Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
When the glue leaves
Context: Every team has one. The person who remembers why the architecture is the way it is, who onboards new people without being asked, who spots the misunderstanding between two colleagues before it becomes a conflict, who writes the documentation nobody else gets around to. They are rarely the loudest voice in the room. Their work is invisible precisely because it works. Then they leave, or they are cut in a restructuring because their output is hard to measure. The team notices immediately. Things that used to happen automatically now fall through the gaps. A few months later, a manager is hired to fill the coordination hole. They come from outside, know how to run a team, but not the domain, not the technology, not the relationships. The team now has overhead where it used to have glue.
OST explains: Parkinson observed that in a bureaucratic structure, administrators multiply subordinates rather than rivals, not out of malice, but because DP1 has only one answer to a coordination problem: add a layer above it. When the informal coordinator disappears, the organisation's structural immune response is to hire a professional manager. It is the only move available. The result is a double loss. The team loses the person who held things together from within, and gains someone whose coordination mechanism is hierarchy rather than craft knowledge and trust. In a DP2 structure, those coordination functions belong to the group as a whole; they are distributed across the team by design, so no single person carries them alone and no single departure collapses them. In DP1, that distribution never happened. The coordination lived in one person because the structure had no other place for it. The replacement manager is DP1's only available response to a gap that DP1 itself created, not a solution to it. The organisation did not solve the coordination problem. It institutionalised it.
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