Post #3528680

2026-06-19 06:13 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Career paths Context: A good developer joins the organisation. They are technically excellent, collaborative, and genuinely invested in the work. Two years in, they get a nudge from their manager: it might be time to think about a senior role, maybe a tech lead position. The path is clear. Individual contributor, senior IC, tech lead, engineering manager, director. Each step means more responsibility, more pay, and more status. Each step also means moving further from the work they loved and closer to the coordination and control functions that DP1 requires. Many take the path not because they want to manage people but because it is the only path available. Others refuse it and hit a ceiling. A few leave for organisations that offer something different. OST explains: The bureaucratic career ladder is one of the primary mechanisms that keeps DP1 in place psychologically. It converts the organisation's need for coordination and control into an individual incentive structure: accept constraints on your autonomy today in exchange for advancement tomorrow. Over time, this produces a management layer of people who were excellent at the work below but whose promotion removed them from it, and a technical workforce that either climbs reluctantly or opts out and stagnates. In DP2, the ladder largely disappears because management functions are distributed into the self-managing groups. This is liberating but genuinely disorienting for people whose professional identity is structured around it, and organisations that move toward self-management without addressing career expectations tend to lose precisely those most invested in the old structure. The transition requires a different answer to "where do I go from here?" — one built around depth of skill and breadth of contribution rather than ascent through a hierarchy DP2 does not have. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-22 06:24

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

Open ##3528678