In 1977, Fred Emery published a map of how organisations, and societies, respond to environments they cannot control. It sets out eight recognisable patterns of failure, and four ideals that offer a w...

In 1977, Fred Emery published a map of how organisations, and societies, respond to environments they cannot control. It sets out eight recognisable patterns of failure, and four ideals that offer a w...

YouTube video by Laksh Raghavan

Utviklere må få tid til å lære seg teknologien skikkelig, sammen, konkluderer Sintef og Knowit etter lang forskning.

In 2008, de Guerre, Emery, Aughton, and Trull published a study tracing a causal chain from organisational design principle to mental health outcome. Structure came first. Trust, autonomy, and low dep...

Will OST just result in structurelessness? Jo Freeman's 1970 essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" comes up now and then as an argument against DP2. The reasoning runs like this. Freeman showed th...

The most common objection from people inside the software industry is that Agile already did what OST suggests. The Agile Manifesto promised working software, collaboration, responding to change. Scru...

YouTube video by Domain-Driven Design Europe

This is "The positive value of negative space - Christin Gorman" by JavaZone on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Objective-setting frameworks recur under new names roughly once a generation. Management by objectives, and later OKRs, are two instances of what appears to be the same underlying mechanism, and each ...

A catalogue of organisational dysfunctions explained through Open Systems Theory. For everyone who has felt the friction of broken structures but lacked the language for it.

Every generation since the war has discovered the human cost of the standard bureaucratic hierarchy for the people at the bottom of it, and tried to fix it. The pattern starts with the Tavistock Insti...

In 2021, stuck at home during COVID, I found van Eijnatten's anthology on Socio-Technical Systems Design and fell into the work of the Emerys. Fred Emery was the obvious anchor, but it was a paper by ...

YouTube video by KanDDDinsky

Trond Hjorteland: Capra reorganiserte seg med Team Topologies. Ledergruppen ble oppløst. Selvstyrende team overtok. Engasjementet økte.,

Sociotechnical architecture has become a useful term in the DDD community for thinking about how team structure and software architecture relate. It does something real. But the theory it borrows from...

Sociotechnical architecture has become a useful term in the DDD community for thinking about how team structure and software architecture relate. It does something real. But the theory it borrows from...

Conway's Law is one of those observations that rings true the moment you hear it: organisations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. Not a theory, but a pattern you see everyw...

Most teams can list what is broken at work but lack a language for why it keeps recurring. Trond Hjorteland diagnoses real dysfunctions using Open Systems…

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 dysfu...

"OST neglects the individual." The objection is straightforward: OST talks about design principles, structural outputs, and groups. Where does the individual go? What about personal ambition, the driv...

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 resu...

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. B...