Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Team Topologies, the wrong way round

Context: Leadership has read Team Topologies. The insights are compelling: stream-aligned teams owning end-to-end delivery, platform teams reducing cognitive load, enabling teams building capability. A reorganisation is planned. Teams are renamed and restructured. The new topology is announced. People find themselves in stream-aligned teams that still wait for approval from the same architects, report to the same managers, and receive priorities from the same product managers who held the backlog before. The platform team is the old infrastructure team with a new name and a mandate to serve internal customers, though nobody agreed on what that means. The enabling team runs workshops that nobody has time to attend. Six months in, the cognitive load has not decreased. Delivery has not improved. Leadership concludes that the teams need to embrace the new model more fully. Another round of communication is planned, and product coaches are hired en masse to fix people.

OST explains: Team Topologies describes structural patterns that emerge from healthy organisations. Like DORA, it is a map of what good looks like, not a recipe for getting there. The patterns only function as intended when the teams operating them are genuinely self-managing, owning their work, coordinating among themselves, and making decisions without constant escalation. Imposing the topology from above while leaving the underlying design principle unchanged is a bureaucratic (DP1) move applied to a self-managing (DP2) framework. Stream-aligned teams become delivery units with a new name. Platform teams become service departments, and their internal customer model quietly recreates the same dependency it was meant to dissolve. Goodhart's law applies here as much as it does to DORA: the moment the topology becomes a target, it stops being a good topology. The book is right. The reorganisation missed the point.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #TeamTopologies

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Involvement theatre

Context: Some architects, project leads, or managers want to do things properly. They genuinely believe in collaboration and know the teams have valuable knowledge. So they organise workshops, like EventStorming sessions, design sprints, or other types of collaborative design workshops. People are invited, post-its go up, discussions happen, and there is real energy in the room. Then the session ends, the outputs are photographed, the facilitator disappears with the material, and a few weeks later, a design document or architecture proposal lands in the team's inbox. It looks nothing like what people thought they were building together. When questions are raised, the answer is that the workshop inputs were "taken into account." The teams learn quickly that the workshops are not really about designing together. They are about being consulted. Next time, fewer people will engage seriously. The post-its get sparser. The energy in the room is noticeably lower, even hostile.

OST explains: This is one of the most common misapplications of participative techniques in DP1 organisations: design authority is retained above, while the appearance of participation is layered on top to legitimise decisions already made or soon to be made elsewhere. OST explains why it fails on two levels. First, Bion's basic assumptions: the moment a person with authority enters the room, even a well-meaning independent facilitator, people shift into dependency or fight/flight, so the workshop never produces genuine collaborative design, regardless of how it is facilitated. Second, Fred and Merrelyn Emery were explicit that it is only when people design their own work that they develop the motivation, responsibility, and commitment to implement it effectively. A design imposed on a group, even one consulted, will never have the ownership that a design created by the group has. Involvement theatre does not just fail to produce good design; it actively corrodes trust in the collaborative process, making genuine participation harder to achieve each time. As Kurt Lewin warned, people cannot be trained for democracy by autocratic means.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Tyranny of the majority

Context: The workshop is wrapping up. There are too many ideas on the wall, and a decision needs to be made, so dot voting is introduced. Everyone gets three dots and places them on their favourites. The tallied results are clear, and the facilitator announces the winners. Most people seem satisfied. A few do not. Their priorities were lost, their concerns were not addressed, and the vote moved on before the reasoning behind the minority view was ever really heard. They leave with a decision they had no real part in making. In meetings, the same pattern plays out through a show of hands, anonymous polls, or simply the loudest voices drowning out the quieter ones. It feels democratic. It is not.

OST explains: Dot voting and majority voting are representative democracy mechanisms, which really are DP1 in disguise. They produce a winner and, by definition, a loser, and the minority does not just lose the vote; they lose the ability to influence the outcome, making them unlikely to commit to implementing something they actively disagreed with. Fred Emery called the alternative rationalisation of conflict: instead of forcing a resolution through voting, the group stays with the disagreement long enough to understand it. The goal is not the most popular option, but the option nobody has a reasoned objection to. A higher bar that takes longer, but produces genuine shared ownership that majority voting never can. A decision reached that way does not need to be enforced; people carry it forward because they helped make it.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #collaboration

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Professional leadership

Context: The organisation has invested heavily in leadership development. There are programmes, frameworks, coaching, 360-degree feedback, and a clear leadership model on the intranet. The managers are well-intentioned, many of them genuinely skilled, and they take their responsibility seriously. However, the teams below them are still not performing as hoped. Engagement is middling, decisions are slow, and the best people keep leaving. Some even because of their manager. Leadership quality is clearly not the bottleneck, so what is? In many industries, supervisors are expected to know the craft they oversee. Not so in most IT organisations, where the manager's job is people and process, not technology. That gap has been growing.

