Triggered by a great tip by @RuthMalan I think I'll redo my "Sociotechnical principle of the day" thread from Twitter here. I'll post one each...day.
[#]SocioTechnical
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Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Compatibility – to get a system capable of self-modification a constructively participative organization is needed, e.g. workers taking part in the design of the jobs they are to perform."
More in this post.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Minimal Critical Specification – giving worker groups clear objectives but leaving them to decide how to achieve them."
More in this post.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Boundary location – boundaries should not be drawn so as to impede the sharing of information, knowledge, and learning."
More in this post.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Variance control – must be controlled as close to their point of origin as possible, e.g. in the team by the team."
More in this post.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"The Multifunctionality Principle – members of a team should be multi-skilled in order for them to be flexible and able to respond to change. Redundancy of functions instead of parts"
More in this post:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Information flow – must go to the place where it is needed for action, i.e. not up any “chain of command” or any other teams."
More in this post.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Support Congruence – The rest of the organisation should support the teams as they are designed, be it payment, training, assessments, promotion, etc"
More in this post.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Design and Human Values – workers have demands that goes beyond the basic needs like pay and security in order to provide high-quality work and have a quality of work life."
More in this post:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
"Incompletion – the design process is never done, new demands and conditions in the work environment mean that continual rethinking of structures and objectives is required."
More in this post:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/
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So far I've presented the 9 principles described by Cherns in his paper from 1976 and it still amazes me how much insight was gathered in these that the IT industry has had to rediscover. And we are still not at this level. So there is still a lot to learn from social sciences.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/001872677602900806
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I will go back to each principle and bring in some more details from that paper and Chern's updated list from '87 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001872678704000303) as well as Clegg's take on them from 2000 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687000000090?via%3Dihub). I hope threading works here...
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OK, as we now have covered all the original nine principles as described by Cherns in '76 let's take a look at the additions that have been made since, starting with the ones Cherns had for his revisit of them in '87 (link above).
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Power and Authority – People should be responsible for supervising and managing complete processes. They should have the authority and resources to do
it.
One of two additions by Cherns '87: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001872678704000303
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Cherns '87: Workers should have "access to and authority to command" any resources needed, thereby "accept responsibility for them and for their prudent and economical use." Also, "the power and authority that accompanies knowledge and expertise."
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This is closely related to the information flow principle (https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/113519733422657630) in that the teams should have all the information, power, and authority so that the job incorporates a whole task, rather than fragmented.
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This results in what Trist and Bamforth called "responsible autonomy" in the seminal paper from '51, where teams have the autonomy to decide what to do, but is also accountable for the outcome of the decision.
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Trist & Bamforth '51: "A primary work-organization of this type has the advantage of placing the responsibility for the complete coal-getting task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small , face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership. For each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure. Though the contract may have been in the name of the hewer, it was regarded as a joint undertaking." 1/2
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"Leadership and 'supervision' were internal to the group, which had a quality of responsible autonomy. The capacity of these groups for self-regulation was a function of the wholeness of their work task, this connection being represented in their contractual status. A whole has power as an independent detachment, but parts require external control." 2/2
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Transitional Organization – an organisation in transition is both different and more complex than old or new, requiring careful planning and design.
The second addition by Cherns '87: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001872678704000303
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Clegg 2000 replaces this and the incompletion principle with "Design practice is itself a sociotechnical system."
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Cherns '87: "Its [the design team] design process embodies the new values, its membership constitutes a cadre for diffusing those new values through the organization. Its role in selecting and socializing the new leadership is vital."
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Cherns '87: "The treatment given to those who will not have a part in the new organization, the model of selection of those who will, and the training they receive, all demonstrate the reality of the espoused philosophy. The principle of compatibility is nowhere more in evidence than here."
(see https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/113482764338718389)
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Design is systemic
The first of Clegg's 19 revised principles, an attempt to make them more relevant in the modern ICT era, encouraging wider application and diffusion of STSD.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687000000090
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Clegg '00: "A sociotechnical perspective explicitly embraces the idea that all aspects of a system are interconnected, that none should take logical precedence over the other, and that they should be designed jointly. Unfortunately, some of the interdependencies may not be apparent during system design...there may be unintended consequences of various change initiatives. Some of these consequences may only become obvious when the system is in operation."
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This perspective is implicit in Cherns' principles and arguments. Many of the new principles are renaming and re-framing of the original 10, but some are also new and I will come back to some of them in the following installments.
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Design should reflect the needs of the business, its users and their managers
This is a new one from Clegg and his added focus on stakeholder needs as well as the workers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687000000090
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Clegg '00: "In one sense such notions are obvious but nevertheless they are worth stating explicitly. All too often systems are designed which do not meet the needs of the business, or of the users."
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Design is an extended social process.
This is also a new one from Clegg and accounts for the system's users and their evolving needs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687000000090
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Clegg '00: "Design continues beyond implementation and throughout use, for example, as the people using the new system interpret it, amend it, massage it and make such adjustments as they see fit and/or are able to undertake."
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Clegg '00: "Different people will interpret systems in different ways, and there need to be structures and mechanisms through which views can be aired, recognized and understood."
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Design is socially shaped.
What this covers is that "design is subject to social movements and trends. These themselves may be manifest in various fads and fashions."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687000000090
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Clegg '00: "This perspective carries with it some negative connotations; it implies that designers and others need to take care that their attentions and efforts are not driven by, and caught up in, the latest fads to emerge."
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Design is contingent.
