Post #3528691

2026-06-09 06:02 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Change agents of the status quo Context: The organisation is struggling with its agile transformation. Teams are frustrated, delivery is slow, and the gap between the agile principles on the wall and the daily reality is hard to ignore. Leadership responds by bringing in agile coaches. Sometimes it is an external consultant. Sometimes it is a team lead who rebrands as a servant leader or agile enabler, sensing that the old role needs a new name to survive. The coaches run workshops, facilitate retros, introduce new ceremonies, and work hard to make things better. The teams appreciate the attention. Things improve slightly at the edges. The fundamental structure does not change. A year later, the same problems are present in slightly different forms. New coaches are brought in. OST explains: Agile coaches are hired by management, which means the coaches who survive in the role are those comfortable operating within DP1. Those who challenge the structure too directly lose the engagement. Over time, the role selects for people skilled at making DP1 more bearable, not at replacing it. The coach becomes a buffer: absorbing frustration from the teams, translating it into something leadership can accept, and returning something that resembles a response. The energy that might have driven structural change is consumed in the process. For team leads and managers who sense that DP2 threatens their position, coaching offers a way to remain relevant, embracing the language of empowerment and self-management while preserving the hierarchy that sustains their career. When they cannot do it themselves, they hire consultants who can do it for them. The result in both cases is the same: a DP1 organisation with a DP2 vocabulary, which is laissez-faire. The coaches are not the villains here. They are the rational product of a system that needs the appearance of change more than it needs change itself. As Gerald Weinberg observed, organisations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-10 06:17

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

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