Larman's laws on organizational behavior

    The translation of Craig Larman 's article “Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior” was done by Lily Alekseeva (Agile Evangelist, Sberbank) with permission of the author.

    I spent dozens of years advising various companies and enterprises and watching how changes in them occur. Based on this experience, I formulated the Larman Laws on organizational behavior . To perceive them, of course, is more likely as a reason for reflection than a direct guide to action.

    1. Organizations are designed in such a way as to avoid changes in the structure of power, the status quo between top and middle management, as well as between middle management and specialists.
    2. The first consequence of claim 1 is that any initiative to change will be reduced to redefining the existing one or introducing new terminology, which in essence means the same thing as before the changes, but which allows maintaining the status quo.
    3. The second consequence of paragraph 1 - any change initiative will be ridiculed as “purist,” “theoretical,” “unnecessarily revolutionary,” and “requiring landing on the organization’s realities,” which prevents the start of work to eliminate existing problems and maintains the status quo of managers and specialists.
    4. Culture obeys the structure (follows it).

    Or, culture / behavior / type of thinking is determined by organizational design. If you really want to change the culture, then you have to start with a review of the organizational structure. There is no other way.

    That is why such well-thought-out disciplines and approaches as “Organizational learning” turn out to be less effective and efficient, while approaches like Scrum, which obviously require structural changes at the beginning of work, tend to have a faster impact on the culture, provided that the initial requirements are met.

    John Seddon (approx. Ed. - consultant, specialist in the field of System Thinking, author of the article “Against ISO 9000”) noted the following: “Attempts to change the organization’s culture are sheer stupidity, and always fail. Culture as human behavior is a product of the system - only by changing the system, you can contribute to a change in behavior. "

    PS . If you are interested in materials on the transformation of processes in large companies, we recommend the Enterprise Agile Russia group on Facebook. We will discuss scaling approaches such as SAFe and LeSS.

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