Organisational Dysfunctions

Most organisations are trying to fix the wrong things.

Agile and digital transformations rarely deliver what they promise, not because the people lack commitment, but because the structural change never happens. The standups become status reports. The retrospectives produce lists nobody acts on. The strategy dissolves somewhere between the boardroom and the team.

This book is written for developers and architects who have felt the friction without having the language for 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.

Although the context in this book is software development, the structural patterns described here extend beyond software organisations to any group working toward a shared purpose.

Each entry sets up a situation you will probably recognise, then explains what is actually causing it through the lens of Open Systems Theory, a body of research that has been answering these questions since the 1960s. The forewords are written by Merrelyn Emery, co-developer of Open Systems Theory, and Alexandra Stokes, author of Empowered Agile Transformation and founder of ReBoot Co.

This is not a book about what to do differently. It is a book about being able to see what is actually there. Diagnosis before treatment. Most organisations skip the first step.

*For anyone who has ever sat in a meeting and known exactly why it was failing, but not had the language for it.*