Post #3528685

2026-06-15 06:22 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day It's just a job Context: The workplace is tolerable. Not great, but manageable. You have learned when to speak and when to stay quiet. You have learned not to care too much about decisions made above you. You protect your energy where you can. Then one evening, you notice you are short with your partner for no reason. You are tired in a way that sleep does not fix. You have stopped talking about work at home, not because things are fine, but because there is nothing useful to say. Friends ask how work is going. "Fine," you say. "It's just a job." You mean it as a boundary. It has quietly become something else. OST explains: Merrelyn Emery described the spiralling maladaptive effects of bureaucracy, and the word spiral matters. It does not stabilise. A structure that generates contempt, humiliation, guilt, shame, and anger at work produces defence mechanisms: withdrawal, cliques, playing politics, and passing the buck. These make the workplace worse, which deepens the distress, which reinforces the defences. The spiral turns. And it does not stop at the door. Apathy and fatigue at work feed family and community disruption at home. Physical and mental health erode. Economic anxiety compounds it. This is where burnout ends up when it is not named or addressed — not recovery, but a permanent lowering of what life is expected to offer. Emery was clear that this is not a collection of individual failures. It is the predictable, structural output of DP1 applied at scale and over time. Organisations pay for it in productivity. Families pay for it in absence and conflict. Communities pay for it in disconnection. "It's just a job" sounds like pragmatism. It is the sound of the spiral completing. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-16 09:50

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

Open ##3528683