Post #3528727

2026-04-28 09:18 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Fear of making decisions Context: One issue many teams in an agile organisation face is the stalemate that frequently happens when they need to make a decision that will impact other teams or other parts of the organisation. They have been empowered and given autonomy to decide for themselves, but they still want to be good players and are afraid to do something that could negatively impact others. Some may even be worried whether the change is allowed at all, like changing their work process or tools to use for things like ticketing, or changing the technical architecture by using a different data storage platform. Good ideas and suggested improvements are often shelved or even abandoned. OST explains: This is another predictable side effect of a partial DP2 transition to self-managing teams, where the teams are given autonomy to self-manage, but do not feel able to. Or, maybe now they are not really empowered, as they know all too well, there are DP1 (bureaucratic) structures still in place that can and will stop them. And, even if they were in a pure DP2 setup, they still need tools to coordinate. One that works well is referred to as the "advice process" and was first described by Dennis Bakke, later by Laloux and Harmel-Law. In it, anyone can make any decision provided they follow this simple rule: first seek advice from 1) everyone who will be meaningfully affected, and 2) people with expertise in the matter. So instead of drawing up everything and then getting approval from someone who cannot possibly understand it properly, or going rogue, you formulate the decision as best as you can and then seek advice on it and adjust it to your liking based on that. Not only do you make better decisions, but you also own them. No more blame game, which DP1 creates, and no chaos, which the mixed mode induces. Participative democracy in practice. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-04-29 07:43

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Psychological safety as a patch Context: Your organisation may have realised that psychological safety is of the essence for good collaboration. Maybe it came out of a retrospective, maybe someone read the Google re:Work study and Amy Edmondson contributions, or maybe it was a leadership initiative after too many people stopped speaking up in meetings. Either way, there are now workshops on it, a section in the onboarding, maybe even a survey to measure it. Leaders are coached to create it. Teams are encouraged to demand it. And yet, somehow, people are still not speaking up, still not taking risks, still not challenging the decisions made above them. The patch does not seem to be holding. OST explains: Psychological safety is real, and it matters a lot, but what is often missed is that it is an emergent property of the structure people work in, not something you can install. In a DP1 organisation, people are inherently in a dependent, subordinate position, and the rational response to that is to be careful about what you say and to whom. That is not a personal failing; it is Bion's basic assumptions playing out exactly as expected: dependency, fight/flight, and factionalism are the natural human response to autocratic hierarchies. You cannot train people out of that while the structure that causes it remains intact. In a DP2 structure, on the other hand, psychological safety is not a programme or a value on the wall; it is simply what happens when people are peers designing and owning their own work. They speak up because it is their job to, and because there is no hierarchy of dominance to be careful around. Demanding psychological safety in a DP1 organisation is a bit like applying a patch to a system with a structural bug. It might cover the symptom for a while, but the underlying code has not changed. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Open ##3528726