?????? OD109: Six patterns of collaborative dysfunction ????

Curated resources on Strategy ? Org Design ? Org Development ? Adjacent fields

Starters

1 of 4 / Strategic Management Journal: Overcoming strategic persistence: Effects of multiple scenario analysis on strategic reorientation

Research by Mark Healey and Gerard Hodgkinson (highlights ours):

"What can managers do when their previously successful strategy stops working?

We found that using multiple scenario analysis, a common strategic planning technique can help decision makers switch to a new strategy.

In our study, using a business simulation game that required players to change strategies to succeed, we found that those players who imagined different industry futures as part of a multiple scenario analysis exercise were more likely to believe in new strategies and as a result more likely to switch to the winning strategy.

However, this intervention was less effective for players who had high levels of success with the old strategy."

Extra arguments for incorporating scenarios in strategy work at various levels (global, national, corporate, business, functional, personal).

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2 of 4 / Matthias Mueller: Analogies are key instruments in the strategist's tool kit.

"(…) analogies are effective tools for catalyzing creativity when the task is to generate strategic options in the first place.

(…) Experiments found that subjects that were given analogies came up with more strategic options than the ones who were given none. In addition, the use of multiple analogies led to better results than the use of just a single analogy. The same was true for remote analogies as opposed to close analogies."

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3 of 4 / Antoinette Weibel: Collective Pay-for-Performance

• "Go with gain or profit sharing - it signals ?we are in the same boat“ and does not create any of the side effects of individual PfP. (…)
• Team bonus systems are also - overall - effective but here the original studies caution. Positive effects are to be expected for interdependent work and if teams take care of potential ?social loafing“ in a considerate manner. (…)

I highly recommend to read the paper - if only to scan it for the possible downsides of such systems. Our knowledge on the effects is in many cases are not yet rich enough but the biggest learnings are the red flags also found."

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4 of 4 / Ben Ford: Social Inflection Points

"(…) Now let’s compare these to a growing tech company.

You start with your founding team. You’re optimising for speed of learning and experimentation. You get things done as fast as possible, having (and needing) very little structure. You’re a section.

Fast forward past product market fit. You know what you’re building now (hopefully). Your sections are now your cross functional teams. You’re taking on longer running, more strategic pieces of work and coordinating multiple streams of work and competing priorities.

This is your first inflection point. This is where you start needing structure and consistency, but not at the expense of being able to get things done and ship. This is also where the seeds of success or dysfunction for scaling up start to be sown.

The next inflection point is when you’re trying to get to?company?size. You need a correspondingly larger leadership and HQ element. This is also the point where communications needs to be a lot more disciplined and?structured."

Main

Six patterns of collaborative dysfunction ????

Found these useful examples in the When Collaboration Fails and How to Fix It MITSMR article:

"Pattern 1: Hub-and-spoke Networks

Issue: Excessive reliance on formal and informal leaders slows decision-making, blocks innovation, alienates team members, and overloads leaders.

Drivers:

• Hierarchical or overly controlling leadership behaviors.
• Dominance of experts.
• Flaws in roles, decision rights, or incentives.
• A fear-driven culture that promotes approval-seeking and validation.

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Pattern 2: Disenfranchised Nodes

Issue: Marginalized team members lack access to resources and struggle to contribute, negatively affecting group performance and the disenfranchised members' engagement and retention.

Drivers:

• Leaders who elevate some group members above others.
• Onerous processes that cause some members to become disillusioned and withdraw.
• A lack of trust in peers outside the function and/or an overreliance on familiar faces.
• Disconnection by virtue of status or physical location.

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Pattern 3: Misaligned Nodes

Issue: Factions that don't relate to one another slow down work, erode cohesion, and undermine project success.

Drivers:

• Agreeing on integrated objectives but then pursuing work in a way that optimizes functional or business unit goals.
• Problems and solutions viewed only from one discipline's perspective.
• Clusters of like-minded teammates.
• Distrust or competition among the team members.

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Pattern 4: Overwhelmed Nodes

Issue: Team members cannot keep up with the collaborative demands placed upon them, leading to insufficient time for work, inefficient decision-making, excessive compromise, lower engagement, and ultimately burnout.

Drivers:

• Group growth that surpasses the limits of team and work design.
• Ineffective meeting and communication norms.
• Lack of effective collaborative workload metrics.
• Fear of making independent decisions or of being left out.
• A culture of overinclusion — both within the team and within the larger organization.

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Pattern 5: Isolated Networks

Issue: Impermeable group borders block stakeholder input and external resources/expertise, resulting in flawed decisions, innovation failures, and a lack of integration with the organization.

Drivers:

• Mandated separation of the group là la Skunk Works or Agile initiatives).
• Hyperfocus on optimizing the outcome based on the group's expertise or values rather than the end need.
• Echo chamber created by amplified input from a select few stakeholders.

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Pattern 6: Priority Overload

Issue: External stakeholder demands cause group members to lose sight of their mission and highest priorities, resulting in work overload that hurts the quality of execution, delays delivery, and creates employee burnout.

Drivers:

• Overemphasis on agility.
• Lack of North Star clarity/agreement among project leaders with competing demands.
• Personal and cultural values that lead toovercommitment."

See more details about each pattern in the original MITSMR article:

25 min read

Dessert

1 of 2 / BBC Worklife: The animal instinct that drives workers to adopt corporate jargon

"(…) Cooper and Brown agree the popularity of corporate jargon has a fairly simple explanation: the desire for status in the workplace, or "human peacocking".

Brown says peacocking is perfectly natural in both the animal world and the corporate world. "Language is one of the mechanisms of [showing off] – it's how you demonstrate that you're competent, you're capable," he says.

(…) the rise in jargon accompanies an overall increase in professional insecurity."

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2 of 2 / Aeon: Does language mirror the mind? An intellectual history

"Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective.

But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

(…) As languages are passed on from generation to generation, the differences between them accumulate, making the languages and the worldviews they contain more and more distinct.

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Bon appétit!

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As the Sense & Change team, we’re working as Strategy & Org Design advisers and facilitators for leadership teams of mid and large ???? Tech companies.

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