Post #3528671

2026-06-30 06:00 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The corridor conversation Context: The meeting goes smoothly. Nobody challenges the proposal, nobody raises the obvious concern, nobody points out that this is the third time the same idea has been tried. Afterwards, in the corridor or on Slack, people say exactly what they did not say in the room. They knew the plan was flawed. They chose not to say so. Some are protecting their chances of promotion. Some have simply learned that speaking up costs more than it is worth. Some genuinely like their manager and do not want to make things awkward. The result is the same: the people with the most operational knowledge stay quiet, and the people with the least make the decisions. OST explains: This is Bion’s basic assumptions in one of their most common forms: dependency and flight. In a DP1 structure, the career of the person below is genuinely in the hands of the person above, so rational people learn to manage upward: agreeing, deferring, smoothing things over rather than challenging. The underlying mechanism is asymmetry, one of the three characteristic features of communication in DP1 (the others being egocentrism and a persistent them-and-us divide), where orders flow down, and responses flow up with no real conversation between equals; it is the communication pattern of an operator and a machine, and it is no coincidence people in these structures describe themselves as cogs. Over time, this becomes habitual and unconscious: the people who should be providing the most useful feedback have the most to lose from doing so. In DP2, where all communications are negotiations between peers, the asymmetry dissolves. People speak because the goal is shared and accountability is mutual, not because they have been told it is safe to do so. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-07-01 06:35

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

Open ##3528670