Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

HiPPOs and dungeon masters

Context: In bureaucratic organisations, the formal ranking of people is usually well known and clear, where people higher up in the hierarchy have certain mandates over people they manage and/or that reports to them. Anything else would be chaos in that world. Still, there is also a lot of informal power, ranging from age difference and gender to more subtle things like years of experience and size of salary, regardless of formal power. This is problematic when decisions are to be made, as these informal power structures end up trumping data and expertise.

OST Explains: Facilitators especially try to counter these tendencies in workshops, for example, by using different types of techniques. A common one is sometimes called Silent Writing, where people are asked to work on the problem alone first, at the start of the workshop, so that all voices are heard. Sometimes this is taken a step further, as in 11-2-4-all, where the next step is joining a colleague to draw up a joint design, before joining up with another pair to create one they all agree on, and so on, before all get together and decide. This works well to get input from everyone, but does not silence the one with rank, as they will dominate regardless. And potentially lead to failure. In the techniques developed in OST, the focus is instead to create a community from the start of the session, instead of fortifying the differences, as these techniques do focus on the individuals. The Search Conference does this by focusing first on the shared goals and wishes for the future, showing that they all agree on more than they disagree on. And, if they do agree on something, put that to the side immediately and focus on what joins them instead of what separates them. The assumption is that we share the we all share the values that lead to the desirable future.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Local optimisations

Context: Any work group of people want to improve their way of working if they could, removing unnecessary work, resources or waste, as Lean calls it. Agile gave the teams that ability, at least to a large extent. Some may only be able to adjust technical issues, while others may even be empowered to decide how they want to do work. For example, one team decides they want to move to an event-driven architecture, while another wants to replace Scrum with Kanban. All great local optimisations that they should be able to do, but often are prevented from doing so, as they need to interact with other teams and are not able to get them to adjust. Or management may not let them because of the impact it has. Again, teams are stuck.

OST explains: This issue is not directly related to OST necessarily, but more to the parts-to-whole relation that comes out of systems thinking, which OST clearly is. Local optimisations in a part are perfect if it does not affect anyone else, which is rarely the case as parts are interconnected with other parts, often even through the shared relation they have to the whole. In a purposeful social system, even more so, as not only must the changes physically fit, but they must also align with the shared purpose of the system as a whole. Most organisations deal with this paradox, the interest of the parts vs. the whole, by designing top down, creating guardrails for the parts to operate within, giving them limited freedom. OST, on the other hand, replaces this centralisation of command and control by distributing it to the parts, where they can design their own work as long as they make sure it aligns with the goals of the system as a whole, like business goals and strategic plans, and, just as importantly, coordinate with all the affected parties. This enables local optimisations for the benefit of the whole.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The frozen middle

Context: Assuming you are a team member in an organisation that has gone through an agile transformation. Your team have been given more autonomy and is expected to self-organise, make decisions, and deliver value faster. Yet somehow, almost everything still takes forever. Decisions get stuck, information does not flow, and initiatives die quietly without explanation. The teams are doing their part, but something above them seems to absorb all energy and momentum like a sponge. Middle managers are busy, always in meetings, always promising to follow up. But nothing moves. A frequent excuse is Things Take Time.

OST explains: This is one of the most predictable side effects of a partial DP2 transition to self-managing teams. When teams are given more autonomy while the surrounding DP1 structure remains intact, middle management gets caught in the middle. They lose their traditional role of passing work down and status reports up, but gain no new meaningful function. The result is a layer of people who are neither coordinating in the old DP1 way nor participating as peers in a DP2 fashion. They become a dampening layer, unconsciously protecting the existing power structure while appearing to support the change. This is not a people problem; it is a structural one. In a full DP2 organisation, the coordination is managed by the self-managing teams themselves, coordination work between peers, and not through proxies. The frozen middle is not resistant to change; it is simply a DP1 organ that has lost its purpose but not yet been replaced by anything coherent. Until the whole system transitions, it will continue to insulate the top from the bottom and slow everything down. The bottleneck has shifted.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Fear of making decisions

Context: One issue many teams in an agile organisation face is the stalemate that frequently happens when they need to make a decision that will impact other teams or other parts of the organisation. They have been empowered and given autonomy to decide for themselves, but they still want to be good players and are afraid to do something that could negatively impact others. Some may even be worried whether the change is allowed at all, like changing their work process or tools to use for things like ticketing, or changing the technical architecture by using a different data storage platform. Good ideas and suggested improvements are often shelved or even abandoned.

