Orgs Notepad

I keep coming up with notes and ideas for posts on organisations faster than I can write the posts themselves.

This page is where I’m keeping everything. The vast majority take and expand upon my idea of “the organisation viewed as a set of services”. It’s a short post, so it might be worth taking a look at if you’ve not already.

Ideas for Posts

• Who loses? Who don’t these services-as-implemented work for? Who do they harm? Whom do they silence?
• Patterns of org-service delivery
• Gloss on “How To Organize A Large Company Without Middle Management” and “4 Future-Proof Organizational Models Beyond Hierarchy And Bureaucracy”
• What happens when there is no “workplace” and we go all-remote? What about all-async?
• At what level do these services act, and whom do each of these services serve? The individual, the team, or the organisation? Does it depend on the implementation?
• What are the service-implementations in “Requisite Organisation” by Jaques
• What are the services in OSS projects inc. a gloss of the “Beautiful Architecture” chapter on KDE dev and how it works at Mozilla, Wordpress and Hashicorp (plus thoughts on “Inner Source”…)
• Organisational “literacy” - reading organisations, and discerning the service-implementations, official and unofficial
• “But will it scale?” (How to scale. When and how to phase-shift when scaling one set of service-implementations breaks)
• Attitude sand Aptitudes - skills (and recognition/progression) and job roles
• Org-services from an anarchist perspective
• What are the service-implementations in a Teal Org? (and in others of Laloux’s hierarchy)
• Perspectives on the Netflix Culture Deck and “Powerful” by Patty McCord
• What are the service-implentations in DDD’s strategic patterns?
• An org-services view of “Turn the Ship Around!”
• An org-services view of the Google re:Work project

Reading

• “Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting”
• “Larman’s Laws of Organisational Behaviour”
• Westrum: “A Typology of Organisational Cultures”
• “Massive Codesign. A Proposal for a Collaborative Design Framework”
• “Generative Team Design: Innovation, Psychological Safety, and Empathy”
• “The Founding Sachems” / “California’s Ancient Cornucopia” / “The Most Dangerous Notion in “Reinventing Organizations””
• “The Shirky Principle”
• “The Tyranny of Structureless”
• “8 Patterns for Decentralised Organising”
• Ackoff: “The Democratic Corporation”
• Management Cybernetics
• “Pava’s Extension of Socio-Technical Theory to Advanced Information Technologies”
• “Democratising Work: Why and How”
• “Calvin Pava’s Legacy: Sociotechnical Systems Design for the “Digital Coal Mines””
• “Org Physics: The Three Faces of Every Company”
• “A Review of Sociotechnical Systems Theory: A Classic Concept for New Command and Control Paradigms”

Notes & Puzzles

• Sociotechnical Architecture: People and Resources
• How do we achieve org-services change? - Via structure/process (bureaucracy) or culture?
• How to remove bureaucracy and replace it with culture (c.f. enabling constraints and “tight loose tight”)
• What about the things we don’t even realise are assumptions - “employment”, hierarchy, job titles / specialisation-based splits
• Unintended consequences - positive and negative
• WTF is “Leadership” in light of this?
• “we had confused the organizational structure with the communication structure, a common error” - Ed Catmull
• “The people in your organization are already self-organizing within the bounds of the current constraints. Don’t like the results? Look at the constraints.” - @estherderby