Post #3528729

2026-04-24 11:29 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Local optimisations Context: Any work group of people want to improve their way of working if they could, removing unnecessary work, resources or waste, as Lean calls it. Agile gave the teams that ability, at least to a large extent. Some may only be able to adjust technical issues, while others may even be empowered to decide how they want to do work. For example, one team decides they want to move to an event-driven architecture, while another wants to replace Scrum with Kanban. All great local optimisations that they should be able to do, but often are prevented from doing so, as they need to interact with other teams and are not able to get them to adjust. Or management may not let them because of the impact it has. Again, teams are stuck. OST explains: This issue is not directly related to OST necessarily, but more to the parts-to-whole relation that comes out of systems thinking, which OST clearly is. Local optimisations in a part are perfect if it does not affect anyone else, which is rarely the case as parts are interconnected with other parts, often even through the shared relation they have to the whole. In a purposeful social system, even more so, as not only must the changes physically fit, but they must also align with the shared purpose of the system as a whole. Most organisations deal with this paradox, the interest of the parts vs. the whole, by designing top down, creating guardrails for the parts to operate within, giving them limited freedom. OST, on the other hand, replaces this centralisation of command and control by distributing it to the parts, where they can design their own work as long as they make sure it aligns with the goals of the system as a whole, like business goals and strategic plans, and, just as importantly, coordinate with all the affected parties. This enables local optimisations for the benefit of the whole. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-04-27 06:32

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The frozen middle Context: Assuming you are a team member in an organisation that has gone through an agile transformation. Your team have been given more autonomy and is expected to self-organise, make decisions, and deliver value faster. Yet somehow, almost everything still takes forever. Decisions get stuck, information does not flow, and initiatives die quietly without explanation. The teams are doing their part, but something above them seems to absorb all energy and momentum like a sponge. Middle managers are busy, always in meetings, always promising to follow up. But nothing moves. A frequent excuse is Things Take Time. OST explains: This is one of the most predictable side effects of a partial DP2 transition to self-managing teams. When teams are given more autonomy while the surrounding DP1 structure remains intact, middle management gets caught in the middle. They lose their traditional role of passing work down and status reports up, but gain no new meaningful function. The result is a layer of people who are neither coordinating in the old DP1 way nor participating as peers in a DP2 fashion. They become a dampening layer, unconsciously protecting the existing power structure while appearing to support the change. This is not a people problem; it is a structural one. In a full DP2 organisation, the coordination is managed by the self-managing teams themselves, coordination work between peers, and not through proxies. The frozen middle is not resistant to change; it is simply a DP1 organ that has lost its purpose but not yet been replaced by anything coherent. Until the whole system transitions, it will continue to insulate the top from the bottom and slow everything down. The bottleneck has shifted. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #agile

Open ##3528728