Larman's laws on organizational behavior

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

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

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

Or, culture / behavior / 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.
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That is why such well-designed disciplines and approaches as “Organizational learning” turn out to be less effective and efficient, whereas approaches like Scrum, which obviously require changes in the structure at the beginning of work, as a rule, affect culture more quickly, provided that the initial requirements are met.

John Seddon (Ed. - Consultant, a specialist in Systems Thinking, the author of the article “Against ISO 9000”) noted the following: “Attempts to change the culture of an organization are sheer nonsense, and always fail. Culture as the behavior of people is a product of the system - only by changing the system, you can contribute to behavior change. ”

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 approaches to scaling, such as SAFe and LeSS.