Post #3528695

2026-06-05 07:24 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The pilot trap Context: The organisation wants to test a new way of working before committing to it fully. A pilot team is selected. They get more autonomy, a flatter structure, and direct access to the people they serve. The experiment is watched closely. Leadership visits. Consultants evaluate. Progress is tracked and reported. The team delivers well. They are energised and proud of what they have built together. Then the question of scaling comes up. Resistance appears, not from people far away, but from those closest to the experiment. The managers whose teams were not selected. The HR department asked to create exceptions for the pilot. The architects whose standards the pilot bypassed. The steering committee that was promised a clear verdict. The experiment ends, or quietly returns to normal. The organisation concludes that the approach works in theory but is not right for them. OST explains: Merrelyn Emery identified this dynamic as paradoxical inhibition, drawing on Pavlov's research on conditioning: the people and areas closest to structural change feel most threatened by it and develop the strongest resistance, while those at a safer distance are more likely to adopt it. Norway lived this in the 1960s. The Industrial Democracy Programme experiments worked. The experiments did not spread. Sweden picked up the ideas and ran with them instead. Treating change as a pilot produces exactly this effect. Those around the pilot are confronted daily with a visible alternative to their own way of working. That is not a neutral situation. It is a structural provocation. Partial DP2 in a DP1 organisation is inherently unstable, not because the experiment fails on its own terms, but because the surrounding system has every structural reason to absorb or eliminate it. This is not cynicism or politics. It is the immune system of DP1 doing exactly what it was designed to do. The only way to avoid the pilot trap is not to pilot. You cannot sneak DP2 past DP1 one team at a time. The fence will hold. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changemanagement

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-08 06:06

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The AI we cannot talk about Context: The organisation has adopted AI. There are productivity metrics, usage dashboards, and a strategy document that references "responsible AI." The head of sustainability has a slide about carbon neutrality by 2035. At a recent industry panel on AI, none of the participants would answer questions about the environmental cost of their deployments when the topic came up from the audience. Not because they did not know. Because their agreements with technology vendors included non-disclosure clauses that prevented them from saying. The audience noticed. Nobody said anything about that either. OST explains: Data centre electricity demand is growing faster than any other sector. AI-focused facilities are the primary driver. The scale is documented, the trends are public, and in many organisations the internal numbers are known. The NDA is not a knowledge problem. It is a structural choice to prevent knowledge from circulating in the field. Active adaptation requires organisations to act on the field they operate in, not just absorb signals from it. At its fullest, that means contributing to conditions under which the whole system, including the broader environment, can develop sustainably. Fred Emery identified shared values as the only viable coordination mechanism for a field in motion. An industry that signs away its ability to speak about the environmental cost of its own technology has not just failed to share values. It has actively prevented the field from forming them. The oil industry spent decades funding doubt about climate science while its own engineers documented the damage. The pattern is the same: internal knowledge, external silence, and a field that cannot self-correct because the people with the relevant information have contracted out of saying it. This is not a communication problem. It is a field that has chosen not to adapt, at the cost of everyone in it. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #ai #climate

Open ##3528693