Seams & signals: the quiet infrastructure of cohesion

Themes: Transformation | Systems thinking | Team | Complexity

Organisations are mostly built for stability. The artifacts they run on, the risk registers and planning cycles and documents that pass between functions, were designed for environments in which what just happened was largely known and what comes next is largely predictable. Those environments are increasingly rare. The work that actually holds the organisation together, in any system of real scale, happens somewhere these artifacts cannot see: at the seams between functions, between strategy and execution, between the organisation and the environment around it.

This talk is about what lives in those seams, and what is meant to. Drawing on Eric Trist’s sociotechnical tradition and the boundary spanning research that followed, it works through three things that hold an organisation together at its seams: boundary objects, roles, and practices. Most organisations have some of each, in some configuration, and much of what is present sits outside the seams it was meant to inhabit. Underneath this is a deeper omission: aligned autonomy, cohesion, and coordination are rarely treated as design conditions to be enabled by design. They are treated as afterthoughts of execution.

The seams are where the design questions that most matter in turbulent times are actually held.

Participant Takeaways:

• A way of seeing the seams in your own organization as inhabited spaces rather than gaps to be closed, and recognizing what currently lives in them.
• A working understanding of how boundary objects, roles, and practices function together, and why most organizations have some of each but few are configured for the seams they are meant to inhabit.
• A sharper diagnostic for distinguishing conditions that have been enabled by design from those that have been left as afterthoughts of execution, and what that distinction reveals about how an organization will handle disruption.