Post #3528698

2026-06-03 07:12 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The project in product clothing Context: The organisation has committed to product thinking, where teams own their domains end-to-end, work iteratively, and adapt based on what they learn. Then a new initiative arrives. It has a defined scope, a delivery date, a budget, and even a steering committee. It is a classic project, but it is run inside the product structure. The product team is asked to deliver specific functionality by a fixed date. The iterative process continues in form — sprints, retros, demos — but the scope is locked, and the deadline is real. When the team discovers mid-way that the problem is more complex than the brief suggested, they do not have the option to redefine it. They have a contract to fulfil. The project ends on time, more or less. The product it leaves behind carries the weight of every decision made under deadline pressure. The team that owns it lives with that weight long after the steering committee has moved on. OST explains: Projects and products are not different delivery methods; they are different theories of what a problem is. A project assumes the problem is known, the solution is specifiable, and the work is simply execution. It is a closed system: scope goes in, deliverable comes out. A product assumes the problem is partially known at best, the solution emerges through contact with the environment, and the work is continuous learning. It is an open system, transacting with users, the market, and technology throughout its life. Emery and Trist's causal textures framework explains why mixing them fails. Projects are a Type III response; competitive, industrial, bureaucratic, and designed for predictable environments. Product development in a turbulent Type IV environment cannot be governed by Type III instruments without losing exactly the adaptive capacity that product thinking was meant to create. The steering committee, the fixed scope, and the delivery date are not compatible with an open system. They close it because they have to. The project does not just constrain the product. It temporarily turns it into something else and leaves it changed when it departs.  #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #ProductOrientation

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-06-04 06:08

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

Open ##3528697