Post #3528688

2026-06-11 06:44 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Them and us Context: There is a clear divide in the organisation. It might be between IT and the business, between development and operations, between project teams competing for the same resources, between headquarters and the regions, or simply between management and everyone else. People talk about the other group with mild contempt or resigned frustration. Collaboration across the boundary is effortful, slow, and often fraught. Everyone acknowledges it is a problem. Workshops are held, values are restated, and leadership talks about being one team. The divide persists. OST explains: This is one of the most reliable products of DP1, understood since Kurt Lewin's group dynamics research in the 1940s. Three characteristic features of communication in DP1 drive this divide: asymmetry, where communication flows up and down a status chain with no real conversation between equals; egocentrism, where individual accountability means people's interests are best served by looking out for themselves rather than sharing information; and "them and us" as the natural end state of both. When people are organised into separate functions with different managers, different goals, and different metrics, the in-group/out-group dynamic is not a cultural failure; it is the structural output. In DP2, teams are organised around whole tasks with shared goals, and all relations are peer negotiations. The divide disappears not because people are nicer, but because neither asymmetry nor egocentrism has anything to feed on.  #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #GroupDynamics

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-12 06:18

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

Open ##3528687