Post #3528705

2026-05-27 07:05 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day People resist change Context: The transformation programme has stalled. Change management consultants are brought in. Their diagnosis is familiar: the organisation has a change resistance problem. People are comfortable with the status quo, risk-averse, and slow to adopt new ways of working. The solution involves communication campaigns, stakeholder management, and training to help people become more comfortable with uncertainty. Leadership frames the resistance as a cultural issue — the organisation needs to become more adaptive. The change programme continues to stall. OST explains: A survey of the software industry found that 82.6% of people who had not experienced any organisational change were dissatisfied with the lack of it. They wanted change. What people consistently object to is not change itself but having change imposed on them — a completely different thing. When people are invited to participate in designing the change they need to make, the resistance largely disappears because there is nothing to resist; the change is theirs. OST's methods, i.e. the Search Conference and the Participative Design Workshop, are built entirely on this insight. The change management industry, with its stakeholder maps and communication cascades, often reflects a reluctance to involve people in designing their own work. It is treating the symptom of DP1 with more DP1. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #changeManagement

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-05-28 07:20

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

Open ##3528704