OST explains: This is another predictable side effect of a partial DP2 transition to self-managing teams, where the teams are given autonomy to self-manage, but do not feel able to. Or, maybe now they are not really empowered, as they know all too well, there are DP1 (bureaucratic) structures still in place that can and will stop them. And, even if they were in a pure DP2 setup, they still need tools to coordinate. One that works well is referred to as the "advice process" and was first described by Dennis Bakke, later by Laloux and Harmel-Law. In it, anyone can make any decision provided they follow this simple rule: first seek advice from 1) everyone who will be meaningfully affected, and 2) people with expertise in the matter. So instead of drawing up everything and then getting approval from someone who cannot possibly understand it properly, or going rogue, you formulate the decision as best as you can and then seek advice on it and adjust it to your liking based on that. Not only do you make better decisions, but you also own them. No more blame game, which DP1 creates, and no chaos, which the mixed mode induces. Participative democracy in practice.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Psychological safety as a patch

Context: Your organisation may have realised that psychological safety is of the essence for good collaboration. Maybe it came out of a retrospective, maybe someone read the Google re:Work study and Amy Edmondson contributions, or maybe it was a leadership initiative after too many people stopped speaking up in meetings. Either way, there are now workshops on it, a section in the onboarding, maybe even a survey to measure it. Leaders are coached to create it. Teams are encouraged to demand it. And yet, somehow, people are still not speaking up, still not taking risks, still not challenging the decisions made above them. The patch does not seem to be holding.

OST explains: Psychological safety is real, and it matters a lot, but what is often missed is that it is an emergent property of the structure people work in, not something you can install. In a DP1 organisation, people are inherently in a dependent, subordinate position, and the rational response to that is to be careful about what you say and to whom. That is not a personal failing; it is Bion's basic assumptions playing out exactly as expected: dependency, fight/flight, and factionalism are the natural human response to autocratic hierarchies. You cannot train people out of that while the structure that causes it remains intact. In a DP2 structure, on the other hand, psychological safety is not a programme or a value on the wall; it is simply what happens when people are peers designing and owning their own work. They speak up because it is their job to, and because there is no hierarchy of dominance to be careful around. Demanding psychological safety in a DP1 organisation is a bit like applying a patch to a system with a structural bug. It might cover the symptom for a while, but the underlying code has not changed.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

OKRs imposed from above

Context: Many organisations have adopted OKRs, but a common way of doing them is like a cascade: company OKRs are set by leadership, then broken down into department OKRs, then into team OKRs. Everyone has objectives and key results. The teams go through the quarterly ritual of setting them, reviewing them, and scoring themselves at the end. Some teams engage genuinely, while others may treat it as a compliance exercise. A common complaint is that the team-level OKRs are effectively dictated by the level above, with little to no room to define what matters to them. The framework says teams should own their goals, but the structure says otherwise.

OST explains: OKRs are a good idea applied in the wrong structure. In DP2, goal-setting is one of the core functions of the self-managing group; it is not something done to them. When goals are cascaded down from above, even with good intentions, the team is not really setting its own objectives; it is translating management's objectives into local language. That is a DP1 (bureaucratic) function dressed in DP2 clothing. The quarterly scoring ritual then becomes a performance review proxy, which is about the last thing a self-managing team needs. In a genuine DP2 structure, the team's goals emerge from its understanding of its own work, its environment, and the shared organisational purpose it has participated in defining. That is a fundamentally different starting point, and it produces fundamentally different commitment.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #strategy

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The agile terrarium

Context: Agile transformed how software is built. Iterative delivery, short feedback loops, cross-functional teams, and continuous improvement. These were genuine advances over the heavyweight waterfall projects they replaced. The lean movement provided much of the intellectual scaffolding: eliminate waste, optimise flow, respect the people doing the work. And yet, decades on, the research is clear that agile has not delivered the engaged, self-managing, high-performing teams it probably hoped. The process works reasonably well. The organisation around it largely does not. @einarwh described agile teams as terrariums: self-contained ecosystems that look alive and healthy from the inside but are sealed off from the real environment around them. Most people working in agile organisations will recognise that image immediately.

OST explains: The terrarium image is more precise than it might seem. A terrarium is a closed system; it regulates its own internal conditions but does not transact with its environment. That is exactly what agile teams are often designed to be: protected from the turbulence outside, given a stable backlog and told to focus. An open system survives by engaging with its environment, learning from it, and actively adapting to it. Sealing it off does not make the turbulence disappear; it just accumulates outside the glass until something breaks. The agile founders identified "structure" as the problem and removed supervision, but left coordination undefined and control in the hands of individuals. The result was not a move to self-managing groups, what we call DP2, but laissez-faire: an industry lost in the wilderness between DP1, the bureaucratic structure most people work inside, and the self-managing alternative. Research surveying the software industry found 55.7% of respondents were predominantly high laissez-faire, more than either DP1 or DP2. Agile is not failing because the process is wrong. It is failing because a closed system cannot adapt, and the industry has been trying to solve an open systems problem with a delivery methodology.

