Curious About Organisational Psychotherapy? Organisational Psychotherapy. That’s a strange term. One you’ve probably not come across before. And one you almost certainly don’t understand in any depth. Why bother looking into it? Seems like a poor use of your time and attention? You could be right. UNLESS, you have some interest in or need for …
In case you missed it: examining collective assumptions and beliefs via your retrospectives: The Organisational Psychotherapy Retrospective
The Organisational Psychotherapy Solution for Staff Attrition What with The Great Resignation, record levels of disengagement in the workforce, and a decade and more of low productivity, management knows that losing staff – a.k.a. “attrition”, “turnover”, or “churn” – is a sure and quick route to disaster. Why Do Folks Quit? All the data (surveys, research, …
The Organisational Psychotherapy Solution for Easier Hiring I’ve hired many people in my time, and every day it seems to be more difficult finding the right people. Most organisation still have the mentality that says they’re doing people a favour by considering them for an open position. Not that hiring for open positions is too …
The Purpose of Organisational Psychotherapy Following on from my previous post, concerning the Fifth Absolute of Quality, which reads: The purpose of quality is customer success, NOT customer satisfaction. it occurs to me that maybe there’s some clarity or insight to be found in similarly describing the purpose of Organisational Psychotherapy: The purpose of Organisational …
Why Your Dev Team Can Benefit From Organisational Psychotherapy To address the constraints which lie outside the control and influence of you and your team (i.e. constraints and blockers residing in the wider organisation, which often includes the upper management, their assumptions and policies). To improve the role of the dev team within the organisation as …
What’s So Weird About Organisational Psychotherapy? I mean, it’s not like most businesses are run on purely rational, logical lines. Many businesses run on Faith (or various denominations), Astrology, Tarot, iChing (e.g. iChing divination), cleromancy, clairvoyance, Haruspicy, Hepatomancy, Anthropomancy, the Magic 8-Ball, HiPPO, and the like. Why then does Organisational Psychotherapy trigger the “Wow, that’s …
The Design Principles of Organisational Psychotherapy
Win Organisational Psychotherapy Book Bundles! In my most recent book, “Quintessence”, I draw a blueprint for the quintessential software development organisation. It builds on the previous two books: Hearts over Diamonds (foundational Organisational Psychotherapy book) Memeology (Organisational Psychotherapy self-help book) I’d be super delighted to hear about your take on the following topic: What does …
Organisational Psychotherapy Bargain Book Bundle You might like to know that a special bargain bundle of all three of my organisational psychotherapy books, Hearts over Diamonds, Memeology, and Quintessence, is now available on Leanpub at a special bargain price. – Bob
The Organisational Psychotherapy Standup Daily stand-ups rapidly become tedious to the point of irrelevance. They rarely address core issues, participants generally preferring to gloss over issues so they can get back to “the real work”, e.g. coding, as soon as possible each morning. Here’s how the Scrum Institute describes the Daily Scrum (Standup): The Daily …
The Organisational Psychotherapy Retrospective Are you bored with mundane retrospectives? I know I am. And so are the teams I work with. Scrum Retrospectives By way of example, let’s take a quick look at the Scrum version of retrospectives. Scrum describes Sprint Retrospectives thusly: The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways to …
Some definitions from the field of Organisational Psychotherapy, as laid out in “Memeology: The Way the Work Works Many organisations use the word “process” or “system” to describe the way employees are expected – or even required – to approach specific tasks. Often, however, the way specific tasks actually get done diverges a little or …
Organisational Psychotherapy and Mobbing It struck me the other day that the idea of mobbing (a.k.a. ensemble programming) serves as an excellent vehicle for exploring how an organisation’s collective assumptions and beliefs influence its adoption of new ideas, such as mobbing. Many of the memes appearing in my book “Memeology” have a bearing on the adoption …
Organisational Psychotherapy For the Curious The foundational premise of Organisational Psychotherapy is that every organisation’s effectiveness is a function of its collective assumptions and beliefs. To improve effectiveness, collective assumptions and beliefs must change. To change collective assumptions and beliefs, the assumptions and beliefs of individuals – such as, but not limited to, managers – must …
Organisational Psychotherapy on Slack For those folks who prefer their interactions via Slack, there’s a new Slack workspace for Organisational Psychotherapy. Check it out and join up now. 🙂 – Bob PS. Please let me know it there are any other aspects of my work for which you’d like to see a dedicated Slack workspace. …
The Nine Principles of Organisational Psychotherapy – 2nd Ed. It’s been nearly ten years now since I first penned the original version of the Nine Principle of Organisational Psychotherapy. In the intervening years, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on that post, and this second edition attempts to clarify a few things, mainly in the …
The Path to Organisational Psychotherapy Lots of people ask me a question about Organisational Psychotherapy along the following lines: “Bob, you’re smart, insightful, brilliant, and with decades of experience in software development. How come you’ve ended up in the tiny corner of the world which you call Organisational Psychotherapy?” Which is a very fair question. …
The Design Principles of Organisational Psychotherapy Some ten years ago now, I began to design an alternative approach to helping collaborative knowledge work organisations become more effective. Typical approaches then in use included: Consultancy Improvement and/or change projects (most often, focussed on one or other part of an organisation, such as sales, manufacturing or product …
Fundamentals of Organisational Psychotherapy By popular demand, I’ve put together this post, which sets out some of the fundamentals of Organisational Psychotherapy (n.b. by no means all of them). Note: This is a work in progress: I keenly invite your comments and questions. Fundamental: The Nature of the Problem The Marshall Model proposes that organisational …
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