Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Fixing the process
Context: Your team runs retrospectives. The board is visible. The ceremonies happen on time. You adopted lean thinking years ago, worked on flow, reduced batch sizes, and improved feedback loops. For a while, it helped. Then the gains plateaued. The same patterns returned, now with better labels. Scrum is in place, but the standups feel like status reports. The process is being followed, and the problems are still there. Something underneath the process is not changing.
OST explains: J. Robins & Sons, a hundred-year-old Australian fashion shoe manufacturer, tried the manufacturing-improvement playbook and ran into the same wall. They were heading the way every other Australian shoe maker had gone, towards offshoring or extinction. So they did something different: they used Participative Design Workshops to legally change the design principle from DP1 to DP2, the self-managing-group structure. Over five years, total stock dropped 50%, lead time went from 15 days to 2 hours, customer returns dropped 45%, downtime dropped 65%, pairs produced per person rose 30%, and absenteeism fell from 4% to 1.5%. They became the sole remaining large footwear manufacturer in Australia, competing with India and China without shifting jobs offshore. The lean and scrum tradition was built on real insights about flow and teamwork, but it stopped at process. OST goes one step further and changes the structure that the process runs on top of. Process improvements without structural change can take you a long way, until they cannot. J. Robins shows what is on the other side.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #lean
