Post #3528672

2026-06-29 06:07 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The short-termism machine Context: The organisation says it is playing the long game. The strategy deck has a five-year horizon. The values mention sustainability, legacy, and purpose. And yet every significant decision bends toward the next quarter. Investment in capability gets deferred. Technical debt accumulates. People are restructured rather than developed. The leaders who make these decisions are not cynical or short-sighted by nature; they are responding rationally to the incentive structure they operate within. Their position, their bonus, and their reputation are all measured on timescales that do not reward patience. When they leave, the consequences follow someone else. OST explains: Short-termism in DP1 is not a governance failure or a cultural problem. It is a structural output. Individual leaders at the top of a hierarchy optimise for their own tenure and their own metrics. The organisation's long-term health and its personal incentives are only accidentally aligned. Boards try to fix this with longer vesting periods, clawback clauses, and ESG targets, patching the incentive structure without changing the underlying design. In DP2, self-managing groups operate at all levels, including the strategic. A group that collectively owns the purpose and the outcomes does not have the same exit incentives as an individual executive. Nobody in the group is positioning for the next job. The consequences of decisions stay with the people who made them. That is not a guarantee of wisdom, but it is a fundamentally different relationship with time. Dee Hock built VISA as something close to this and described the result as an organisation that could outlast any individual within it. Short-termism is not human nature. It is what DP1 selects for. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #strategy

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-30 06:00

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

Open ##3528671