Fix organizational bugs

The most common way of thinking about an organization is as a group of individuals working together towards a common purpose. This mental model of an organization or a team can be useful in many development and alignment efforts, but when it comes to improving or changing the organization, the focus on individuals gets in the way.

When managing change and improvement, it makes more sense to think of the organization as a standalone machine or a product with certains features and traits that can be amended, added to, and improved.

Sometimes (a lot of the time, actually) things go wrong in an organization. One way to think about these failures are as organizational bugs.

An organizational bug is like a software/product bug in that an interaction with the product (in this case the organization) in a given context produces an outcome which is unexpected or undesirable.

In her article Strategies for Learning from Failure, Amy Edmondson explains that when leaders are asked to consider which portion of the failures in their organizations that are truely blameworthy, their answers are usually in single digits (2% to 5%).

Yet, they admit that as much as 70 - 90% of failures are treated as blameworthy. This is not useful for morale, and even less so when it comes to implementing a permanent fix.

A bug can most easily be recognized by a display of frustration from someone who comes in contact with the organization, be it an employee, a leader, a client, a board member, an investor or a vendor/partner.

The frustration is usually an indication of an expectation (explicit or implicit) not being met.

In order to manage the organization as a product, there needs to exist a single source of truth describing and dictating how the organization operates. To borrow a term from software programming, we can think of this as the source code of the organization. More recently, systems managing the source code of an organization have come to be known as Digital Twins of the Organization (DTO).

A DTO establishes a digital representation of how the organization operates which can then be modified to reflect our best and most up-to-date understanding of how we should organize work.

Provided that the DTO has a means of deploying updates to the relevant people in a manner which allows them to grow familiar with the changes, we are now able to change and improve how the organization operates in a continuous and predictable manner.