From Mechanical to Sociotechnical

This week’s newsletter brings episode 15 of the Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast, featuring Trond Hjorteland.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the concept of Sociotechnical systems with our guest, Trond Hjorteland. We begin by exploring Trond's journey from a developer in Oslo to becoming an advocate of Sociotechnical systems. Trond shares insightful stories from his career, detailing the significance of self-organization and autonomy within teams, and how these principles helped them navigate through various organizational challenges.

We discuss the historical origins of Sociotechnical systems, emphasizing the importance of looking at both the social and technical aspects within organizations for sustainable success. Trond also highlights how companies can implement these ideas through practices like Participative Design Workshops and Search Conferences. We discuss interesting case studies and wrap up with advice for mid-level managers on how to create more adaptive and resilient organizations.

Tune in to learn how to evolve your management practices and drive better organizational outcomes.

Members of the Cyb3rSyn Community can watch/discuss the podcast episode on the www.cyb3rsynlabs.com portal or the mobile app (iOS and Android).

Checkout the podcast episode here:

I recently had the immense pleasure of diving deep into the world of organizational design with our truly insightful guest, Trond. As part of our ongoing exploration of multidisciplinary insights for technology practitioners, entrepreneurs, and executives, Trond shared his journey and profound insights from Open Systems Theory (OST) and sociotechnical systems. Trond, an architect from Oslo, Norway, brought a wealth of experience, having started his career in development back in 1999 and navigating the complexities of organizational structures ever since.

Our conversation aimed to unravel why so many modern organizations, despite being technologically advanced, struggle with internal dynamics and team effectiveness. Trond, whose curiosity about sociotechnical systems was born from his own frustrations with teams not working as effectively as they once did, guided us through a paradigm shift in how we view and design organizations.

Here are some of the key insights from our conversation:

Trond's journey began with a curious observation about Agile. His first attempt at implementing Agile in the early 2000s worked "really well" because the team did it themselves; it was self-initiated. However, later attempts at different companies, where Agile was pushed down from higher-ups, were nowhere near as successful, leading to frustration and teams struggling despite having some autonomy. This stark contrast highlighted the limitations of the prevalent mechanistic view of organizations, where people are reduced to "cogs in a big machine" with specific, isolated roles, and alignment is achieved through rigid top-down control.

This mechanistic perspective is deeply rooted in our historical understanding, where the world was viewed "as a clock," emphasizing reductionism – understanding the whole by breaking down, analyzing and measuring its parts. In this view, humans are often seen as untrustworthy variables to be removed from the equation.

The sociotechnical lens offers a powerful alternative. This concept, defined based on research in British coal mines in 1951, arose from a critical observation: the introduction of new technology (like electric coal cutters) intended to improve efficiency actually deteriorated the social system. The technology forced miners into separated shifts with specific, isolated targets, leading to conflicts, unhappiness, absenteeism, and strikes. The crucial discovery was that the successful groups "jointly optimized the social and the technical" aspects of their work. Furthermore, for this joint optimization to truly work, the social system (the people) had to do it themselves; external experts designing the "perfect system" often led to a "not invented here" syndrome, where the people receiving the design didn't embrace it. This emphasizes the fundamental importance of self-organization and autonomy.

Explore: Consider how your organization's current structure might be inadvertently fostering a mechanistic view. How much autonomy do teams truly have in designing their work processes, versus just executing predefined tasks?

Open Systems Theory (OST) pushes our understanding even further, moving beyond both mechanistic and even organismic thinking. While organismic thinking acknowledges that an organization is more than the sum of its parts and interacts with an environment (like a body interacting with nature), it still often frames this interaction as a simple input-output system, where the organization dynamically adapts to the market.

OST posits a "mutual determinism" between the system and its environment: the system is defined by its environment, but the environment is also defined by the system it surrounds. This means the environment is far broader than just customers, competitors, or regulators; it includes larger global social systems that can profoundly affect an organization (e.g., global warming impacting a doctor's work). Crucially, OST is less about what a system is and more about "what it does" – its practices are designed to help the system and its environment create a "desirable future".

Instead of focusing on "cause and effect" (the mechanistic view where striking a billiard ball necessarily leads to its movement), OST embraces "purposefulness" or teleological thinking. In social and biological systems, many factors contribute to an effect, so focusing on a shared purpose allows all parts to move collectively towards that goal. If an organization defines its purpose, then its parts naturally align and pull in that direction, rendering strict cause-and-effect less relevant.

Explore: Reflect on your organization's stated purpose. Is it truly a guiding principle that informs collective action, or is it more a "vision" or "goal" that is then broken down into siloed tasks? How might broadening the definition of "environment" change your strategic considerations?

