Post #3528670

2026-07-01 06:35 UTC

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

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-07-02 05:53

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Rearranging the furniture Context: The organisation wants to improve engagement. HR runs a job design initiative. Roles are reviewed and enriched: more variety, clearer ownership, better learning opportunities, stronger feedback loops. Individual development plans are updated. Some people respond well. The numbers improve slightly. A few years later, the same initiative runs again under a different name. The underlying dynamic has not changed. People are still doing work defined by someone else, in structures designed by someone else, toward goals set by someone else. The enrichment made the cage more comfortable. The cage is still there. OST explains: This is not a new experiment. The Norwegian Industrial Democracy Programme in the 1960s, in which Fred Emery played a central role, tested exactly this. Job enrichment worked in some contexts, particularly where the technology and task structure allowed individual roles to be redesigned meaningfully. But it consistently produced weaker results than the alternative: groups that collectively designed their own work. The critical distinction is not how much autonomy a person is given. It is who defines the work in the first place. In job enrichment, management or HR redesigns the individual role. The person receives a better-designed job. In a self-managing team as understood in OST, the group designs its own work, its own coordination, its own goals. Nobody hands it down. The six psychological requirements for productive work, things like genuine learning, real decision-making, and meaningful social support, can be partially addressed by enriching individual jobs. They are fully addressed only when the group owns the design of its work. Job enrichment is a DP1 solution applied to a DP1 problem. It improves the parts without changing the system. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Open ##3528669