The last of Clegg's meta-principles, making what was implicit explicit, namely that design is highly contextual.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0003-6870(00)00009-0
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There is no "one best way" to design work. What is needed to produce a range of similar products where quality demands are at a premium is not the same as when tasks are interdependent, when people need to interact to resolve problems as they arise, and where a range of skills is required.
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Clegg '00: "...competing demands and their opportunity costs are also important. Such choices, given current levels of knowledge and understanding, are extraordinarily difficult. Indeed, in many cases, it is unlikely to be clear what represents an optimal design choice."
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Core processes should be integrated.
This content principle covers Cherns' principles on boundary location, information flow, and power and authority.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687000000090
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This should be familiar to anyone doing agile and organising in cross-functional teams. Clegg seems to have joined in Hackman and Oldham's work here (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_characteristic_theory) which builds on the STSD core idea of autonomous work groups.
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[#]Sociotechnical principle of the day:
Design entails multiple task allocations between and amongst humans and machines.
This covers Cherns' multifunctional principle and job design, extended with task allocation between humans and machines.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687000000090
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Cherns '76: "Design is a reiterative process. The closure of options open new ones."
"As soon as design is implemented, its consequences indicate the need for redesign."
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Cherns '87: "Redesign is not the task of a special design team; it is the function of self-regulating operating teams provided with the techniques of analysis, the appropriate criteria and the principles of design."
"Implementation must begin with the start of design."
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Cherns '87: "...not only have [the teams] to learn the appropriate operating skills, they have to learn to operate as a team, they have to learn how to handle the information of all kinds their self-regulatory function requires, and they have to learn to review and evaluate their performance and to negotiate redesign."
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Six intrinsic characteristics were defined:
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An early version of this list was defined as early as the 60s by Emery and later extended by him and Thorsrud. Cherns had them as a separate principle in '76, but put them as generic values in '87, arguing that they underpin all the other principles.
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Cherns '76: "The objective is to provide these [responsibility, involvement, etc] for those who do want them without subjecting those who don't to the tyranny of peer control."
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These values were actually added to the Norwegian Work Environment Act based on the work by Emery, Thorsrud and others. More on this in: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/democratisation-work-trond-hjorteland/
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What I find interesting is that this work was done in the 60s and 70s and these values is aligned with Pink's mastery, autonomy, and purpose, even the Self Determination Theory and its relatedness.
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This principle may sound a bit odd at first, but it is actually very important for autonomous teams to work over time. We all have probably seen how problematic it is doing agile bottom-up, where teams try to be autonomous but get stuck in an environment that is not.
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Cherns '76: "Not infrequently a management committed to philosophies of participation simultaneously adopts systems of work management, for example, which are in gross contradiction."
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Cherns '87: "At best, each production unit can operate as a profit center; that conflicts with many finance departments' view of financial control."
"...pay for what you know rather than for what you do.[...]Their value is what is in their head."
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This is similar and related to variance control in that the information should be kept and used at its origin. This should resonate well with agile teams and even data meshes.
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Cherns '76: "...sophisticated information systems can supply a work team with exactly the right type and amount of feedback to enable them to control the variances which occur within the scope of their spheres of responsibility and competence..."
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Cherns '87: "It is no use holding an individual or a team responsible for any function and doling out information about its performance in arrear and through higher authority. Under those conditions, the individual or team cannot have ownership of the performance."
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Even ín agile people are so used to handing off information to authority outside the team that many don't think of the consequences, be it (guess)estimates, burn-down charts, retrospectives, etc. It is naive to believe this will not be used to break team autonomy and self-governance.
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This was quite controversial back in the day, especially as it countered the idea of division of labour, where tasks were made so simple that the workers could easily be replaced. In STSD teams should be multi-skilled so that anyone in the team can take over for the other at any time.
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For non-repetitive knowledge work multi-skilled is replaced with multi-disciplinary and the redundancy of function is handled by people being proficient in some aspects, capable in others. Calvin Pava developed these ideas in the 80s and made considerable amendments to STSD.
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The multifunctionality principle is meant to handle the variance at its origin (see the variance control principle https://hachyderm.io/@trondhjort/113508573368606260) and that "there are several routes to the goal - the principle sometimes described as equifinality." (Cherns '76)
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Cherns '87: "Hiring specialists, experts, is the mechanical response; training to enlarge the repertoire is the organic."
This is so good!
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@trondhjort Its also an approach that does not scale well.
I would agree that designing the entire system is necessary, but only at the architectural level. The detailed design and implementation should be done with each module isolated as much as possible.
Coupling between modules often results in changes rippling across the entire system. The most insidious coupling is where developers design their code with knowledge of how other modules work.
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@ocratato A holistic approach does NOT replace an analytic approach. It comes as an addition. You start with seeing how it all must be combined to serve the whole before designing the pieces to make them fit the larger system. Which is the reason why they are there.
Also, do remember that we are taking about a sociotechnical system here, not a purely technical one that have no purpose. Any technical part is given a purpose by being a function of a larger purposeful system.
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@trondhjort
Are you suggesting that the technical stuff should not be designed until the surrounding societal system is understood?
Take something like the humble spreadsheet. Its existence shaped how many businesses operated.
For a bespoke system you are probably correct, but a lot of software (and other technology) is developed in the hope there might be a market.
Very few organisations can afford bespoke software.
Artists might also find exception that their work is without purpose.
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@ocratato I think most of us in IT are creating software together with other people for people to use as tools. In other words, we must be able to understand the user need, the problem they would like to have solved by the tool and the context it will operate. So, yes, absolutely, the larger containing system needs to be understood for our tools to work.
What we do practically though is jointly optimise this, i.e. the mutually determinate nature of the social and technical.
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