Post #3528704

2026-05-28 07:20 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Empowerment Context: Leadership has announced that teams are now empowered. There are communications about it, a new set of principles, perhaps even a manifesto. The manager has been rebranded as a coach or a servant leader. Controls have been loosened, warm and friendly communication is encouraged, and people are told they have more autonomy. For a brief moment, there is energy. Then people try to actually use this empowerment, run into the existing approval processes, budget controls, and management expectations, and quietly conclude that nothing has really changed. The word starts to feel like a joke. And then something goes wrong — a missed deadline, a budget overrun, a production incident — and the coach suddenly starts acting a lot more like a manager. The mask slips, and everyone realises it was always there. OST explains: Research on organisations that have adopted agile and similar approaches identified a specific and common structural form: the trainer, leader, or coach (TLC) model, where controls are loosened and warm communication encouraged, but the design principle has not actually changed. Workers often prefer this form as it can provide greater autonomy, until things go wrong, at which point the legal DP1 bureaucracy structure kicks back into life. This is not bad faith on the part of the manager; it is the structure asserting itself. The design principle was never changed, so in a crisis, it reasserts the only legitimate authority available. Empowerment in OST terms is not a communication style or a management philosophy; it means the team genuinely controls the coordination and the goals of its own work. That is a structural change, not a cultural one. Announcing empowerment without changing the structure does not create DP2; it creates laissez-faire. The confusion of appearing to have freedom while the real constraints remain exactly where they were, waiting for the next thing to go wrong. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-05-29 07:25

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Outsourcing the future Context: The organisation wants a new strategy. Leadership does not have the bandwidth, or perhaps the confidence, to lead the process internally. A consulting firm is brought in. They are smart, experienced, and methodologically rigorous. They interview the leadership team, benchmark against competitors, analyse market trends, and run workshops with selected stakeholders. A few months later, a strategy document arrives. It is well-structured and credible. The organisation begins implementing it. Some things work. Others do not land the way the consultants predicted. The people doing the implementation have questions that the document does not answer. The consultants are gone. Two years later, a new consulting firm is brought in to develop the next strategy. OST explains: Strategy is not a document. It is a shared understanding of where a system is, where it needs to go, and why. That understanding cannot be imported from outside because it depends on knowledge that only exists inside the system, distributed across the people who operate it, the relationships they hold, and the environment they transact with daily. A consulting firm can bring analytical frameworks, comparative data, and an external perspective. What they cannot do is replace the participative process through which an organisation develops genuine strategic ownership. The Search Conference exists because Emery understood this. An effective strategy requires the whole system in the room, not a representative sample interviewed by outsiders. A strategy people helped build is one they will adapt when reality diverges from the plan. A strategy handed down, however well-researched, will be executed literally until it fails and then replaced by the next one. The cycle is not a strategy problem. It is a participation problem. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #strategy

Open ##3528702