Post #3528707

2026-05-22 07:57 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The customer we never met Context: Context: The team is building a product. They have a backlog, a product owner, and a roadmap. A user story describes what users need. Personas represent who those users are. Analytics track what people do. Every few months, there is a user research report from the UX team. The team works hard, ships regularly, and hits their sprint goals. They have never spoken directly to a customer, though. The product owner does that, and the UX researcher. But the engineers, the people making hundreds of small decisions every day that shape the product, have not. They are building for an abstraction. A persona on a wall, a ticket in Jira, a data point in a dashboard. OST explains: An open system maintains its health by actively engaging with its environment. For a product team, the primary environment is the people using what they build. The DP1 bureaucracy is a closed system and mediates that relationship through roles: the product owner translates customer needs into requirements, the UX researcher translates behaviour into insights, and the engineer receives the output of both translations. Each translation loses something. The judgment, the context, the friction, the moment when a real person says something that changes how you understand the problem entirely. In DP2, the group owns the whole task, which includes understanding who it is for. Teams with direct customer access make qualitatively different decisions than teams working from second-hand accounts. Not because engineers are better researchers, but because unmediated contact with the environment is not a nice-to-have. For an open system, it is the condition for staying alive. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-05-26 06:08

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The Sunday email Context: The organisation has a genuine commitment to work-life balance. It is in the values mentioned in onboarding, and comes up regularly in all-hands meetings. Flexible working is encouraged. Mental health is taken seriously. And then the email arrives. Sunday evening, 21:47, from the director. Not urgent. Just something they wanted to get out of their head. No response expected, of course. Nobody says that, though. By Monday morning, three people have replied. Others noticed and said nothing. Over time, the pattern becomes clear. The people who get ahead are the ones who are always available. The policy says one thing. The calendar says another. OST explains: In the bureaucratic DP1, the person at the top carries personal responsibility for outcomes they do not fully control. The higher the position, the larger the gap between accountability and agency. That gap produces anxiety, and anxiety produces overwork. Not because leaders are workaholics by nature, but because the structure places an unreasonable individual burden at every level of the hierarchy. The Sunday email is not a character flaw. It is a structural symptom. The deeper problem is that modelled behaviour always outcompetes stated values. People read the environment, not the handbook. What the boss does on Sunday communicates more about what is expected than any well-being policy. In DP2, responsibility is distributed across the group. No single person carries the weight of outcomes alone, so the chronic anxiety that drives performative overwork largely disappears. Work-life balance stops being a value that needs defending and becomes a natural consequence of a structure that does not place impossible individual burdens on anyone. The Sunday email stops because nobody needs to send it. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

Open ##3528706