Post #3528720

2026-05-06 08:29 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Deploying AI into a broken system Context: The organisation is deploying AI: copilots, automated pipelines, intelligent triage, and decision support. The pilots look promising; the broader rollout is patchy, with some people embracing the tools and others routing around them. A few raise concerns about deskilling, about oversight, about what happens when the AI gets it wrong. Leadership frames this as change resistance. The change management programme is expanded. Meanwhile, the tools are also being used to monitor output, flag underperformance, and justify headcount decisions. The people who were concerned start to understand why they were concerned. OST explains: This pattern is not new. Sociotechnical systems research emerged in the 1950s precisely because organisations kept introducing new technology with enormous focus on technical capability and almost no attention to the social system. The result was that technology failed to deliver its potential, workers became alienated, and productivity gains were short-lived. The core insight applies directly to AI: you will not get the benefit by optimising the technical system alone. In DP1, the manager-led structure, people are defined by the task they perform. One person, one job, one replaceable part, so when the task can be automated, the person becomes redundant by the organisation's own logic. In DP2, the group owns the whole task, and each person brings judgment, context, and adaptability that no tool replicates; AI becomes an extension of the group's capability rather than a replacement of it. In a DP1 structure, AI is almost inevitably used as a tool of control, monitoring output, flagging underperformance, and surveilling the parts. We are in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution and making exactly the same mistake as the third. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-05-07 08:02

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

Open ##3528719