#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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The external verdict

Context: The organisation wants an independent assessment of the codebase. An external firm is brought in, given access to the repositories, and asked to produce a report. Sometimes the teams are interviewed individually beforehand. Sometimes they are not involved at all until the findings land. Either way, the result is a document that describes their work from the outside, written by people who were not there when the decisions were made, did not carry the constraints, and will not be there when the changes need to happen. The teams read the report. Some findings are fair. Others miss the context entirely. A few are simply wrong. The usual response is a mix of defensiveness, resignation, and quiet relief that at least some things were not noticed. Nobody feels ownership of the conclusions. The report goes into a folder. Most of it stays there.

OST explains: Bringing in external experts to evaluate a team's work is a bureaucratic DP1 move, even when done with good intentions. Control and judgement sit outside the group, and the group receives a verdict rather than participating in an enquiry. The knowledge needed to assess a codebase well is distributed across the people who built it. An external reviewer can spot patterns and bring a comparative perspective, but cannot access the reasoning, the tradeoffs, or the organisational pressures that shaped every decision. Individual interviews are better than no involvement, but they reinforce exactly the individualisation that DP1 already produces, and in teams with existing tensions, they can surface conflicts that the interview format has no mechanism to resolve. What works is treating the review as a collective sense-making exercise. The team leads the process, names what it already knows is wrong, and uses external input as one source of perspective rather than as the source of judgment. In DP2 (self-managing teams), the group owns the quality of its own work. That ownership cannot be outsourced. An external consultant can be a useful mirror and a driver for change. They should never be the judge.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #review

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Working alone together

Context: The pandemic forced a global experiment nobody had planned. Offices emptied overnight, and something unexpected happened. People managed. Many thrived. The commute nobody missed, the open-plan office nobody pined for, the meetings that turned out to work fine as calls. When offices reopened, a significant number of people simply did not want to come back, at least not every day. The debate that followed framed this as a question of productivity, collaboration, or work-life balance. It missed the more uncomfortable signal. When given the choice, a large number of people revealed they prefer to work alone. That is not a statement about remote work. That is a statement about what going to the office actually felt like.

OST explains: In DP1, the bureaucratic structure, work is individualised by design. Tasks are broken into minimal parts, each assigned to one person, with coordination handled above. The office under DP1 is not a place of genuine collaboration; it is a place of proximity without connection. People sit near each other, manage their own tasks, protect their own position, and attend meetings where decisions have usually already been made. The six psychological requirements for productive work include mutual support and respect, and continual learning through real feedback from people you work with as peers. DP1 delivers neither. Of course, people prefer to stay home. Home is quieter, the coffee is better, and nobody is watching. In DP2, the group is the unit of work. Coordination, learning, and support all happen in the group, not above it. People in genuine DP2 structures report wanting to be with their colleagues because the group is where the work actually lives. The WFH debate is really a DP1 debate. The office stopped being worth the commute long before the pandemic. The pandemic just made it impossible to pretend otherwise.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #teams

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The collaboration that isn't

Context: Two teams decide to work together. A shared initiative, a joint project, a problem neither can solve alone. There is enthusiasm on both sides, and a genuine excitement about what they might build together. Everyone has a picture in their head of what that looks like and what they want to get out of it, and everyone assumes the others have the same one. Who owns what, and what success looks like for each of them, is left open. Good intentions and regular syncs will be enough. For a while, they are. Then something goes wrong. Credit lands unevenly. Decisions get made by the louder team. One side feels their contribution has been absorbed rather than shared. Trust erodes quietly. The collaboration continues in name but not in spirit.

OST explains: Two teams are two social systems, each with its own purpose, its own design principle, its own internal logic. The shared purpose is assumed rather than agreed upon. There are two clean ways to work across that boundary. A clear transactional relationship: a contract, explicit deliverables, arm's length. Or deliberately create a new, shared system with a common purpose both sides have actually agreed to, a structure for how the collaboration works and is coordinated, and a design principle governing the joint work. What tends to happen instead is neither. The teams proceed as if goodwill substitutes for structure. The result is laissez-faire more often than not. No clear location of responsibility, no purpose anyone has committed to, no shared system. DP1 (bureaucracy) fills the vacuum, as it always does: the team with more power, more visibility, or a stronger brand quietly starts setting the terms. The other finds itself inside someone else's system without ever agreeing to join it. The same dynamic plays out between companies, just with invoices adding a harder edge to the same underlying confusion. The collaboration was real. The shared system never was.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #systemsThinking

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The customer we never met

Context: Context: The team is building a product. They have a backlog, a product owner, and a roadmap. A user story describes what users need. Personas represent who those users are. Analytics track what people do. Every few months, there is a user research report from the UX team. The team works hard, ships regularly, and hits their sprint goals. They have never spoken directly to a customer, though. The product owner does that, and the UX researcher. But the engineers, the people making hundreds of small decisions every day that shape the product, have not. They are building for an abstraction. A persona on a wall, a ticket in Jira, a data point in a dashboard.

