Post #4012322

Every time an organisation tries to democratise its work, the same three-layer dynamic plays out. The first layer is the people closest to the experiment. They work hard, they believe in it, and results follow. The pilot succeeds. The case study is written up. Leadership is encouraged. The second layer is the people one step removed — the middle of the organisation, the managers and coordinators who were not part of the experiment. Something odd happens here. They do not actively oppose the change. They slow it down, quietly, without quite meaning to. Their formal role has lost its purpose, but nothing has replaced it. They are neither coordinating in the old bureaucratic way nor participating as peers in the new one. OST calls it paradoxical inhibition: the structural response of a layer that has been made redundant without being redesigned. The frozen middle is not a people problem. It is what happens when the design principle changes in one layer and not the others. The third layer is the people furthest out — other organisations watching. They see the success story. They copy the topology, the roles, the vocabulary. They do not see the structural conditions that produced the results because those are invisible from the outside. The Spotify model spread across the industry this way. Team Topologies is spreading the same way now. Both describe what good looks like. Neither changes the design principle underneath. The copies produce the original's surface without its substance. All three layers follow structurally from the same thing. The pilot works because DP2 conditions were created locally. The middle freezes because DP1 remains intact above and around it. The copies fail because the form is adopted without the principle. The only way to avoid the pilot trap is not to pilot. OST methods are designed to change the whole system at once, for exactly this reason. You cannot sneak DP2 past DP1 one team at a time. Three dysfunctions from the book cover a layer each: The pilot trap (https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116696304124043996), The frozen middle (https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116475267077470990), and Team Topologies, the wrong way round (https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116594341102988605). www.organisationaldysfunctions.com/ #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign