Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The facilitator's toolkit

Context: The facilitator is experienced and well-prepared. The workshop opens with an icebreaker to warm up the room. Post-its go up on the walls. Groups rotate through stations. After lunch, there is an energiser to lift the energy back. Priorities are set by dot voting. The debrief is structured and timed. Every element has been chosen carefully. The facilitator is skilled, the tools are familiar, and the day runs smoothly. The outputs are adequate. Something harder to name is missing. Participants were present but not quite in it. The facilitator reflects on which tools to adjust for next time.

OST explains: Every tool in the toolkit carries an implicit answer to the most important question in the room: who owns this? The facilitator who opens with an icebreaker, directs the post-it debrief, calls the energiser, and closes the dot vote is the one who owns it, regardless of how collaborative the tools feel. Merrelyn Emery was precise on this: most facilitation tools come from the first educational paradigm, which is DP1-based, and introducing them into a workshop that is trying to be DP2 does not produce a hybrid; it produces confusion about who has control, and Bion's defences activate in response. The participants arrived willing to work. The toolkit told them, before the first exercise was finished, that they were not in a self-managing space. They adjusted accordingly. Dependency and flight are not failures of engagement; they are accurate readings of the design principle actually operating in the room. The toolkit is not the problem. The design principle operating in the room is.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #facilitation

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The series has become a book, available now on Leanpub. Link in the comments.
http://www.organisationaldysfunctions.com

Kruglanski's work on cognitive closure describes this pull. He wasn't writing about software boundaries. The pattern is the same.

Holding the discomfort is only half of it though. Hold it too long and the group is just tired. The other half is reading when the not knowing has done its work and closing there. That balance is a skill, and it gets better with practice.

Anyone can pick it up. What doesn't work is assuming someone will.

#DomainDrivenDesign #CollaborativeModelling #Facilitation

Two people can leave a meeting thinking they agreed, then find out weeks later they didn't. Nobody wrote it down clearly enough to check. Michael shared a moment where writing a disagreement on a whiteboard changed everything—people stopped arguing at each other and started looking at the same thing.

Read, watch, or listen: https://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/externalising-decisions-not-alignment/

#SoftwareArchitecture #DDD #Facilitation

What are powerful questions and what aren’t they? And where does the power actually lie?
#Facilitation #Complexity #Leadership #Hosting #ArtOfHosting

https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/thinking-about-powerful-questions/

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The agenda that sabotaged itself

Context: The agenda looked good on paper. An opening keynote to align everyone on context, small group work to generate ideas, a panel of senior leaders to react and give feedback, and then a vote to prioritise. Energy is high at the start. The keynote is engaging. The groups work well for an hour. Then the panel arrives, and something shifts. Questions become pointed. A few people go quiet. The vote produces winners and losers rather than consensus. By the time people leave, the energy has curdled. The facilitator was experienced. The participants came in good faith. Nobody can quite explain what happened.

OST explains: What the agenda described was a textbook Mixed Mode event: a structure that alternates between DP1 and DP2 within the same session. The keynote is DP1: an expert transmits to an audience. The group work is DP2: participants own the task. The panel reinstates DP1: authority figures evaluate what the groups produced. Merrelyn Emery was precise on this: mixed mode is not a synthesis or a balance between the design principles. Every time the design principle shifts within a session, it disrupts the group’s sense of who is responsible, and Bion’s basic assumptions are triggered fresh. The keynote primes dependency. The group work briefly generates genuine creative work. The panel reactivates hierarchy and invites fight or flight. This is not bad luck, and it is not a facilitation problem. It is the structural consequence of building incompatible design principles into the same event. The only reliable path is a workshop that stays on one design principle throughout. Prevention is straightforward. Recovery, once the room has turned, rarely is. The problem is not in the room. It is on the agenda.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #facilitation

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day

The output nobody owned

Context: The workshop uses post-its. Everyone writes, sticks them up, and the facilitator clusters them into themes. By the end of the day, there are hundreds of them on the wall. Even the plenary review, where the groups walk through their output together, cannot hold it all. Participants follow for the first twenty minutes, then the sheer volume overtakes their capacity to track. Something you wrote is up there somewhere. Whether it survived the clustering, whether it was merged into something adjacent or simply lost in the mass, you cannot tell. The facilitator synthesises. The output looks clean. The trust in it is thinner than it looks.