OST explains: An open system maintains its health by actively engaging with its environment. For a product team, the primary environment is the people using what they build. The DP1 bureaucracy is a closed system and mediates that relationship through roles: the product owner translates customer needs into requirements, the UX researcher translates behaviour into insights, and the engineer receives the output of both translations. Each translation loses something. The judgment, the context, the friction, the moment when a real person says something that changes how you understand the problem entirely. In DP2, the group owns the whole task, which includes understanding who it is for. Teams with direct customer access make qualitatively different decisions than teams working from second-hand accounts. Not because engineers are better researchers, but because unmediated contact with the environment is not a nice-to-have. For an open system, it is the condition for staying alive.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The Sunday email

Context: The organisation has a genuine commitment to work-life balance. It is in the values mentioned in onboarding, and comes up regularly in all-hands meetings. Flexible working is encouraged. Mental health is taken seriously. And then the email arrives. Sunday evening, 21:47, from the director. Not urgent. Just something they wanted to get out of their head. No response expected, of course. Nobody says that, though. By Monday morning, three people have replied. Others noticed and said nothing. Over time, the pattern becomes clear. The people who get ahead are the ones who are always available. The policy says one thing. The calendar says another.

OST explains: In the bureaucratic DP1, the person at the top carries personal responsibility for outcomes they do not fully control. The higher the position, the larger the gap between accountability and agency. That gap produces anxiety, and anxiety produces overwork. Not because leaders are workaholics by nature, but because the structure places an unreasonable individual burden at every level of the hierarchy. The Sunday email is not a character flaw. It is a structural symptom. The deeper problem is that modelled behaviour always outcompetes stated values. People read the environment, not the handbook. What the boss does on Sunday communicates more about what is expected than any well-being policy. In DP2, responsibility is distributed across the group. No single person carries the weight of outcomes alone, so the chronic anxiety that drives performative overwork largely disappears. Work-life balance stops being a value that needs defending and becomes a natural consequence of a structure that does not place impossible individual burdens on anyone. The Sunday email stops because nobody needs to send it.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

People resist change

Context: The transformation programme has stalled. Change management consultants are brought in. Their diagnosis is familiar: the organisation has a change resistance problem. People are comfortable with the status quo, risk-averse, and slow to adopt new ways of working. The solution involves communication campaigns, stakeholder management, and training to help people become more comfortable with uncertainty. Leadership frames the resistance as a cultural issue — the organisation needs to become more adaptive. The change programme continues to stall.

OST explains: A survey of the software industry found that 82.6% of people who had not experienced any organisational change were dissatisfied with the lack of it. They wanted change. What people consistently object to is not change itself but having change imposed on them — a completely different thing. When people are invited to participate in designing the change they need to make, the resistance largely disappears because there is nothing to resist; the change is theirs. OST's methods, i.e. the Search Conference and the Participative Design Workshop, are built entirely on this insight. The change management industry, with its stakeholder maps and communication cascades, often reflects a reluctance to involve people in designing their own work. It is treating the symptom of DP1 with more DP1.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changeManagement

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Empowerment

Context: Leadership has announced that teams are now empowered. There are communications about it, a new set of principles, perhaps even a manifesto. The manager has been rebranded as a coach or a servant leader. Controls have been loosened, warm and friendly communication is encouraged, and people are told they have more autonomy. For a brief moment, there is energy. Then people try to actually use this empowerment, run into the existing approval processes, budget controls, and management expectations, and quietly conclude that nothing has really changed. The word starts to feel like a joke. And then something goes wrong — a missed deadline, a budget overrun, a production incident — and the coach suddenly starts acting a lot more like a manager. The mask slips, and everyone realises it was always there.

OST explains: Research on organisations that have adopted agile and similar approaches identified a specific and common structural form: the trainer, leader, or coach (TLC) model, where controls are loosened and warm communication encouraged, but the design principle has not actually changed. Workers often prefer this form as it can provide greater autonomy, until things go wrong, at which point the legal DP1 bureaucracy structure kicks back into life. This is not bad faith on the part of the manager; it is the structure asserting itself. The design principle was never changed, so in a crisis, it reasserts the only legitimate authority available. Empowerment in OST terms is not a communication style or a management philosophy; it means the team genuinely controls the coordination and the goals of its own work. That is a structural change, not a cultural one. Announcing empowerment without changing the structure does not create DP2; it creates laissez-faire. The confusion of appearing to have freedom while the real constraints remain exactly where they were, waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Outsourcing the future

Context: The organisation wants a new strategy. Leadership does not have the bandwidth, or perhaps the confidence, to lead the process internally. A consulting firm is brought in. They are smart, experienced, and methodologically rigorous. They interview the leadership team, benchmark against competitors, analyse market trends, and run workshops with selected stakeholders. A few months later, a strategy document arrives. It is well-structured and credible. The organisation begins implementing it. Some things work. Others do not land the way the consultants predicted. The people doing the implementation have questions that the document does not answer. The consultants are gone. Two years later, a new consulting firm is brought in to develop the next strategy.

