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 see how this goes. Happy to take comments and rebuttals to each one of them, as the point of doing this is to trigger reflections and critical thinking.
Warning: these will probably be a bit more opinionated. 😁
Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
The daily status report
Context: Your team is using Scrum and has been taught how important stand-ups are (daily coordination meeting), but it feels like a drag and a complete waste of time. Feels more like reporting to someone, be it the scrum master or the product owner. And you really do not care about what the others are working on, as it has little to no impact on what you're doing.
OST explains: This team is probably not a team at all; it's more like a group of individuals working on different things. They may contribute to the same delivery but have not been able to take control of the work design and the coordination needed to deliver it. This is not a self-managing team, but rather a delivery group assigned specific tasks by a manager, in charge of splitting the work so that all team members are working as effectively as possible. This is pure DP1 and nowhere close to the self-managing teams in DP2.
