks have all changed across four initiatives; the design principle has not. What looks like resistance or exhaustion is pattern recognition operating at a high level of accuracy. In DP1, there is no mechanism by which the people doing the work can decide whether to incur the cost of a change that affects them, let alone shape what that change actually is. They receive it fully designed and handed down, and absorb it. The organisation reads the quiet as cynicism, a personal failing to be managed with better communication. People are not tired of change. They are tired of change that was never theirs to make.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changeManagement
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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
From the Leanpub Blog: The Leanpub Podcast 🎙 Feat. Yevgen Nebesov, Author of The Architecture of Power: See what shapes outcomes. Find where you can act.
#books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #systemsthinking #powerstructures #organizationalchange #sociotechnical #architectureofpower #changemanagement #softwarearchitecture #leanpub #techlead
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NEW! The Leanpub Podcast 🎙 Feat. Yevgen Nebesov, Author of The Architecture of Power: See what shapes outcomes. Find where you can act.
#books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #systemsthinking #powerstructures #organizationalchange #sociotechnical #architectureofpower #changemanagement #softwarearchitecture #leanpub #techlead