OST explains: Strategy is not a document. It is a shared understanding of where a system is, where it needs to go, and why. That understanding cannot be imported from outside because it depends on knowledge that only exists inside the system, distributed across the people who operate it, the relationships they hold, and the environment they transact with daily. A consulting firm can bring analytical frameworks, comparative data, and an external perspective. What they cannot do is replace the participative process through which an organisation develops genuine strategic ownership. The Search Conference exists because Emery understood this. An effective strategy requires the whole system in the room, not a representative sample interviewed by outsiders. A strategy people helped build is one they will adapt when reality diverges from the plan. A strategy handed down, however well-researched, will be executed literally until it fails and then replaced by the next one. The cycle is not a strategy problem. It is a participation problem.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #strategy

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The product owner trap

Context: The team has a product owner. She sits with the team, attends the standups, writes the user stories, and manages the backlog. She is good at her job, but she is not really making product decisions. She is translating decisions made by a business stakeholder who sits outside the team and controls the budget. The team builds what she tells them to build, being the proxy for the business which tells her to tell them. She does not really have the mandate to decide much. When the team raises a concern about direction, it goes to the PO, who raises it with the business, who considers it and comes back three weeks later with a modified brief. The team is a feature factory. Everyone knows it. Nobody knows what to do about it.

OST explains: The product owner role, as conceived in Scrum, places a single person in charge of deciding what the team builds. That person is formally part of the team but functionally a conduit for management, the ordering-supplier divide between business and IT given a new job title. In OST terms, this is pure bureaucracy (DP1): responsibility for goal-setting sits above the work, even if it sits only one step above rather than many. A genuinely self-managing group in DP2 owns its whole task, not just how the work is done, but what work is done and why. That means the team has a genuine relationship with the customer and the business context, not a mediated one through a proxy. Marty Cagan's distinction between feature teams and empowered product teams maps almost exactly onto DP1 and DP2: in the former, the team is handed a solution to build, in the latter, it is given a problem to solve. The difference is not about process or methodology. It is about whether goal-setting lives inside or outside the group. Until that changes, the product owner is not empowering the team; she is the most visible evidence that it is not empowered.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Doing the wrong thing right

Context: The organisation is focused on improvement. There are efficiency drives, process optimisations, restructuring programmes, and culture initiatives. Each quarter brings a new priority. The internal machinery is constantly being tuned. Meanwhile, the environment is changing. A new technology is reshaping customer expectations. A regulatory shift is coming. A competitor is doing something nobody has quite figured out yet. The people closest to these signals mention them in meetings, raise them in retrospectives, and flag them in Slack. The organisation processes them slowly, if at all. The improvement programmes continue. The internal machinery gets more refined. The gap between the organisation and its environment quietly widens.

OST explains: Open systems theory makes a distinction that most management frameworks miss. The health of a system depends not only on its internal functioning but on the quality of its relationship with its environment. An organisation can be internally coherent, well-managed, and efficiently run while simultaneously drifting away from the environment it depends on. Emery and Trist's turbulent fields insight is relevant here: in a Type IV environment, the environment itself is in motion. An organisation that looks inward while the field moves becomes misaligned, not through any internal failure but simply through the passage of time. DP1 (bureaucracy) accelerates this, concentrating perception and decision-making at the top, seeing the environment through a narrow aperture. DP2 distributes that perceptual capacity across the whole system. Every group at the boundary imports a signal. All hands on deck. The organisation stays coupled to its environment not through a strategy process but through its structure. Peter Drucker distinguished between efficiency and effectiveness: there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Most improvement programmes are efficiency projects. OST asks the effectiveness question first. You cannot tune your way into relevance. The environment does not wait.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #SystemsThinking

Intermezzo:

The Organisational Dysfunction of the Day series is becoming a book. 63+ dysfunctions explained through Open Systems Theory — why they keep happening and what the structure underneath them is.

Launching July 2026. Follow along on Leanpub: https://leanpub.com/organisationaldysfunctions

#opensystemstheory #sociotechnical #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The project in product clothing

Context: The organisation has committed to product thinking, where teams own their domains end-to-end, work iteratively, and adapt based on what they learn. Then a new initiative arrives. It has a defined scope, a delivery date, a budget, and even a steering committee. It is a classic project, but it is run inside the product structure. The product team is asked to deliver specific functionality by a fixed date. The iterative process continues in form — sprints, retros, demos — but the scope is locked, and the deadline is real. When the team discovers mid-way that the problem is more complex than the brief suggested, they do not have the option to redefine it. They have a contract to fulfil. The project ends on time, more or less. The product it leaves behind carries the weight of every decision made under deadline pressure. The team that owns it lives with that weight long after the steering committee has moved on.

