Post #3528697

2026-06-04 06:08 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The performance review Context: It is that time of year. Everyone knows it is coming. The forms go out, the self-assessments are written, the manager prepares their ratings, and the one-to-ones are scheduled. The organisation may have moved to agile, reorganised around teams, and invested in collaboration, but for these few weeks, the focus shifts unmistakably back to the individual. People remember that their pay, their career, and their standing in the organisation are determined not by how the team performed but by how they personally look to the person above them. The careful positioning begins. The collaborative spirit that seemed genuine a month ago quietly recedes. OST explains: The annual individual performance review is one of the most structurally destructive rituals in modern organisations precisely because it is so normalised. Whatever self-managing DP2 conditions the organisation has managed to create during the year, the performance review reinstates bureaucratic DP1 values in a single stroke: you are an individual, your performance is separable from the group's, and someone above you is qualified to judge it. In a genuinely self-managing group, individual performance reviews are not only unnecessary; the group manages its own performance collectively. They are actively harmful because they reintroduce the personal dominance hierarchy through one of its most intimate mechanisms. Research consistently shows that external individual evaluation undermines exactly the intrinsic motivation that DP2 structures produce. The review is not a neutral administrative process; it is a structural signal about who is really in charge and what actually gets rewarded. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #management

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-05 07:24

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

Open ##3528695