OST explains: The problem is not the leaders; it is the existence of the role itself. DP1 as bureaucracy requires leaders because control and coordination are handled by a layer above the real productive work, be it managers in the line, project managers, product managers, or even architects. You therefore need good ones, and training them makes sense within that logic. But no amount of leadership quality fixes the structural problem that the people doing the work are not in control of it. In DP2, the need for professional leadership largely disappears because coordination and control are handled by the group itself. The resources currently spent on developing leaders should instead be invested in developing the team's self-managing capacity. That is not a small shift; it is a fundamentally different theory of how organisations work. A DNA swap.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Burned by design

Context: People are burning out. Not one or two, but a pattern across the organisation. The response is usually more support: capacity planning, better prioritisation, blocking time for work, reduced meeting loads, encouragement to take time off, and reminders that it is okay to set boundaries. Some people recover. Others leave. New people arrive and, after a while, show the same signs. The organisation is aware that this is not sustainable but frames it as a consequence of a demanding industry or a difficult period. It will get better soon; we just need to pass this hurdle.

OST explains: Burnout is not primarily a capacity or resilience problem; it is a job design problem. The conditions most strongly associated with burnout, like lack of control, unclear demands, and absence of meaningful feedback, are structural features of the bureaucratic DP1; not unfortunate side effects. Many do not burn out immediately; they switch off first. Presenteeism, being physically present but mentally absent, is the earlier stage of the same structural problem, and burnout is what happens when even the switching off stops working. The numbers are striking. The WHO projected that by 2020 depression would be the second leading cause of disability globally. Gallup reports that 20% of employees experience daily loneliness, in a setting where people actively come together to produce something. One documented DP1 to DP2 transition showed a 28% decrease in absenteeism and an 81% increase in engagement in the first year, with no major technical changes. Adding support resources helps individuals cope with a system that is harming them, but does not change the system. The tree was planted in the wrong soil; repotting is not optional.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #health

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

DORA, the wrong way round

Context: The DORA metrics have become the gold standard for measuring engineering performance. Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. The four key metrics. Teams build dashboards around them, set quarterly targets, and run improvement initiatives to move the numbers in the right direction. Some teams genuinely improve, while others find the numbers are stubborn or that improvements one quarter quietly reverse the next. Leadership concludes that the teams need more discipline, better tooling, or another round of training. What gets called cargo culting (for lack of a better term) in the industry, copying the visible practices without the underlying conditions, is exactly this pattern.

OST explains: DORA was designed as a research instrument, not as a target system. The metrics are downstream signals of healthy delivery, not the drivers of it. Healthy delivery is when self-managing teams own the whole product, make decisions without escalation, and have tight feedback loops with the people they serve. Take those structural conditions away, and the numbers regress, no matter how many dashboards you build. Treating DORA as a goal in DP1 (bureaucratic) is exactly the goal displacement Goodhart warned about: the moment a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. In DP2, the self-managing-group structure, the same numbers emerge naturally as side effects of work well done. You do not need to chase them. You need to build the conditions that produce them.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #DevOps

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The error factory

Context: Something goes wrong. A post-mortem is held, a root cause is identified, and a fix is put in place. A few months later, the same thing goes wrong again, in a slightly different form. The organisation responds with more process, more checklists, more training. The error rate stays stubbornly high. Leadership concludes that people are not following the processes correctly, so more oversight is added. The errors continue. Nobody questions whether the structure itself might be amplifying the mistakes rather than catching them.