OST explains: Projects and products are not different delivery methods; they are different theories of what a problem is. A project assumes the problem is known, the solution is specifiable, and the work is simply execution. It is a closed system: scope goes in, deliverable comes out. A product assumes the problem is partially known at best, the solution emerges through contact with the environment, and the work is continuous learning. It is an open system, transacting with users, the market, and technology throughout its life. Emery and Trist's causal textures framework explains why mixing them fails. Projects are a Type III response; competitive, industrial, bureaucratic, and designed for predictable environments. Product development in a turbulent Type IV environment cannot be governed by Type III instruments without losing exactly the adaptive capacity that product thinking was meant to create. The steering committee, the fixed scope, and the delivery date are not compatible with an open system. They close it because they have to. The project does not just constrain the product. It temporarily turns it into something else and leaves it changed when it departs.


#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #ProductOrientation

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The performance review

Context: It is that time of year. Everyone knows it is coming. The forms go out, the self-assessments are written, the manager prepares their ratings, and the one-to-ones are scheduled. The organisation may have moved to agile, reorganised around teams, and invested in collaboration, but for these few weeks, the focus shifts unmistakably back to the individual. People remember that their pay, their career, and their standing in the organisation are determined not by how the team performed but by how they personally look to the person above them. The careful positioning begins. The collaborative spirit that seemed genuine a month ago quietly recedes.

OST explains: The annual individual performance review is one of the most structurally destructive rituals in modern organisations precisely because it is so normalised. Whatever self-managing DP2 conditions the organisation has managed to create during the year, the performance review reinstates bureaucratic DP1 values in a single stroke: you are an individual, your performance is separable from the group's, and someone above you is qualified to judge it. In a genuinely self-managing group, individual performance reviews are not only unnecessary; the group manages its own performance collectively. They are actively harmful because they reintroduce the personal dominance hierarchy through one of its most intimate mechanisms. Research consistently shows that external individual evaluation undermines exactly the intrinsic motivation that DP2 structures produce. The review is not a neutral administrative process; it is a structural signal about who is really in charge and what actually gets rewarded.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #management

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The pilot trap

Context: The organisation wants to test a new way of working before committing to it fully. A pilot team is selected. They get more autonomy, a flatter structure, and direct access to the people they serve. The experiment is watched closely. Leadership visits. Consultants evaluate. Progress is tracked and reported. The team delivers well. They are energised and proud of what they have built together. Then the question of scaling comes up. Resistance appears, not from people far away, but from those closest to the experiment. The managers whose teams were not selected. The HR department asked to create exceptions for the pilot. The architects whose standards the pilot bypassed. The steering committee that was promised a clear verdict. The experiment ends, or quietly returns to normal. The organisation concludes that the approach works in theory but is not right for them.

OST explains: Merrelyn Emery identified this dynamic as paradoxical inhibition, drawing on Pavlov's research on conditioning: the people and areas closest to structural change feel most threatened by it and develop the strongest resistance, while those at a safer distance are more likely to adopt it. Norway lived this in the 1960s. The Industrial Democracy Programme experiments worked. The experiments did not spread. Sweden picked up the ideas and ran with them instead. Treating change as a pilot produces exactly this effect. Those around the pilot are confronted daily with a visible alternative to their own way of working. That is not a neutral situation. It is a structural provocation. Partial DP2 in a DP1 organisation is inherently unstable, not because the experiment fails on its own terms, but because the surrounding system has every structural reason to absorb or eliminate it. This is not cynicism or politics. It is the immune system of DP1 doing exactly what it was designed to do. The only way to avoid the pilot trap is not to pilot. You cannot sneak DP2 past DP1 one team at a time. The fence will hold.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changemanagement

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The AI we cannot talk about

Context: The organisation has adopted AI. There are productivity metrics, usage dashboards, and a strategy document that references "responsible AI." The head of sustainability has a slide about carbon neutrality by 2035. At a recent industry panel on AI, none of the participants would answer questions about the environmental cost of their deployments when the topic came up from the audience. Not because they did not know. Because their agreements with technology vendors included non-disclosure clauses that prevented them from saying. The audience noticed. Nobody said anything about that either.

OST explains: Data centre electricity demand is growing faster than any other sector. AI-focused facilities are the primary driver. The scale is documented, the trends are public, and in many organisations the internal numbers are known. The NDA is not a knowledge problem. It is a structural choice to prevent knowledge from circulating in the field. Active adaptation requires organisations to act on the field they operate in, not just absorb signals from it. At its fullest, that means contributing to conditions under which the whole system, including the broader environment, can develop sustainably. Fred Emery identified shared values as the only viable coordination mechanism for a field in motion. An industry that signs away its ability to speak about the environmental cost of its own technology has not just failed to share values. It has actively prevented the field from forming them. The oil industry spent decades funding doubt about climate science while its own engineers documented the damage. The pattern is the same: internal knowledge, external silence, and a field that cannot self-correct because the people with the relevant information have contracted out of saying it. This is not a communication problem. It is a field that has chosen not to adapt, at the cost of everyone in it.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #ai #climate

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Change agents of the status quo

Context: The organisation is struggling with its agile transformation. Teams are frustrated, delivery is slow, and the gap between the agile principles on the wall and the daily reality is hard to ignore. Leadership responds by bringing in agile coaches. Sometimes it is an external consultant. Sometimes it is a team lead who rebrands as a servant leader or agile enabler, sensing that the old role needs a new name to survive. The coaches run workshops, facilitate retros, introduce new ceremonies, and work hard to make things better. The teams appreciate the attention. Things improve slightly at the edges. The fundamental structure does not change. A year later, the same problems are present in slightly different forms. New coaches are brought in.

