Trond Hjorteland
@trondhjort@hachyderm.io
An open #sociotechnical systems and #DDDesign practitioner at Capra with a ghoulish sense of post-punk and a geeky interest in science and systems thinking. He/him.
hachyderm.io
Replying to
@trondhjort@hachyderm.io
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The output nobody owned
Context: The workshop uses post-its. Everyone writes, sticks them up, and the facilitator clusters them into themes. By the end of the day, there are hundreds of them on the wall. Even the plenary review, where the groups walk through their output together, cannot hold it all. Participants follow for the first twenty minutes, then the sheer volume overtakes their capacity to track. Something you wrote is up there somewhere. Whether it survived the clustering, whether it was merged into something adjacent or simply lost in the mass, you cannot tell. The facilitator synthesises. The output looks clean. The trust in it is thinner than it looks.
OST explains: Solomon Asch identified four conditions that must be present for communication to actually work: openness, basic psychological similarity, a mutually shared field, and trust. The last is a product of the first three. Post-its structurally undermine the first and third. They can be removed, merged, reworded, or lost without detection. The field is no longer shared and open; it is curated, and everyone in the room senses this even when they cannot name it. The Search Conference tradition addresses this with deliberate bluntness: everything goes on large sheets of paper fixed to the walls, written in full view, staying there for the entire event. Nothing is summarised by a facilitator. Groups consolidate their own work before it is brought to the plenary, so the authors are present when it is presented and can verify it. The open record is not a formality; it is the mechanism by which trust accumulates. Merrelyn Emery called butchers' paper the ultimate guarantee of openness, precisely because it is virtually impossible to change without the room noticing. The post-it is convenient. It is also the perfect tool for a workshop where nobody quite trusts the output and nobody can explain why.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #facilitation