Most organisations recognise their dysfunctions. The chronic meetings that produce nothing, the decisions that never land, the talented people who quietly disengage, the change initiatives that dissolve on contact with the organisation. We notice the symptoms. What we rarely see is the structure that produces them.

This talk starts where most do — with the dysfunctions themselves. But rather than treating them as problems to be fixed with better culture, better tools, or new leadership, it uses them as evidence. What looks like a people problem or a process problem is almost always a structural one. The way work is organised shapes what people can do, what they can learn, and what kind of system the organisation becomes over time.

Drawing on Open Systems Theory, we will look at what bureaucratic structures actually do, not what they intend to do, but what they produce. And then at what happens when those structures meet a world that refuses to stay still.

There is a way out, but it is not a new methodology or a reorganisation. It is a different design principle: one with fifty years of evidence behind it, and a participative process for getting there that does not require the organisation to be redesigned from above.

This presentation is based on my self-published book on LeanPub "Organisational Dysfunctions: Open Systems Theory Explains"