Post #3528689

2026-06-10 06:17 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Fixing the process Context: Your team runs retrospectives. The board is visible. The ceremonies happen on time. You adopted lean thinking years ago, worked on flow, reduced batch sizes, and improved feedback loops. For a while, it helped. Then the gains plateaued. The same patterns returned, now with better labels. Scrum is in place, but the standups feel like status reports. The process is being followed, and the problems are still there. Something underneath the process is not changing. OST explains: J. Robins & Sons, a hundred-year-old Australian fashion shoe manufacturer, tried the manufacturing-improvement playbook and ran into the same wall. They were heading the way every other Australian shoe maker had gone, towards offshoring or extinction. So they did something different: they used Participative Design Workshops to legally change the design principle from DP1 to DP2, the self-managing-group structure. Over five years, total stock dropped 50%, lead time went from 15 days to 2 hours, customer returns dropped 45%, downtime dropped 65%, pairs produced per person rose 30%, and absenteeism fell from 4% to 1.5%. They became the sole remaining large footwear manufacturer in Australia, competing with India and China without shifting jobs offshore. The lean and scrum tradition was built on real insights about flow and teamwork, but it stopped at process. OST goes one step further and changes the structure that the process runs on top of. Process improvements without structural change can take you a long way, until they cannot. J. Robins shows what is on the other side. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #lean

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-11 06:44

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

Open ##3528688