Post #3528687

2026-06-12 06:18 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Out of sight, out of sync Context: The team is fully remote. Async communication is the norm, the tools are good, and the documentation is better than it ever was in the office. Standups happen on video, retros happen on Miro, and the team ships regularly. Once or twice a year the whole team gets together for a few days. The energy is noticeably different in person: things get resolved that had been stuck for weeks, new people finally feel like they belong, and everyone goes home re-energised. And then, slowly, things drift back. On paper, everything still works. In practice, something is harder to name. Decisions that should be simple take longer. Small misunderstandings accumulate. Someone does something that puzzles the rest, and nobody quite knows how to raise it. The team is coordinating. It is not quite cohering. OST explains: DP2 is structurally possible in a remote setting. The requirements for self-management, that the group controls its own coordination and work design, do not depend on physical presence. But the social fabric that makes those requirements liveable does not. Solomon Asch identified four conditions that must be present for communication to actually work: openness, basic psychological similarity, a mutually shared field, and trust. Remote work weakens all four. The cues we use to sense whether someone is struggling, whether a decision landed well, whether a conflict is brewing, most of them are non-verbal, ambient, and invisible over video. A co-located DP2 group builds and repairs its social fabric continuously and mostly unconsciously. A remote DP2 group has to do that work deliberately. Team gatherings help, and people feel the difference when they happen. But they are injections of social capital into a structure that depletes it continuously. They are not a substitute for the daily, informal repair work that physical proximity enables. The result is a group that is formally self-managing but socially thin. Coordination holds. Cohesion frays. Remote does not break DP2. It makes the invisible work of maintaining it visible and expensive. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #distributedWork

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-15 06:22

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

Open ##3528685