OST explains: Solomon Asch identified four conditions that must be present for communication to actually work: openness, basic psychological similarity, a mutually shared field, and trust. The last is a product of the first three. Post-its structurally undermine the first and third. They can be removed, merged, reworded, or lost without detection. The field is no longer shared and open; it is curated, and everyone in the room senses this even when they cannot name it. The Search Conference tradition addresses this with deliberate bluntness: everything goes on large sheets of paper fixed to the walls, written in full view, staying there for the entire event. Nothing is summarised by a facilitator. Groups consolidate their own work before it is brought to the plenary, so the authors are present when it is presented and can verify it. The open record is not a formality; it is the mechanism by which trust accumulates. Merrelyn Emery called butchers' paper the ultimate guarantee of openness, precisely because it is virtually impossible to change without the room noticing. The post-it is convenient. It is also the perfect tool for a workshop where nobody quite trusts the output and nobody can explain why.

#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #facilitation

It's hard when teams identify problems as technical, but the real issues are deeper. We interviewed nine practicioners at @dddeu and ask them: what's the hardest part of facilitating software architecture and design?

Read, watch, or listen: https://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/problem-isnt-technical-ddd-europe/

#DDD #Facilitation #SoftSkills

It's hard when a solution is proposed before the problem is fully understood. Kim Kao shows how using Impact Mapping and EventStorming creates a shared understanding, helping teams move past assumptions to address the real challenge. Kim Kao shared this experience. #ImpactMapping #EventStorming #Facilitation

Read, watch, or listen: https://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/impact-mapping-before-architecture/

Covert recording is increasingly unavoidable. Here's why group agreements are essential for trust and confidentiality at conferences.

#ConferenceDesign #Facilitation #GroupProcess #EventProfs #Trust

https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/event-design/2026/06/personal-recording-technology-threatens-group-process

Alt...

A photograph of Thorben Grosser (wearing a PLAUD) and Julius Solaris (wearing Meta Ray-Ban glasses) at IMEX Frankfurt 2026, with permission from Thorben's LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thorbengrosser_at-imex-in-frankfurt-my-friend-julius-walked-ugcPost-7465024814882177024-nyUL/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAABPZcBvliRajhMsazSc4XieWMbwNFWd_g

It's hard to make progress with collaborative modeling when underlying cultural resistance makes feedback feel like an attack. @Heimeshoff shares how he learned that successful facilitation needs a true mandate and understanding the system's actual readiness for change, not just applying methods.

Read, watch, or listen: https://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/cultural-resistance-collaborative-modeling/
#DDD #Facilitation #Culture

It's hard when architectural discussions become arguments about solutions without first defining the problem. @noctovis shared practices like separating problem definition from solution comparison, asking about assumptions, and using evidence to transform conflict into collaboration.
#SoftwareArchitecture #TeamCollaboration #Facilitation

Read, watch, or listen: https://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/turning-architecture-conflict-into-collaboration/

It's hard when architects think they agree on a system's design, but their mental models differ. @apaipi shares how asking everyone to draw the same monolith unveiled hidden misunderstandings, fostering crucial shared understanding and better architectural decisions.
#SoftwareArchitecture #Facilitation #DDD

Read, watch, or listen: https://virtualddd.com/facilitating-archdes/drawing-same-system-different-architectures/

What you get: a guaranteed early bird spot, real co-design from day one, and a learning experience that goes both ways.
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#OpenSpace #Facilitation #Unconference