Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
What the war room proves
Context: The payment service goes down at 2am. Within minutes, an incident channel is spun up with people from three teams. For the next ninety minutes, whoever is in that channel has full authority to decide what to try, coordinate with whomever they need, and act without asking anyone above them for approval. It gets fixed faster than almost anything else the organisation does. By 4am the channel is archived. Everyone returns to the structure where none of that authority exists, and the person who diagnosed the root cause spends the next three days getting sign-off to actually fix it,.
OST explains: The war room is a concept that should not need to exist. Its existence is the evidence: the organisation has a name and a procedure for temporarily switching to DP2, which means it already knows DP2 works and knows exactly what it looks like. It reserves this mode for the moments when the cost of DP1 is most visible and least tolerable, then reverts as soon as the pressure lifts. The structure that performs best under pressure is treated as an exception. The structure that performs worse under normal conditions is the default. Placing control and coordination with the people doing the work is not something incidents require, and everyday work does not. It is something every kind of work would benefit from, not only the kind that is on fire. The organisation has already built the proof. It just refuses to draw the conclusion when nothing is on fire.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #incidents
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This post is part of the Organisational Dysfunction of the Day series. Full list here: https://lnkd.in/e_CF_zEK
The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com