OST explains: Agile coaches are hired by management, which means the coaches who survive in the role are those comfortable operating within DP1. Those who challenge the structure too directly lose the engagement. Over time, the role selects for people skilled at making DP1 more bearable, not at replacing it. The coach becomes a buffer: absorbing frustration from the teams, translating it into something leadership can accept, and returning something that resembles a response. The energy that might have driven structural change is consumed in the process. For team leads and managers who sense that DP2 threatens their position, coaching offers a way to remain relevant, embracing the language of empowerment and self-management while preserving the hierarchy that sustains their career. When they cannot do it themselves, they hire consultants who can do it for them. The result in both cases is the same: a DP1 organisation with a DP2 vocabulary, which is laissez-faire. The coaches are not the villains here. They are the rational product of a system that needs the appearance of change more than it needs change itself. As Gerald Weinberg observed, organisations are perfectly designed to get the results they get.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Fixing the process

Context: Your team runs retrospectives. The board is visible. The ceremonies happen on time. You adopted lean thinking years ago, worked on flow, reduced batch sizes, and improved feedback loops. For a while, it helped. Then the gains plateaued. The same patterns returned, now with better labels. Scrum is in place, but the standups feel like status reports. The process is being followed, and the problems are still there. Something underneath the process is not changing.

OST explains: J. Robins & Sons, a hundred-year-old Australian fashion shoe manufacturer, tried the manufacturing-improvement playbook and ran into the same wall. They were heading the way every other Australian shoe maker had gone, towards offshoring or extinction. So they did something different: they used Participative Design Workshops to legally change the design principle from DP1 to DP2, the self-managing-group structure. Over five years, total stock dropped 50%, lead time went from 15 days to 2 hours, customer returns dropped 45%, downtime dropped 65%, pairs produced per person rose 30%, and absenteeism fell from 4% to 1.5%. They became the sole remaining large footwear manufacturer in Australia, competing with India and China without shifting jobs offshore. The lean and scrum tradition was built on real insights about flow and teamwork, but it stopped at process. OST goes one step further and changes the structure that the process runs on top of. Process improvements without structural change can take you a long way, until they cannot. J. Robins shows what is on the other side.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #lean

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Them and us

Context: There is a clear divide in the organisation. It might be between IT and the business, between development and operations, between project teams competing for the same resources, between headquarters and the regions, or simply between management and everyone else. People talk about the other group with mild contempt or resigned frustration. Collaboration across the boundary is effortful, slow, and often fraught. Everyone acknowledges it is a problem. Workshops are held, values are restated, and leadership talks about being one team. The divide persists.

OST explains: This is one of the most reliable products of DP1, understood since Kurt Lewin's group dynamics research in the 1940s. Three characteristic features of communication in DP1 drive this divide: asymmetry, where communication flows up and down a status chain with no real conversation between equals; egocentrism, where individual accountability means people's interests are best served by looking out for themselves rather than sharing information; and "them and us" as the natural end state of both. When people are organised into separate functions with different managers, different goals, and different metrics, the in-group/out-group dynamic is not a cultural failure; it is the structural output. In DP2, teams are organised around whole tasks with shared goals, and all relations are peer negotiations. The divide disappears not because people are nicer, but because neither asymmetry nor egocentrism has anything to feed on.


#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #GroupDynamics

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

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

It's just a job

Context: The workplace is tolerable. Not great, but manageable. You have learned when to speak and when to stay quiet. You have learned not to care too much about decisions made above you. You protect your energy where you can. Then one evening, you notice you are short with your partner for no reason. You are tired in a way that sleep does not fix. You have stopped talking about work at home, not because things are fine, but because there is nothing useful to say. Friends ask how work is going. "Fine," you say. "It's just a job." You mean it as a boundary. It has quietly become something else.

