Larman's Laws of Organisational behaviour serves as an insight into observations around organisational structures and behaviours. Lets dive into the observations around these laws further and understand what they mean.
Larman's Laws of Organisational Behaviour 1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures.
2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as status quo.
3. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be derided as “purist”, “theoretical”, “revolutionary”, "religion", and “needing pragmatic customization for local concerns” — which deflects from addressing weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo.
4. As a corollary to (1), if after changing the change some managers and single-specialists are still displaced, they become “coaches/trainers” for the change, frequently reinforcing (2) and (3).
5. (in large established orgs) Culture follows structure. And in tiny young orgs, structure follows culture. So what does this mean for larger organisations? Culture follows organisational design, so if you want to change the culture, the first place to start is by changing the structure so that culture and mindset can follow. For example, In the Agile world, if we looked at Scrum as a framework that provides us with structure, we can see that once roles, ceremonies and artefacts are established alongside a set of principles and values, these rapidly start to embed new mindsets and ways of thinking within teams. Therefore, having a strong focus on structure right at the start, helps culture transform more quickly. With companies being designed to keep middle managers in their positions to avoid changing the status quo, this keeps power in the middle layer and can easily take over the language through enforcing patterns of 'this is how we do things here' which ultimately leads to many becoming easily discouraged to think outside the box and try to do things differently. As long as we continue to refuse to change the structural elements, in fear of personal safety around our positions, how we've previously worked and what we know - the people and culture within organisations will continue to suffer, which will ultimately lead to decreased productivity, high volumes of staff turn over, wasted time and a decrease in company revenue. A greater alternative is to change the structure, hierarchy, processes and put the right people in the right places and everything else will naturally follow. In todays society, lots of thriving technology companies have grasped this very concept and are making the shift towards working with coaches to re-establish structure and re-think their structures. The more we can have these conversations and share insights, the faster these changes can happen. So the big question is - how will you use these laws to help your organisation take that first step towards rethinking their organisational design?
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