#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
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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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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
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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://organisationaldysfunctions.com -
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/ -
🚨 Human belief is becoming a #security issue.
Security in #sociotechnical #systems is shaped not only by #technology, but by how people interpret information.
Our new study reviews 24 factors and conceptualizes belief in false information as a human-centered security risk.
👉 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07016
#Misinformation #Disinformation #FakeNews #DeepFake #AI #Trust #DigitalRisk #InformationSecurity #BusinessInformatics #Wirtschaftsinformatik #FakeInformation #SocialNetworks #Cybersecurity