The core of implementing OST lies in enabling self-management. Two essential techniques are paramount:

1. Search Conferences: These are collaborative strategic planning techniques aimed at defining the organization's purpose and how to achieve it. While not a full company-wide democracy, it's crucial that the purpose resonates with and is embraced by the entire organization. Employees should feel alignment with where the company is going.

2. Participative Design Workshops (PDW): This is where teams themselves design how they do their work. They are the experts in their daily operations and should not have methodologies like Scrum or Kanban imposed upon them. This is a direct counter to "involvement theater," where managers or architects collect input from experts only to go off and design something different, which then gets imposed back on the teams, leading to worse outcomes than not involving them at all. The team's collective expertise and ownership in design are paramount.

Explore: Evaluate your company's strategic planning and project initiation processes. Are they truly participative, or do they risk falling into "involvement theater"? Consider how you might empower teams to design their own workflows and structures.

Implementing OST requires a "dramatic change," almost a "DNA change" for the company. The biggest hurdle is often bureaucracy itself, as positions of power are hard to relinquish. Managers, accustomed to a mechanistic system where they are measured by control, are often "stuck in a system where they can't do anything else".

Historically, and unfortunately, most companies that successfully adopt OST principles do so out of necessity - when they are in a crisis - like on the verge of bankruptcy and "have no choice". They've tried everything else, including Lean and attempts at "debureaucratizing," and failed. T

Trond shared a compelling case study of an Australian shoe manufacturer facing massive competition from cheap Chinese imports.

Initially, they implemented Lean manufacturing, dramatically reducing production time from 8 weeks to 3 weeks. While impressive, it wasn't enough.

Then, they moved to full self-managing teams based on OST principles. The results were astounding:

However, in a significant "plot twist," this company eventually went bankrupt. Why? Because despite their incredible internal self-organization, they neglected the broader environment. Their suppliers, who were not part of this transformation, couldn't deliver materials fast enough to match the manufacturer's new, hyper-efficient production speed. This illustrates the critical OST principle of "mutual determinism" and the danger of "closing the system" by ignoring the reciprocal influence with the environment, even if only parts of it.

I’d like to contrast this with what Toyota did with its supply chain.

In companies that embrace participative design, managers might find their previous roles redundant, leading them to leave voluntarily. Managers who choose to stay can transition into team-support roles, administrative functions, or other expert positions, as self-managing teams are not necessarily leaderless but decide if they need a leader and who that leader should be. The goal is to retain experienced people who "know what's going on" at the ground level.

Explore: When analyzing potential organizational changes, beyond the internal benefits, identify critical external dependencies. How would a proposed internal change impact external partners, and what strategies are in place to ensure mutual adaptation, not just internal optimization?

For mid-level managers, particularly those facing layoffs or organizational shifts, Trond offered direct and actionable advice: empower teams to self-design and self-organize.

Crucially, avoid "involvement theater," where input is solicited but the final design is imposed. This is worse than not involving people at all, as it creates a sense of betrayal and disengagement. Instead, truly allow teams to "do the proper design" themselves, with managers and architects serving as supporters and helpers rather than designers.

Trond also pushed back against the term "servant leadership," viewing it as mere "wordplay" if the fundamental power structure doesn't change. A true self-managing team doesn't need to be "served"; they need genuine autonomy and the ability to decide their own needs. If a manager reverts to old control behaviors when "sh*t hits the fan," the "servantship" disappears.

A significant warning was issued about the "mixed mode" - where agile, self-empowered teams exist within a broader bureaucratic hierarchy. This mixed state is actually "worse than the bureaucracy that it came out of" because it creates constant conflict and frustration when teams hit a "glass roof" of control from above. This perpetual conflict arises because teams believe they have empowerment, but managers (stuck in their own measurement systems) still seek to control, leading to an unsustainable situation.

The ultimate goal, therefore, is to move towards self-managing teams at all levels of the organization, not just at the bottom. This is how companies can truly become genuinely adaptive and resilient.

Explore: As a manager, identify one area where your team currently has limited autonomy. Brainstorm ways to truly empower them to self-design that process or outcome, providing support rather than imposing solutions. Be prepared to address potential "mixed mode" conflicts.

Our conversation with Trond truly highlighted that achieving organizational agility and resilience is not just about adopting new frameworks or technologies; it's about a fundamental shift in worldview and power dynamics. It's about recognizing organizations as complex open systems where people are not cogs, but purposeful experts capable of shaping their environment for a desirable future.

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