Post #3528715

2026-05-13 06:58 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Professional leadership Context: The organisation has invested heavily in leadership development. There are programmes, frameworks, coaching, 360-degree feedback, and a clear leadership model on the intranet. The managers are well-intentioned, many of them genuinely skilled, and they take their responsibility seriously. However, the teams below them are still not performing as hoped. Engagement is middling, decisions are slow, and the best people keep leaving. Some even because of their manager. Leadership quality is clearly not the bottleneck, so what is? In many industries, supervisors are expected to know the craft they oversee. Not so in most IT organisations, where the manager's job is people and process, not technology. That gap has been growing. OST explains: The problem is not the leaders; it is the existence of the role itself. DP1 as bureaucracy requires leaders because control and coordination are handled by a layer above the real productive work, be it managers in the line, project managers, product managers, or even architects. You therefore need good ones, and training them makes sense within that logic. But no amount of leadership quality fixes the structural problem that the people doing the work are not in control of it. In DP2, the need for professional leadership largely disappears because coordination and control are handled by the group itself. The resources currently spent on developing leaders should instead be invested in developing the team's self-managing capacity. That is not a small shift; it is a fundamentally different theory of how organisations work. A DNA swap. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership

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@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-05-14 08:22

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Tyranny of the majority Context: The workshop is wrapping up. There are too many ideas on the wall, and a decision needs to be made, so dot voting is introduced. Everyone gets three dots and places them on their favourites. The tallied results are clear, and the facilitator announces the winners. Most people seem satisfied. A few do not. Their priorities were lost, their concerns were not addressed, and the vote moved on before the reasoning behind the minority view was ever really heard. They leave with a decision they had no real part in making. In meetings, the same pattern plays out through a show of hands, anonymous polls, or simply the loudest voices drowning out the quieter ones. It feels democratic. It is not. OST explains: Dot voting and majority voting are representative democracy mechanisms, which really are DP1 in disguise. They produce a winner and, by definition, a loser, and the minority does not just lose the vote; they lose the ability to influence the outcome, making them unlikely to commit to implementing something they actively disagreed with. Fred Emery called the alternative rationalisation of conflict: instead of forcing a resolution through voting, the group stays with the disagreement long enough to understand it. The goal is not the most popular option, but the option nobody has a reasoned objection to. A higher bar that takes longer, but produces genuine shared ownership that majority voting never can. A decision reached that way does not need to be enforced; people carry it forward because they helped make it. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #collaboration

Open ##3528714