Post #3528719

2026-05-07 08:02 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Fixing people Context: "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." Gerald Weinberg's Second Law of Consulting is good advice. It is a reminder that the human dimension is always present, that purely technical diagnoses miss something essential, and that the people involved always matter. Most managers and HR professionals would recognise themselves in it. Someone on the team is struggling. Maybe they are disengaged, not delivering, clashing with colleagues, or just not showing up in the way they used to. The organisation's response is to fix the person: a performance improvement plan, a coaching programme, a personality assessment, or a quiet word from HR. Sometimes it works for a while. But the same problems keep reappearing, often with different people in the same role. The carousel of interventions never quite stops. OST explains: Weinberg is right that it is always a people problem; people's experience, motivation, and well-being are always at stake. OST does not disagree; it adds the next step. When the same dysfunction shows up repeatedly across different people in the same role, the problem is not those individuals; it is what the system does to whoever occupies that position. DP1 structures (manager-led), with their competition for recognition and dependency on management for decisions, produce exactly the disengagement and avoidance that organisations then try to coach out of people. Fixing the individual while leaving the structure intact contains a deep paradox: elevating the individual as the problem, isolated from the structure shaping their behaviour, goes beyond blaming the victim; it creates them. So yes, it is always a people problem. The question OST asks is: what is the structure doing to the people? #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

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@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-05-08 07:53

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The error factory Context: Something goes wrong. A post-mortem is held, a root cause is identified, and a fix is put in place. A few months later, the same thing goes wrong again, in a slightly different form. The organisation responds with more process, more checklists, more training. The error rate stays stubbornly high. Leadership concludes that people are not following the processes correctly, so more oversight is added. The errors continue. Nobody questions whether the structure itself might be amplifying the mistakes rather than catching them. OST explains: The research is mathematically precise on this. In a DP1 (bureaucratic) structure, if five people each make sound judgements eight times out of ten, the probability they give you correct unanimous advice is only one in three. The more you control through hierarchy, the deeper you move into error. In a DP2 structure with the same five people and the same fallibility, wrong unanimous advice occurs only three times in ten thousand. In DP1, errors get amplified because asymmetry and competition mean people filter information to serve their own position rather than the truth. In DP2, the same errors become learning opportunities because everyone has shared responsibility, and it is in nobody's interest to hide a mistake. The diagnosis of inadequate training and the prescription of more training will not reliably reduce error rates; that requires attention to the underlying structural cause. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #management

Open ##3528718