Post #3528678

2026-06-22 06:24 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Designed to undermine Context: The organisation has restructured into self-managing teams. The design work was done carefully: clear boundaries, whole tasks, and genuine coordination within the group. For a while, things improve. Then the friction starts. The annual performance review asks people to describe their individual contributions. The career ladder requires becoming a team lead to get a pay rise. The bonus is tied to personal targets. Hiring is run by HR using job descriptions written for roles the new structure no longer has. Training budgets are allocated per person, not per team. A senior developer joins and immediately starts protecting their turf because their title and seniority depend on being the expert. Six months in, the team is drifting back toward the old behaviour. Nobody changed the structure. The support system did it for them. OST explains: DP2 requires that the systems surrounding the organisation reinforce its design, not contradict it. Performance management, pay structures, career paths, and hiring practices are all built around DP1 assumptions about individual accountability and hierarchical progression, and they will quietly pull against any DP2 redesign. They do not need to be actively hostile — they just need to keep rewarding individual behaviour in a structure that depends on collective behaviour. OST is explicit that DP2 cannot be introduced in parts of an organisation while DP1 remains in the rest; that mixed mode is not a halfway house but laissez-faire, and it is maladaptive. The support systems are the clearest proof. They belong to the DP1 organisation and reach into the DP2 teams every review cycle, every hiring decision, every pay round. A DP2 structure surrounded by DP1 support systems is a plant in the wrong soil. The roots have nowhere to go. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-23 08:28

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Pay and reward Context: The organisation has moved to agile, reorganised around product teams, and invested heavily in the transition. The teams have more autonomy, shared goals, and genuine collective accountability. The work feels different. Then the bonus cycle arrives. Individual targets are reviewed. Personal ratings are assigned. The payout is calculated per person based on their individual performance. Some team members did less visible work that was essential to the group. Others were more prominent but depended heavily on the rest. The bonus does not know the difference. Within a few weeks, the behaviour shifts. People start making sure their name is on the right things. The team dynamic that took a year to build quietly corrodes. The reward system has spoken, and it was louder than everything else. OST explains: Pay and reward systems are one of the most powerful structural signals in any organisation, and almost all of them are built on DP1 assumptions: individual performance ratings, bonuses tied to personal targets, pay bands linked to seniority and title. OST's support congruence principle is precise about this: the rest of the organisation, including how people are paid, must support the teams as they are designed. If the team is supposed to share accountability for collective outcomes but is rewarded individually, the reward system will win. It is a stronger structural signal than any value statement or team charter. The DP2 alternative is pay for skill rather than pay for position: people are compensated for the range of functions they can perform for the group, which incentivises learning and breadth of contribution rather than territory protection. It also removes the basis for individual ranking within the team, which in a genuinely self-managing group is not only unnecessary but structurally corrosive. The bonus did not break the team. The design of the bonus did. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Open ##3528676