OST explains: Merrelyn Emery described the spiralling maladaptive effects of bureaucracy, and the word spiral matters. It does not stabilise. A structure that generates contempt, humiliation, guilt, shame, and anger at work produces defence mechanisms: withdrawal, cliques, playing politics, and passing the buck. These make the workplace worse, which deepens the distress, which reinforces the defences. The spiral turns. And it does not stop at the door. Apathy and fatigue at work feed family and community disruption at home. Physical and mental health erode. Economic anxiety compounds it. This is where burnout ends up when it is not named or addressed — not recovery, but a permanent lowering of what life is expected to offer. Emery was clear that this is not a collection of individual failures. It is the predictable, structural output of DP1 applied at scale and over time. Organisations pay for it in productivity. Families pay for it in absence and conflict. Communities pay for it in disconnection. "It's just a job" sounds like pragmatism. It is the sound of the spiral completing.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The pair that runs everything

Context: Your team has two people who seem to understand both the work and each other. Everyone defers to them in standups. Their pull requests move faster. The real design decisions happen between those two, usually in a thread most of the team is not in. New people join and quickly learn to route questions through them. The team delivers, which is why nobody says anything. Management sees the output and calls it a high-performing team. Then one of the pair leaves. Then, within a year, the other. The team that looked healthy from the outside has no internal coordination structure of its own. It was borrowed from two people who are now gone.

OST explains: What you are seeing is Bion's pairing assumption operating at the team level. When a group has no real coordination structure of its own, it creates a surrogate: two people whose competence and rapport become the informal hub the rest of the team orbits around. It works, until it doesn't. Merrelyn Emery showed that pairing is not always destructive. In a well-functioning DP2 group, two or more people can come together in an animated exchange around a new idea, energising the whole room and pulling everyone into more creative work — a genuine prelude to the group firing on all cylinders. That is the regenerative form. What appears in most agile teams is the other one: a pair whose rapport becomes the de facto coordination mechanism, creating asymmetrical relations with the rest, parallel monologues rather than group conversation, a brittle stability that depends entirely on those two people being present. The structure determines which form pairing takes. In a DP2 group with genuine shared coordination, pairing is a spark. In a laissez-faire team without a coordination structure — which is most agile teams — it hardens into something that looks like high performance but is actually borrowed from two people the team was never asked to share accountability with. The pair did not fail the team. The structure failed the team, and the pair was the price.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #teamdynamics

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The agile scaling trap

Context: The teams are working well, or well enough. Sprints are running, retrospectives are happening, and there is some genuine ownership of the work. Then the question arrives from above: how do we scale this? The organisation has hundreds of developers across dozens of teams, and it needs them to be coordinated, aligned, and pulling in the same direction. A scaling framework is adopted; SAFe is the most common, but there are others. Release Trains are introduced. Programme Increment planning fills two days every quarter. A new layer of roles appears: Release Train Engineers, Solution Architects, Portfolio Managers. The teams are still doing agile. The organisation around them now looks remarkably like the bureaucracy agile was supposed to replace.

OST explains: Scaling frameworks like SAFe are not an extension of agile; they are a reassertion of DP1 over the partial DP2 that agile attempts. The coordination problem agile never solved at the team level becomes acute at scale, and in the absence of a structural answer, the bureaucracy provides one: add a layer above. The Release Train is a project in disguise, the PI planning session is a quarterly waterfall, and the portfolio layer is the PMO with new vocabulary. OST predicted this: when you introduce DP2 practices into a DP1 organisation without changing the underlying design principle, DP1 will fight back, and it usually wins, because it controls the resources, the budget, and the careers. SAFe is not a solution to the scaling problem; it is proof that the scaling problem was always an organisational design problem agile never had an answer to. The answer is not a bigger framework but a hierarchy of functions. Self-managing groups at every level, each owning its whole task and coordinating as peers. Agile needed fixing. Instead, it got scaled.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Budgets are bureaucracy

Context: The organisation has restructured into product teams. They have autonomy over their work, their roadmap, and how they collaborate. Then comes budget season. Each team is asked to forecast its needs twelve to eighteen months ahead, justify them against business cases, and compete with other teams for a finite pool of money. The forecasts get approved or revised by people who are not part of the teams. Mid-year, priorities shift. Some budgets get cut. Others get reallocated through a process that the teams do not control. The autonomy on paper meets the finance department in practice. Everyone knows which one wins. The team owns the product, but not the resources that decide what the product can actually become.

OST explains: Whoever controls the allocation of money controls the structure, regardless of what the org chart says. A DP2 design with DP1 budgeting is not a DP2 organisation. It is a DP1 organisation with self-managing teams operating in the spaces that money has decided in advance. DP2 requires that groups control the resources for their own work. That is what it means to own the whole task. What OST does not do is prescribe how this should look in a given organisation, because OST is a conceptual framework, not a recipe. A preset model handed down would itself be a DP1 move — exactly the kind of imposed design the theory argues against. The methods OST provides, Search Conference and Participative Design Workshop, exist to help an organisation work out its own answer, not to deliver one. Beyond Budgeting, developed in part by Norwegian practitioner Bjarte Bogsnes, is one practical attempt to separate the decisions about goals, resources, and evaluation that the annual budget collapses into one. It moves in the right direction. But the answer to how money should flow in a self-managing organisation is one that each organisation must design for itself, using its own people. The structure of money is the structure of the organisation. Both have to be designed together, by the people who will live with the result.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership