Post by @trondhjort@hachyderm.io

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The wellness programme

Context: The organisation launches a mental health initiative. An EAP contract, a wellness app subscription, mindfulness sessions during lunch, and a poster campaign about checking in on colleagues. Leadership talks about work-life balance in the all-hands, and a new policy discourages emails after 6 pm. HR reports strong sign-up numbers for the app. Sick leave for stress-related reasons does not move. Someone asks whether any of it is working.

OST explains: de Guerre, Emery, Aughton and Trull's research, based on data from Canadian and Australian organisations, found that organisational structure is the single most significant factor affecting employee mental health, ahead of individual coping skills or access to wellness resources. Their causal path analysis traced a clear sequence: the design principle determines conditions such as trust, autonomy and relationships, which in turn determine mental health and sick days. The direction only runs one way. They were direct about what this means for interventions like the one in this organisation: change methods that specialise in improving relationships, trust, or awareness of mental illness may achieve some gains, but they will be short-lived, because changing an enabling condition cannot be sustained if the structure underneath is still DP1. Herbst put the underlying point plainly: the product of work is people, as well as goods and services, and a society is no better than the quality of the people it produces. Wellness programmes and work-life balance policies both aim at the same target: the strain the work causes, not the work itself. Neither touches the structure producing the strain in the first place. A DP1 organisation running a wellness programme is treating the exhaust as if it were the engine.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #health

***

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

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#opensystemstheory #orgdesign #sociotechnical #health

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Trond Hjorteland

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 4 days ago

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Deskilled by AI

Context: The calculator took mental arithmetic. GPS took a sense of direction that used to build itself through years of navigating without help. Neither loss announced itself; the skill just stopped being exercised, then stopped being there. The organisation is rolling out AI coding assistants. Mandatory adoption, tracked usage, productivity metrics. The tools are useful for some things: boilerplate, syntax, routine pattern completion. For the developers who have spent years on narrow, well-defined tasks, the transition is smooth. They were already doing the kind of work the tool handles well. For the developers who remember working across a broader codebase, who once designed as well as implemented, the feeling is harder to name. The tool is filling the gap left by a job that was already shrunk. Something that used to be skill is now a prompt.

OST explains: DP1 deskills actively over time. When a skilled person enters a narrow role, the skills outside it atrophy. Promotion is slow, lateral movement rare, and the structure has no interest in breadth it cannot use. Redundancy of parts requires simple, replaceable parts. When AI tools arrive into this organisation, they meet people already reduced to the slice of work the tool handles best, and the tool completes a process DP1 started years earlier. In DP2, the same tool lands differently: it extends what a multiskilled group can do, rather than substituting for the depth that was never allowed to develop. The question to ask about any AI rollout is not whether the tool is good. It is what kind of person the organisation has spent the last decade producing.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #AI

***

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

View

Trond Hjorteland

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 3 days ago

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The enterprise architect

Context: The organisation has hired another enterprise architect. They come from a strong IT background and have spent years designing complex systems. Now the scope is bigger: the whole operating model. Capability maps are drawn. Functions are decomposed, interfaces specified, governance layers defined. The result is coherent and well-documented. The business leaders look at it and recognise their organisation. The boxes are right. The functions are there. Nobody has the vocabulary to articulate what is missing. The architect is the expert, and the model is technically correct. It is approved. The business strategy is now expressed as an architecture diagram.

OST explains: Enterprise architecture inherited its tools from systems engineering: decompose into components, specify the interfaces, optimise for control. Applied to organisations, this assumptions remains. Applied to organisations, the assumptions travel with them. People become roles, relationships become interfaces, and the organisation becomes a diagram. A diagram is a closed system. It is bounded and designed to be stable. Organisations are not. The business side usually knows this. They read customers, adjust direction without waiting for the architecture to catch up. Frameworks that add resilience help the technical layer bend without breaking, but resilience returns a system to its designed state. It does not ask whether that state is still right. The organisation did not fail to implement the architecture. It outgrew it.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #entArch

***

The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub.
http://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 days ago

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

Removing management

Context: The organisation has decided to flatten. A layer of management, usually middle management, is removed in the name of agility, cost reduction, or both. The teams are told they are now self-managing. Some are excited. Most are bewildered. The work that the managers used to do (coordination, prioritisation, escalation, context-sharing) does not disappear. It just has no home. People improvise, some step into informal leadership, and after a while a new informal hierarchy has formed that looks like the one that was removed.

OST explains: Removing managers without redesigning the work produces an accidental laissez-faire, not a transition to DP2. The management layer existed because the DP1 structure required it: coordination and control had to live somewhere above the work. Removing the layer without moving those functions into the self-managing group means they migrate back in another form. The informal leader who emerges is doing the same job the manager used to do; they have no title or training for it. The transition to DP2 is less about removing bureaucracy and more about letting the group build the self-managing capability to handle coordination, goal-setting, and control itself. That is a design process, not an org chart edit.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #management

***

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

View

Trond Hjorteland

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 23 hr. ago

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

It took an outsider to say it

Context: Someone on the team has been raising the same issue for two years. In retrospectives, in one-to-ones, in Slack threads, in a document nobody read. They have the data, the experience, and the specific knowledge of why this is a problem. They have been politely acknowledged and consistently deprioritised. Then a consultant is brought in for a three-week engagement. They interview people, review some documents, and produce a slide deck. Slide nine says exactly what the team member has been saying for two years. The room nods. Leadership is visibly engaged. Action is taken within the month. The team member says nothing. There is nothing left to say.

OST explains: In a DP1 structure, communication is asymmetrical: messages are filtered through the hierarchy, and their weight depends as much on the sender's position as on their content. An internal voice below a certain level is structurally discounted, not because of bad intent, but because the design principle concentrates authority above the work. The external consultant has no position in the hierarchy and is therefore evaluated differently: their message arrives without the accumulated baggage of power relations and bypasses the filter. Gerald Weinberg observed this pattern decades ago: organisations frequently hire consultants to say what insiders have already said, because the structure cannot hear its own people clearly. The organisation did not need a consultant who was right. It needed one who would be heard. The knowledge was already there. The structure just could not let it in.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #communication

***

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