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• Post #4487771

  I need your help to keep Merrelyn Emery's Wikipedia page. Someone has marked it for deletion, claiming her contributions to the field are not sufficient (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPROF). Probably what happened to the previous page, resulting in a redirect to Fred Emery. If I find this to be outrageous. Was actually warned about this when I created the page back in 2021, but did not believe it could happen. Give your vote in the deletion discussion (it's an Af...

• 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 ch...

• Post #3994896

  v1.01 of Organisational Dysfunctions is out today. The three summer essays — «We already know what's wrong», «OST is just structuralism», and «The three-layer dynamic» — are now in the book as part of a restructured Intermezzo. Part Two and Part Three have been substantially updated, and the glossary has grown with entries for Unique Designs, Human ideals, and Maladaptive responses. No entries have been added or changed. The sixty-three dysfunctions are still the sixty-three dysfunctio...

• Post #3851403

  Most organisations are trying to fix the wrong things. 🎉 Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains is out today! This book is written for developers and architects who have felt the friction without the language to describe it, for team leads and agile coaches who have watched transformation programmes produce the opposite of what they promised, and for managers and executives who have invested in change and wondered why so little of it stuck. Most lists of dysfunctions catalo...

• Post #3851402

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/116854520977654259 The book has been out for two days. People have already chosen to spend money on it, which still feels a little unreal to me. Some have run into issues on Leanpub, which I have reported, and they are working to get them sorted. Maybe they are DP2? If you have had trouble accessing it, get in touch.

• Post #3851401

  We have never had more frameworks for diagnosing organisational dysfunction. We have also never had more organisational dysfunction. That combination should give us pause. Lencioni gave us five dysfunctions. Others have produced lists of twenty, thirty, fifty. There are frameworks, assessments, workshops, and diagnostics. The field of organisational dysfunction is well covered. What exactly does OST add? The symptoms these models describe are real and recognisable. Absence of trust, fear of co...

• Post #3851400

  Merrelyn Emery just released a retrospective on the infamous '65 causal texture paper, showing how impactful it has been to our understanding of systems and their environment. "Fifty Years On: The Far Reaching Consequences of The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments" https://www.socialsciencethatactuallyworks.com/wp-content/uploads/documents/ost-environments-and-the-future/Fifty%20Years%20On%20-%20The%20Far%20Reaching%20Consequences%20of%20The%20Causal%20Textu...

• Post #3851399

  Fair warning: this one gets philosophical. Someone once told me that OST is structuralism, and that we should embrace poststructuralism instead. It was a serious objection from a thoughtful person. Because if OST were structuralism, the criticism would be right. Structuralism holds that meaning and behaviour are determined by underlying structures, fixed and universal, operating independently of context. That is exactly what organisations do not need: another universal template to impose. The...

• Post #3528743

  I managed to make a little dent with my series of posts on #SocioTechnical principles of the day, and thought it was due to do something similar, but this time in the context of modern organisations (especially #agile ones) and the modern version of #STS, known as Emery's #OpenSystemsTheory ( #OST). I'll list some systemic problems I have seen in organisations over the years and explain their causes using OST, one each day as I did back then. Probably way too ambitious, but let's se...

• Post #915654

  #Sociotechnical principle of the day: Deliberations – sequence of exchanges and communication In the 80s, Calvin Pava felt that STS needed updating to keep pace with change and accommodate non-linear and non-routine knowledge work. He proposed extending the design practice with two patterns, https://stsroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/Pava-Redesigning-STS-Design.1986.pdf