Post by @trondhjort@hachyderm.io

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The bureaucracy that became the work

Context: You track your time. Not because you want to, not because anyone measured your productivity, but because the organisation requires it. Every hour logged against a project code, every meeting justified by a deliverable, every decision documented for the record. By the end of the week, a significant part of your time has gone into reporting on time, attending governance meetings, preparing status updates, and getting approvals for things that have already been decided. You were hired to design systems. You spend most of your time administering the administration. The work is still there somewhere, but it is no longer what the day is actually about.

OST explains: Herbst, who worked alongside Fred Emery, is direct about this. Treating bureaucratic structure as the only way to organise work has a central consequence: the structure stops serving the task; the task serves the structure. As the internal turbulence and costs of DP1 increase, the organisation's actual work slips into the background and becomes a boundary condition for maintaining the bureaucratic structure. Parkinson described the mechanism in 1955: administrative work expands to fill available time, officials create work for each other, and the apparatus grows regardless of the work. The reporting, the governance meetings, the approval rounds are the cost of the structure, not the cost of the work. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The work happens around it.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #bureaucracy

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

View

Organisational Dysfunctions

A catalogue of organisational dysfunctions explained through Open Systems Theory. For everyone who has felt the friction of broken structures but lacked the language for it.

#opensystemstheory #orgdesign #sociotechnical #bureaucracy

4 Replies

1 Boost

Trond Hjorteland

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2 wk. ago

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Playing politics

Context: Getting things done requires knowing the right people. Decisions that should be straightforward end up depending on who you know, who owes whom a favour, and who has the ear of which senior leader. People learn quickly that the formal process is not really how things work. Some become skilled at navigating this; others find it exhausting and demoralising. Everyone knows it is happening. Nobody talks about it directly.

OST explains: Political behaviour in organisations is a structural output, not a personality trait. When formal authority is concentrated at the top and resources are scarce and competed for, informal influence becomes the only reliable way to get things done. People are being sensible given the system they are in. OST shows that this pattern is a direct consequence of the hierarchy of personal dominance, where power over others is the primary currency. Herbst, who worked alongside Fred Emery, put it directly: the bureaucratic model may not allow an organisation to function and survive without the development of informal practices and relationships. The informal network is what the system requires to work at all. DP2 removes the precondition: when coordination belongs to the group, there is no concentration of authority worth lobbying.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #bureaucracy

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

View

Organisational Dysfunctions

A catalogue of organisational dysfunctions explained through Open Systems Theory. For everyone who has felt the friction of broken structures but lacked the language for it.

Trond Hjorteland

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2 wk. ago

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The blind decision

Context: The organisation is replacing the system that runs its core operations. A large evaluation project is set in motion: people from the floor who use the current system every day, specialists who understand the technical requirements, a project lead who coordinates the process. Options are assessed, vendors are interviewed, workshops are run. Three candidates emerge. The team prepares a thorough brief, comparing each option across every relevant dimension, and presents it to the CTO with a clear recommendation. The CTO reads it, asks a few questions, and signs off. Everyone moves on. Later, someone wonders what the CTO actually decided.

OST explains: In DP1, formal authority over decisions rises with seniority. By the time a decision of this scale reaches the top, the real judgements have been made by the people who understand the domain. The CTO cannot override a well-argued recommendation from a cross-functional team without triggering a political crisis. They can ask questions, request revisions, delay. But the substance of the decision is beyond their reach, because the knowledge required to make it sits below them in the hierarchy. Herbst, who worked alongside Fred Emery, described this systematically: in DP1, the higher the level, the more purely a person becomes a decision-maker without tasks to perform; the lower the level, the more purely an executor without decisions to make. The decision authority and the decision knowledge are in different places, and the hierarchy ensures they stay there. The CTO signs for an organisation that has already decided.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

View

Organisational Dysfunctions

A catalogue of organisational dysfunctions explained through Open Systems Theory. For everyone who has felt the friction of broken structures but lacked the language for it.

Trond Hjorteland

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io last wk.

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The values on the wall

Context: The organisation has values. They were developed in a workshop eighteen months ago, facilitated by a consultant. People wrote on post-its, and the output was synthesised into five words: Courage, Trust, Impact, Collaboration, Excellence. They are on the website, in the onboarding deck, framed in reception. Leadership references them in all-hands. A few people have them in their Slack profiles and email signatures. Most people cannot name all five without looking. None of this is unusual. It is, in fact, the standard outcome.

OST explains: Fred Emery identified shared values as the only viable coordination mechanism for organisations in turbulent environments, conditions where the complexity of change exceeds what any hierarchy can process. In Towards a Social Ecology (1972), he and Trist made the argument precise: in Type IV, individual organisations can no longer adapt through direct action alone, and what holds a field together is the emergence of values with overriding significance across the whole system. Emery went further in Futures We're In (1977), distinguishing between values, which are context-bound preferences, and ideals, which are ends that can always be approached but never fully reached. These are not words a leadership team selects; they are already present in everyone, and what lets people adapt together is recognising ideals they already hold in common, not agreeing to five words someone else chose for them. Values guide behaviour; ideals are what people strive toward. The values on the wall were specified: a consultant ran the workshop, leadership signed off on the wording, and the result was handed down the same way a policy is handed down. Values that arrive that way carry the DP1 filter with them, weighted by the sender's position rather than by what they mean to the people expected to live by them. You cannot laminate your way to shared direction. The organisation gets five words. It does not get an ideal anyone is actually seeking.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #values

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

View

Organisational Dysfunctions

A catalogue of organisational dysfunctions explained through Open Systems Theory. For everyone who has felt the friction of broken structures but lacked the language for it.

Trond Hjorteland

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io last wk.

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Hired from above

Context: The team is behind. The deadline is real and the backlog is not shrinking fast enough. Management wants to help. A decision is made to bring in a consultant, someone experienced, available quickly, and with the right skills on paper. The team hears about it when the contract is already signed. The new person joins on Monday. The team now has to onboard them, explain the codebase, the context, the decisions made six months ago and why, the unwritten rules, the ongoing tensions. The work does not stop while this happens. Two weeks in, the team is further behind than before. Management considers hiring another consultant.

OST explains: Who is in a group is the most fundamental design decision a group can make. In DP2, self-managing groups control their own composition, who joins, when, at what pace, and how new members are integrated. It is a prerequisite for the group to function as a coherent unit, not a privilege. In DP1, hiring is a management function located above the team. The team is a set of roles to be filled, and filling them is somebody else's job. The consultant dropped in under deadline pressure is the extreme version of this. Brooks' Law, adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, is one of the best-known observations in software development. It is broken routinely, by well-meaning people, for structural reasons OST can name. The same dynamic operates in every organisation where teams have no meaningful say in who works alongside them. At best they get to interview candidates and offer an opinion. The decision is made elsewhere. In OST terms, the group that cannot design its own membership cannot fully own its own work. The onboarding cost that Brooks identified is primarily a social system problem, not a knowledge transfer problem. A new person disrupts the group's established patterns of coordination and trust. Those patterns take time to rebuild, and they cannot be rebuilt on demand or to somebody else's schedule. The consultant who eventually left had never really joined.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #recruitment

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

View

Organisational Dysfunctions

A catalogue of organisational dysfunctions explained through Open Systems Theory. For everyone who has felt the friction of broken structures but lacked the language for it.

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