Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Built for yesterday
Context: The strategy keeps changing. The market shifted, then shifted again. A competitor emerged from an unexpected direction. AI is rewriting the economics of the industry faster than anyone predicted. The three-year plan written eighteen months ago is already obsolete. Leadership responds with more planning, tighter governance, and faster decision cycles at the top. The organisation is working harder than ever and adapting less than ever. People at the coalface can see what needs to change, but cannot get decisions made quickly enough. By the time something is approved, the situation has moved on. The organisation is not slow because people are lazy or misaligned. It is slow because it was designed for a world that no longer exists.
OST explains: Emery and Trist identified four types of organisational environment, which they called causal textures. The third, disturbed reactive, is the competitive industrial world that DP1, the bureaucratic structure, was designed for, with large, similar organisations whose moves continually disturb one another. The fourth, turbulent fields, is categorically different: the environment itself is in motion, driven by forces in the field itself, like technological disruption, social change, and ecological pressure. In turbulent fields, the variety generated by the environment exceeds the capacity of any hierarchy to process and respond to it. DP1 is actively maladaptive here, because concentrating perception and decision-making at the top creates exactly the bottleneck that makes the organisation slow when speed matters most. DP2, the self-managing-group structure, distributes that capacity across the whole organisation, with every group actively scanning its environment, adapting, and feeding learning back into the system. We have been in turbulent fields for decades. AI has just turned up the intensity several orders of magnitude. To 11.
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