OST explains: The research is mathematically precise on this. In a DP1 (bureaucratic) structure, if five people each make sound judgements eight times out of ten, the probability they give you correct unanimous advice is only one in three. The more you control through hierarchy, the deeper you move into error. In a DP2 structure with the same five people and the same fallibility, wrong unanimous advice occurs only three times in ten thousand. In DP1, errors get amplified because asymmetry and competition mean people filter information to serve their own position rather than the truth. In DP2, the same errors become learning opportunities because everyone has shared responsibility, and it is in nobody's interest to hide a mistake. The diagnosis of inadequate training and the prescription of more training will not reliably reduce error rates; that requires attention to the underlying structural cause.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #management

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Fixing people

Context: "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." Gerald Weinberg's Second Law of Consulting is good advice. It is a reminder that the human dimension is always present, that purely technical diagnoses miss something essential, and that the people involved always matter. Most managers and HR professionals would recognise themselves in it. Someone on the team is struggling. Maybe they are disengaged, not delivering, clashing with colleagues, or just not showing up in the way they used to. The organisation's response is to fix the person: a performance improvement plan, a coaching programme, a personality assessment, or a quiet word from HR. Sometimes it works for a while. But the same problems keep reappearing, often with different people in the same role. The carousel of interventions never quite stops.

OST explains: Weinberg is right that it is always a people problem; people's experience, motivation, and well-being are always at stake. OST does not disagree; it adds the next step. When the same dysfunction shows up repeatedly across different people in the same role, the problem is not those individuals; it is what the system does to whoever occupies that position. DP1 structures (manager-led), with their competition for recognition and dependency on management for decisions, produce exactly the disengagement and avoidance that organisations then try to coach out of people. Fixing the individual while leaving the structure intact contains a deep paradox: elevating the individual as the problem, isolated from the structure shaping their behaviour, goes beyond blaming the victim; it creates them. So yes, it is always a people problem. The question OST asks is: what is the structure doing to the people?

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Deploying AI into a broken system

Context: The organisation is deploying AI: copilots, automated pipelines, intelligent triage, and decision support. The pilots look promising; the broader rollout is patchy, with some people embracing the tools and others routing around them. A few raise concerns about deskilling, about oversight, about what happens when the AI gets it wrong. Leadership frames this as change resistance. The change management programme is expanded. Meanwhile, the tools are also being used to monitor output, flag underperformance, and justify headcount decisions. The people who were concerned start to understand why they were concerned.

OST explains: This pattern is not new. Sociotechnical systems research emerged in the 1950s precisely because organisations kept introducing new technology with enormous focus on technical capability and almost no attention to the social system. The result was that technology failed to deliver its potential, workers became alienated, and productivity gains were short-lived. The core insight applies directly to AI: you will not get the benefit by optimising the technical system alone. In DP1, the manager-led structure, people are defined by the task they perform. One person, one job, one replaceable part, so when the task can be automated, the person becomes redundant by the organisation's own logic. In DP2, the group owns the whole task, and each person brings judgment, context, and adaptability that no tool replicates; AI becomes an extension of the group's capability rather than a replacement of it. In a DP1 structure, AI is almost inevitably used as a tool of control, monitoring output, flagging underperformance, and surveilling the parts. We are in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution and making exactly the same mistake as the third.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Built for yesterday

Context: The strategy keeps changing. The market shifted, then shifted again. A competitor emerged from an unexpected direction. AI is rewriting the economics of the industry faster than anyone predicted. The three-year plan written eighteen months ago is already obsolete. Leadership responds with more planning, tighter governance, and faster decision cycles at the top. The organisation is working harder than ever and adapting less than ever. People at the coalface can see what needs to change, but cannot get decisions made quickly enough. By the time something is approved, the situation has moved on. The organisation is not slow because people are lazy or misaligned. It is slow because it was designed for a world that no longer exists.

OST explains: Emery and Trist identified four types of organisational environment, which they called causal textures. The third, disturbed reactive, is the competitive industrial world that DP1, the bureaucratic structure, was designed for, with large, similar organisations whose moves continually disturb one another. The fourth, turbulent fields, is categorically different: the environment itself is in motion, driven by forces in the field itself, like technological disruption, social change, and ecological pressure. In turbulent fields, the variety generated by the environment exceeds the capacity of any hierarchy to process and respond to it. DP1 is actively maladaptive here, because concentrating perception and decision-making at the top creates exactly the bottleneck that makes the organisation slow when speed matters most. DP2, the self-managing-group structure, distributes that capacity across the whole organisation, with every group actively scanning its environment, adapting, and feeding learning back into the system. We have been in turbulent fields for decades. AI has just turned up the intensity several orders of magnitude. To 11.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #strategy