Sociotechnical Systems Design for the “Digital Coal Mines”*

The term “sociotechnical” seems to have gotten a bit or renaissance lately, which is a great thing given all the positive impact it has had on many organisations and their workers around the world over the years. It also seems to have gotten some traction outside the academic circles this time after being developed and pushed from there mostly using action research since its humble beginning in the post-war British coal mines. It is an entry into systems thinking for many, with its idea about joint optimisation of both the technical and social aspects of an organisation. A common example is setting up the team topology to match the service architecture in an attempt to cater for negative effects of Conway’s law. This is all well and good, but if we think about it, viewing the modern organisation as a sociotechnical system is a bit of a tautology; all organisations have social and technical elements that people deal with on a daily basis. As with systems thinking, the value of sociotechnical system design is more about perspective and understanding rather than any specific outcome. There is so much more to sociotechnical design than DevOps and team setup that we need in order to cope in our increasingly complex and hazardous “digital coal mines.”

“The world of socio-technical design is democratic, humanistic and provides both freedom and knowledge to those who are part of it." –Enid Mumford

We are entering what is often referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, where increased automation and new business models are based on smart technology with large-scale use of machine-to-machine communication and internet of things that reduce the need for human intervention. The third industrial revolution, which has been going on since the 60s, has gotten an overenergetic child that force companies still struggling with the digitisation and automation of existing processes into the unknown high-paced territory of digitalisation and digital transformations. It fundamentally changes the way in which they need to operate and how to realise value for their customers – the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance. A holistic approach is needed, especially one that treat social and technical aspects as equally important.

Sociotechnical systems design (STSD) actually came about in similar circumstances in the 1950s, where the technological advances did not bring about the promised results because the companies struggled to adjust accordingly. Action research carried out by academics in sociology and psychology showed that introduction of new technology, be it new production methods or machines, should not be done without adjusting the social aspect to match, for example how people organise themselves and how they divide the work. Only focusing on the technology frequently resulted in a lower productivity and reduced quality of working life, leading to frustration at all levels of the company. Instead a participative approach was used, where the workers was involved in the design of the work system. This simultaneous focus on both the technological and social aspects resulted in not only improved productivity but also increased worker satisfaction. It is therefore not unlikely that an overfocus on the tech in this new industrial revolution can yield similar result and that STSD can once again be a way to counter similar negative effects – both on the business and the people working there.

Another interesting parallel between the current digital economy and the industrial world after the second world war is the position of and demands by the workers. Limited access to skilled personnel shifts the power from the employer to the employee, the latter being in a position to demand better quality of working life, more choice in the work environment, and require self-direction to being closely observed and controlled. The modern workers are also often a lot more knowledgeable and technologically advanced than before, especially the digital natives brings with them different expectations, values, and motivations. Autonomy, meaning, teamwork, personal development, self-expression, fun, and life balance are considered important – and bureaucracy and hierarchy are strongly disliked. Being fundamentally a human relation movement, STSD is a good match for this anti-authoritarianism. Not only for the workers, but also the employers because, as Gerald Weinberg famously observed: “No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem."

In addition to the human relations connection, STSD has always been grounded in systems theory, specifically open systems and cybernetics, and a sociotechnical systems, like an organisation, is constantly being affected by its environment and must deal with all the variety and uncertainty in order to survive and thrive. The Tayloristic and bureaucratic way of dealing with this is matching the external complexity with more command and control: formal lines of authority, rigid division of labour, redundancy of parts (e.g. workers), strict control of variety by standardisation and so on. STSD takes an almost completely opposite approach, embracing uncertainty and variety by replacing the “complex organisation and simple jobs” with “simple organisation and complex jobs.” This is done by giving work groups the autonomy, authority, and responsibility to define how work should be done, seeing that they are the experts and are more equipped to deal with the complexity and the variety. The concept of participative democracy is central and deals nicely with the not so user-friendly system principle of “joint optimisation” of the technical and social aspects.

It would be ironic if STSD then was defined prescriptively with detailed processes and rigid frameworks. Instead it gives a set of good practices and guiding principles, some of which are as follows:

•  Compatibility – to get a system capable of self-modification a constructively participative organization is needed, e.g. workers taking part in the design of the jobs they are to perform.
• Minimal Critical Specification – giving worker groups clear objectives but leaving them to decide how to achieve them.
• Variance control – must be controlled as close to their point of origin as possible, e.g. in the team by the team.
• The Multifunctionality Principle – members of a team should be multi-skilled in order for them to be flexible and able to respond to change. Redundancy of functions instead of parts.
• Boundary location – boundaries should not be drawn so as to impede the sharing of information, knowledge, and learning (a point also made in this post).
• Information flow – must go to the place where it is needed for action, i.e. not up any “chain of command” or any other teams.
• Support Congruence – The rest of the organisation should support the teams as they are designed, be it payment, training, assessments, promotion etc.
• Incompletion – the design process is never done, new demands and conditions in the work environment mean that continual rethinking of structures and objectives is required.

A number of human values has also been identified that high quality work requires: jobs to be reasonably demanding, opportunity to learn, an area of decision-making, social support, the opportunity to relate work to social life, and a job that leads to a desirable future.

All this sounds pretty much like the perfect setup for agility, but most of this predates the agile manifesto by more than it has been here for. STSD has struggled to get a foothold for probably the same reasons that agile does: risk aversion and inertia in the existing bureaucracies and power structures that still stand strong in most companies. Many companies are still struggling with adjusting to the third industrial revolution, the digital one, and are nowhere near coping with the fourth one. Even in the face of increasing complexity, growing global competition, accelerating digital innovations, and the predicted shortages in the labour market, companies still reach for the same old recipe of hierarchies and command & control – the one that was developed to deal with the second industrial revolution 100 years ago. Some have realized though that fundamental changes are needed, that new organisational designs are required, and that business agility and the organisational capability of rapid change is a huge competitive advantage. Not only to meet the customer demand, but also for attracting the best people that is increasingly interested in participation and quality of working life – two of the core values of STSD. Sociotechnical thinking are needed as capabilities associated with new technologies are rapidly outpacing the development of new organizational designs.

“STS design was intended to produce a ‘win-win-win-win’: human beings were more committed, technology operated closer to its potential and the organization performed better overall while adapting more readily to change in its environment.” –Pasmore et al

* The title of this post is taken from a paper by Austrom and Ordowich: Calvin Pava's Legacy: Sociotechnical Systems Design for the "Digital Coal Mines".