Post #3528683

2026-06-16 09:50 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The pair that runs everything Context: Your team has two people who seem to understand both the work and each other. Everyone defers to them in standups. Their pull requests move faster. The real design decisions happen between those two, usually in a thread most of the team is not in. New people join and quickly learn to route questions through them. The team delivers, which is why nobody says anything. Management sees the output and calls it a high-performing team. Then one of the pair leaves. Then, within a year, the other. The team that looked healthy from the outside has no internal coordination structure of its own. It was borrowed from two people who are now gone. OST explains: What you are seeing is Bion's pairing assumption operating at the team level. When a group has no real coordination structure of its own, it creates a surrogate: two people whose competence and rapport become the informal hub the rest of the team orbits around. It works, until it doesn't. Merrelyn Emery showed that pairing is not always destructive. In a well-functioning DP2 group, two or more people can come together in an animated exchange around a new idea, energising the whole room and pulling everyone into more creative work — a genuine prelude to the group firing on all cylinders. That is the regenerative form. What appears in most agile teams is the other one: a pair whose rapport becomes the de facto coordination mechanism, creating asymmetrical relations with the rest, parallel monologues rather than group conversation, a brittle stability that depends entirely on those two people being present. The structure determines which form pairing takes. In a DP2 group with genuine shared coordination, pairing is a spark. In a laissez-faire team without a coordination structure — which is most agile teams — it hardens into something that looks like high performance but is actually borrowed from two people the team was never asked to share accountability with. The pair did not fail the team. The structure failed the team, and the pair was the price. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #teamdynamics

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@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-17 06:14

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The agile scaling trap Context: The teams are working well, or well enough. Sprints are running, retrospectives are happening, and there is some genuine ownership of the work. Then the question arrives from above: how do we scale this? The organisation has hundreds of developers across dozens of teams, and it needs them to be coordinated, aligned, and pulling in the same direction. A scaling framework is adopted; SAFe is the most common, but there are others. Release Trains are introduced. Programme Increment planning fills two days every quarter. A new layer of roles appears: Release Train Engineers, Solution Architects, Portfolio Managers. The teams are still doing agile. The organisation around them now looks remarkably like the bureaucracy agile was supposed to replace. OST explains: Scaling frameworks like SAFe are not an extension of agile; they are a reassertion of DP1 over the partial DP2 that agile attempts. The coordination problem agile never solved at the team level becomes acute at scale, and in the absence of a structural answer, the bureaucracy provides one: add a layer above. The Release Train is a project in disguise, the PI planning session is a quarterly waterfall, and the portfolio layer is the PMO with new vocabulary. OST predicted this: when you introduce DP2 practices into a DP1 organisation without changing the underlying design principle, DP1 will fight back, and it usually wins, because it controls the resources, the budget, and the careers. SAFe is not a solution to the scaling problem; it is proof that the scaling problem was always an organisational design problem agile never had an answer to. The answer is not a bigger framework but a hierarchy of functions. Self-managing groups at every level, each owning its whole task and coordinating as peers. Agile needed fixing. Instead, it got scaled. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Open ##3528682