#sociotechnical — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Trond Hjorteland @trondhjort · 2026-09-09 · 08:17 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Somebody has to chase this

Context: The reorg genuinely changed things. Stream-aligned teams now own their own backlog and ship independently, without waiting on a steering committee. People notice the difference; work feels less like asking permission. But cross-team dependencies did not disappear when the topology chart was drawn; they just stopped having an owner. A platform change that three stream-aligned teams need gets raised in three different Slack channels and forgotten in two of them. The one that gets built is the one where someone personally followed up, twice, then a third time. That person is not the platform team's manager and has no authority to reprioritise anyone's backlog. They are just the one who keeps asking.

OST explains: Wilfred Bion identified pairing as one of the basic assumption patterns a group falls into when it is not working to task: an unconscious reliance on a few individuals to generate the movement the group is not structured to produce on its own. Merrelyn Emery's organisational instrument measures this directly, as a single item: how many people report that a few must personally push things forward for anything to happen. Team Topologies, done well, can genuinely increase control: teams own more of their own work and answer to fewer layers above them. What it does not automatically produce is coordination, the horizontal negotiation between teams that a topology diagram assumes but does not design. Where that negotiation mechanism is missing, what remains is informal pushing, absorbed by whoever notices the gap and cares enough to close it, without the authority that would make it anyone's actual job.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

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This post is part of the Organisational Dysfunction of the Day series. Full list here: https://lnkd.in/e_CF_zEK
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/

#opensystemstheory #sociotechnical #orgdesign #agile

Trond Hjorteland @trondhjort · 2026-09-08 · 06:37 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

We need a resource

A client asks for two Java resources for three months, starting Monday. The staffing lead checks who is between engagements. A senior architect who has spent the last five years building depth in distributed systems resilience, the part of the job he actually cares about, gets slotted in because his profile says Java and he happens to be free. The work is basic maintenance, nowhere near what he has spent five years getting good at. Nobody asked what he is actually good at. Nobody asked what he wanted to be doing. He will do the work competently, because he is competent. He will also spend three months being, on paper, the same thing as anyone else who can write Java.

OST explains: Matching competence to work requires coordination. Something has to see the whole picture, what each person can actually do and what an assignment actually needs, and connect the two deliberately. Where that coordination is missing, staffing collapses to whatever can be matched without it, and a label like "Java resource" is exactly that, a single visible attribute standing in for the person. Fred Emery distinguished redundancy of parts, more people than a task strictly requires, each interchangeable, from redundancy of functions, more skill and knowledge built into each person than any single task uses.1 Sorting people by a technology label and staffing by availability is redundancy of parts applied to expertise. The cost is more than efficiency: variety and continual learning are two of OST's six psychological criteria for motivating work, and both depend on being staffed on what a person is actually engaged in, not on the coarsest label that happens to match. The client asked for two resources and got exactly that. What they did not get, and had no way to ask for, was the specific expertise one of those resources had spent years building, and had no chance to use.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #sourcing

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

#opensystemstheory #sociotechnical #orgdesign #sourcing