#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
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
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
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
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
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
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
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
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
https://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com -
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
***
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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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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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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Listen to this podcast if you want to know why security and security champion programmes may thrive in a good company culture. And also to learn a bit about good company culture. And a lot more.
For me it was yet another reminder how everything in software development is a people problem as well as a technical one.
#security #SoftwareEngineering #sociotechnical #companyculture
via @lisihocke
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Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Endless alignment meetings
Context: The calendar is full of alignment meetings. Syncs between teams, cross-functional check-ins, steering group updates, all-hands, and the occasional offsite to get everyone on the same page. Each one feels necessary in isolation. There really are dependencies to manage and decisions that affect multiple parties. But the total volume is considerable, and after every meeting, more meetings are needed. The organisation is spending a significant portion of its working time just trying to stay coordinated.
OST explains: High coordination cost is a reliable indicator of poorly drawn boundaries: when teams depend on each other to complete their own work, they need constant communication to manage those dependencies. In a DP2 structure, a group owns its whole task, including responsibility for its own coordination and control, which is exactly what removes the need for this kind of external alignment work. Research on the software industry found that lack of coordination makes a more powerful contribution to low motivation than lack of control. Most discussion of engagement assumes autonomy is the primary driver; working together toward shared goals appears to matter more. The meetings are not just a productivity drain: they are what fills the space left by coordination that was never designed into the structure, and that absence is what erodes motivation. The goal is not fewer meetings; it is a structure where coordination is built into the work itself.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile
***
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://organisationaldysfunctions.com -
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Out of sight, out of sync
Context: The team is fully remote. Async communication is the norm, the tools are good, and the documentation is better than it ever was in the office. Standups happen on video, retros happen on Miro, and the team ships regularly. Once or twice a year the whole team gets together for a few days. The energy is noticeably different in person: things get resolved that had been stuck for weeks, new people finally feel like they belong, and everyone goes home re-energised. And then, slowly, things drift back. On paper, everything still works. In practice, something is harder to name. Decisions that should be simple take longer. Small misunderstandings accumulate. Someone does something that puzzles the rest, and nobody quite knows how to raise it. The team is coordinating. It is not quite cohering.
OST explains: DP2 is structurally possible in a remote setting. The requirements for self-management, that the group controls its own coordination and work design, do not depend on physical presence. But the social fabric that makes those requirements liveable does not. Solomon Asch identified four conditions that must be present for communication to actually work: openness, basic psychological similarity, a mutually shared field, and trust. Remote work weakens all four. The cues we use to sense whether someone is struggling, whether a decision landed well, whether a conflict is brewing, most of them are non-verbal, ambient, and invisible over video. A co-located DP2 group builds and repairs its social fabric continuously and mostly unconsciously. A remote DP2 group has to do that work deliberately. Team gatherings help, and people feel the difference when they happen. But they are injections of social capital into a structure that depletes it continuously. They are not a substitute for the daily, informal repair work that physical proximity enables. The result is a group that is formally self-managing but socially thin. Coordination holds. Cohesion frays. Remote does not break DP2. It makes the invisible work of maintaining it visible and expensive.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #distributedWork
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Leanpub book LAUNCH 🚀 User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters by Rich Allen
Watch here: https://youtu.be/maH7lWKKUlc
#books #ebooks #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #booklaunch #UserNeedsMapping #TeamAlignment #FlowOptimization #SocioTechnical #ProductDelivery #SystemThinking #OrganizationalDesign #TeamTopologies #SoftwareLeadership #Leanpub
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Leanpub book LAUNCH 🚀 User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters by Rich Allen
Watch here: https://youtu.be/maH7lWKKUlc
#books #ebooks #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #booklaunch #UserNeedsMapping #TeamAlignment #FlowOptimization #SocioTechnical #ProductDelivery #SystemThinking #OrganizationalDesign #TeamTopologies #SoftwareLeadership #Leanpub
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NEW! A Leanpub Podcast Episode 🎙️ Feat. Rich Allen, Author of User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters
Watch here: https://youtu.be/IyLQ6AFSpIM
#books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #UserNeedsMapping #TeamAlignment #FlowOptimization #SocioTechnical #ProductDelivery #SystemThinking #OrganizationalDesign #TeamTopologies #SoftwareLeadership #Leanpub #podcast