Post #3528673

2026-06-26 06:08 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The market we think we shape Context: The organisation is genuinely engaged with its market. There is a customer advisory board that meets twice a year. The head of product speaks at industry conferences. The company publishes case studies, contributes to working groups, and has a reputation for being thoughtful about the space it operates in. Leadership talks about being a market shaper, not a market follower. Internally, roadmap decisions are still driven by competitive analysis, quarterly OKRs, and what the sales team is hearing from prospects. The advisory board gives feedback on features that have already been decided. The conference talks describe what the company has built, not what the industry needs. The working groups produce documents nobody implements. The organisation is present in the field. It is not shaping it. OST explains: An open system survives by maintaining an active relationship with its environment, not just absorbing signals from it but acting on them. Most organisations in turbulent fields are reasonably good at the first: they scan, survey, monitor, and respond. What they systematically underinvest in is the second: actively shaping the field. Responsiveness alone is reactive. The US auto industry watched fuel prices rise, saw consumer values shifting, and kept building SUVs. The signals were there. The field was not taken seriously as something to act on, only to respond to. In turbulent conditions that gap is fatal, because the field changes faster than any planning cycle can track. Shaping a field at its fullest means contributing to conditions under which customers, partners, and the broader system can develop sustainably. That requires treating the future as a puzzle to be explored together, not a problem to be solved internally. The advisory board, the conference talk, the working group document are all problem-solving instruments. None of them is puzzle-solving. The organisation is not shaping its environment. It is describing it, at a safe distance, and calling that strategy. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #strategy

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-29 06:07

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

Open ##3528672