The Human systems' axioms™
Our organizational principles are pure, already existing science, with different "activation" depending on the context, i.e., Clear, Complicated or Complex, referring to the Cynefin™ Framework, by Dave Snowden. The more complexity, the more organizational principles will be "activated" and therefore need to be fulfilled, and in a complex context like product development, we need to fulfil all of them. Since any organization (or any human constellation), can be defined as "People that interact to solve activities with interdependencies for a common purpose.", the organizational principles need to cover the science for people and activities.
Here are the organizational principles for our people:
- Respect for people
- Teams of maximum 15 persons to achieve trust and sympathy
- Teams of teams of maximum 150 persons (Dunbar's number) to achieve recognition of all peoples' names and faces
- Miller's number, which means that we can only keep 7 +-2 things in our short-term memory
- Conway's law, to avoid that the architecture will deteriorate
- There must be someone (person/team) responsible for an activity
- There must be someone responsible for activities regarding; the way of working (top priority), guilds with people, tools, competence, career, salary, products, maintenance, etc.
Here are the organizational principles for our activities:
- We need to reduce the uncertainty in our product we are developing
- We need to reduce the disciplinary complexity in the parts of our product we are developing
- We need to do a top-down reduction of the transdisciplinary complexity in our product we are developing
- We need to do a top-down reduction of the transdisciplinary complicatedness in our product we are developing
- There must be a top-down priority order between the initiatives, and for the activities within an initiative
- The activities need to be done in the stated right priority order within an initiative
- We need to have control on the dependencies and interdependencies between the activities within the initiatives, or between the initiatives
- We need to be proactive enough towards variability
- We need to have a common language in the organization
- We need to have timely (just-in-time) feedback (context dependent length)
Since science always needs to be followed, not fulfilling all the organizational principles will lead to a mal-functioning way of working. This mal-functioning will be of varying degree, depending on which organizational principles that are not fulfilled and how many of them. If our way of working does not fulfil the organizational principles, our way of working will have a built-in organizational root cause for every non-fulfilled organizational principle.
It can also be added, that the more complex context we are operating in, the longer it will take until we understand that we have built-in deficiencies, and the more severe our organizational problems will be. But, SPPA is the method that takes care about this, and an easy-used method that we should use regularly, in order to find the root causes to our problems as early as possible.
Remember that we also have a lot of true common sense, that we follow without reflecting on it, like that we need structure and order when we have too many things to take care about, or the need of documentation in order to "remember", or to be able to transfer knowledge to other people. The solution is often the need of not only structuring and planning, but also making it visualised with pictures, diagrams, drawings, etc., since only text is not enough, especially not when we need details or when it is complicated. This is why it is natural for us humans to have people structures, system architectures, product structures, plans, etc.
For detailed information about the organizational principles, please see here.