Organisational Dysfunctions

Foreword by Merrelyn Emery

Foreword by Alexandra Stokes

Preface

1. What the Structure Does
2. What the coal miners discovered
3. The two design principles
4. Modern forms of laissez-faire: the third state
5. Why structure beats culture
6. The six psychological requirements

In the Room

1. The room that went quiet
2. The phones came out
3. The pair that runs everything
4. The agenda that sabotaged itself
5. The output nobody owned
6. HiPPOs and dungeon masters
7. Tyranny of the majority
8. The corridor conversation
9. Divided for efficiency
10. The facilitator’s toolkit
11. The wrong people in the room

In the Team

1. The daily status report
2. Passing the buck
3. The powerless retrospective
4. Forming–storming–norming–performing
5. The hero culture
6. The servant who still decides
7. Working alone together
8. Out of sight, out of sync
9. The agile terrarium
10. The collaboration that isn’t
11. The product owner trap
12. Analysis paralysis
13. The decision that went nowhere
14. Permanent urgency
15. Rearranging the furniture
16. The code review that became personal
17. Hired from above
18. When the glue leaves
19. We need a resource

In the Department

1. Psychological safety as a patch
2. You are empowered now
3. Team Topologies, the wrong way round
4. DORA, the wrong way round
5. Involvement theatre
6. The frozen middle
7. Better leaders is the answer
8. It’s a communication problem
9. The external verdict
10. Fixing people
11. The error factory
12. Burned by design
13. Designed to undermine
14. The pilot trap
15. Local optimisations
16. Change agents of the status quo
17. Fixing the process
18. Them and us
19. Everything is fine
20. Matrices
21. Playing politics
22. The bureaucracy that became the work
23. What the war room proves
24. Loose in name only
25. It took an outsider to say it
26. Somebody has to chase it
27. Endless alignment meetings
28. Nobody wants to own this
29. The org chart nobody uses

In the Organisation

1. OKRs imposed from above
2. Budgets are bureaucracy
3. The performance review
4. The learning organisation that doesn’t learn
5. The short-termism machine
6. The strategy that did not survive contact with reality
7. Quiet quitting
8. The Sunday email
9. The project in product clothing
10. It’s just a job
11. Career paths
12. Pay and reward
13. The leadership team that isn’t
14. The agile scaling trap
15. Becoming Teal
16. The blind decision
17. Back to the office
18. The wellness programme
19. Deskilled by AI
20. The enterprise architect
21. Removing management
22. The gates they removed
23. The change they stopped believing in
24. Innovation theatre
25. The efficiency drive
26. The talent myth
27. Intermezzo

Objections

1. Self-management doesn’t scale
2. Nobody actually does this
3. All teams need a manager
4. This is fifty-year-old theory
5. This sounds like communism
6. IT is different
7. Agile works fine, why do we need OST?
8. Developers just want to code
9. We’ve already transformed
10. We already know what’s wrong
11. OST is just structuralism
12. OST neglects the individual
13. OST is just structurelessness

Perspectives

1. The three-layer dynamic
2. The fix we keep trying
3. The sociotechnical we left out
4. What Inverse Conway doesn’t see
5. Objectives, by another name
6. The mental health data nobody cites
7. What the Open System Does
8. Where the world is now
9. Active and passive adaptation

Beyond the Walls

1. Built for yesterday
2. Deploying AI into a broken system
3. The customer we never met
4. The market we think we shape
5. The AI we cannot talk about
6. Outsourcing the future
7. People resist change
8. Doing the wrong thing right
9. The IT-business divide
10. The values on the wall
11. We transformed, our suppliers didn’t
12. The adaptation plan nobody owns
13. The Way Out

The Two-Stage Model

1. The Search Conference
2. The Participative Design Workshop

The Democratic Methods

1. Unique Designs

Epilogue: The Diagnosis

Glossary

References

Changelog

1. v1.2 — 18 September 2026
2. v1.1 — 29 August 2026
3. v1.02 — 29 July 2026
4. v1.01 — 18 July 2026
5. v1.0 — 3 July 2026

Acknowledgements

About the Author