Organisational Dysfunctions

Organisational Dysfunctions

Trond Hjorteland
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Table of Contents

Foreword by Merrelyn Emery›

  • Foreword by Merrelyn Emery
  • Foreword by Alexandra Stokes
  • Preface

What the Structure Does›

  • In the Room
    • The room that went quiet
    • The phones came out
    • The pair that runs everything
    • The agenda that sabotaged itself
    • The output nobody owned
    • HiPPOs and dungeon masters
    • Tyranny of the majority
    • The corridor conversation
    • Divided for efficiency
    • The facilitator’s toolkit
    • The wrong people in the room
  • In the Team
    • The daily status report
    • Passing the buck
    • The powerless retrospective
    • Forming–storming–norming–performing
    • The hero culture
    • The servant who still decides
    • Working alone together
    • Out of sight, out of sync
    • The agile terrarium
    • The collaboration that isn’t
    • The product owner trap
    • Analysis paralysis
    • The decision that went nowhere
    • Permanent urgency
    • Rearranging the furniture
    • The code review that became personal
    • Hired from above
    • When the glue leaves
    • We need a resource
  • In the Department
    • Psychological safety as a patch
    • You are empowered now
    • Team Topologies, the wrong way round
    • DORA, the wrong way round
    • Involvement theatre
    • The frozen middle
    • Better leaders is the answer
    • It’s a communication problem
    • The external verdict
    • Fixing people
    • The error factory
    • Burned by design
    • Designed to undermine
    • The pilot trap
    • Local optimisations
    • Change agents of the status quo
    • Fixing the process
    • Them and us
    • Everything is fine
    • Matrices
    • Playing politics
    • The bureaucracy that became the work
    • What the war room proves
    • Loose in name only
    • It took an outsider to say it
    • Somebody has to chase it
    • Endless alignment meetings
    • Nobody wants to own this
    • The org chart nobody uses
  • In the Organisation
    • OKRs imposed from above
    • Budgets are bureaucracy
    • The performance review
    • The learning organisation that doesn’t learn
    • The short-termism machine
    • The strategy that did not survive contact with reality
    • Quiet quitting
    • The Sunday email
    • The project in product clothing
    • It’s just a job
    • Career paths
    • Pay and reward
    • The leadership team that isn’t
    • The agile scaling trap
    • Becoming Teal
    • The blind decision
    • Back to the office
    • The wellness programme
    • Deskilled by AI
    • The enterprise architect
    • Removing management
    • The gates they removed
    • The change they stopped believing in
    • Innovation theatre
    • The efficiency drive
    • The talent myth

Intermezzo›

  • Objections
    • Self-management doesn’t scale
    • Nobody actually does this
    • All teams need a manager
    • This is fifty-year-old theory
    • This sounds like communism
    • IT is different
    • Agile works fine, why do we need OST?
    • Developers just want to code
    • We’ve already transformed
    • We already know what’s wrong
    • OST is just structuralism
    • OST neglects the individual
    • OST is just structurelessness
  • Perspectives
    • The three-layer dynamic
    • The fix we keep trying
    • The sociotechnical we left out
    • What Inverse Conway doesn’t see
    • Objectives, by another name
    • The mental health data nobody cites

What the Open System Does›

  • Beyond the Walls
    • Built for yesterday
    • Deploying AI into a broken system
    • The customer we never met
    • The market we think we shape
    • The AI we cannot talk about
    • Outsourcing the future
    • People resist change
    • Doing the wrong thing right
    • The IT-business divide
    • The values on the wall
    • We transformed, our suppliers didn’t
    • The adaptation plan nobody owns

The Way Out›

  • The Two-Stage Model
    • The Search Conference
    • The Participative Design Workshop
  • The Democratic Methods
    • Unique Designs
  • Epilogue: The Diagnosis
  • Glossary
  • References
  • Changelog
    • v1.2 — 18 September 2026
    • v1.1 — 29 August 2026
    • v1.02 — 29 July 2026
    • v1.01 — 18 July 2026
    • v1.0 — 3 July 2026
  • Acknowledgements
  • About the Author
Organisational Dysfunctions/What the Open System Does

What the Open System Does

https://leanpub.com/organisationaldysfunctions

Where the world is now

https://leanpub.com/organisationaldysfunctions

Active and passive adaptation

https://leanpub.com/organisationaldysfunctions

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Perspectives

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Beyond the Walls

In this part

  • Beyond the Walls
  • Built for yesterday
  • Deploying AI into a broken system
  • The customer we never met
  • The market we think we shape
  • The AI we cannot talk about
  • Outsourcing the future
  • People resist change
  • Doing the wrong thing right
  • The IT-business divide
  • The values on the wall
  • We transformed, our suppliers didn’t
  • The adaptation plan nobody owns