This article shows, in many examples, Goodheart’s law and Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. You can’t make a hierarchical organization achieve outcomes people outside of the organization see as valuable through incentives because they cause side effects that will be counter-productive as soon as they move your organization out of its current state.
The article says it’s impossible to solve this problem. But I think the real problem is hierarchical organizations. They act as extractive institutions, removing value from people until those people realize what has become of them and then become parasites on the organizations.
The way out was provided by the framers of agile. I’m not talking about modern, consultant driven agile that uses the language of scrum to give organizations renewed extractive power. I’m talking the agile that provides value through close customer collaboration. That provides people inside the organization and outside the ability to influence each other. Closing the feedback loop eliminates disconnects and maps problems to solutions.
Most (all?) organizations are hierarchical above a certain size. I don't think agile ever addressed the resulting problems; some of it was designed for smaller teams. For an "agile" take on organizations of a medium double digit size and up, see SAFe - there's nothing quite like it
The article says it’s impossible to solve this problem. But I think the real problem is hierarchical organizations. They act as extractive institutions, removing value from people until those people realize what has become of them and then become parasites on the organizations.
The way out was provided by the framers of agile. I’m not talking about modern, consultant driven agile that uses the language of scrum to give organizations renewed extractive power. I’m talking the agile that provides value through close customer collaboration. That provides people inside the organization and outside the ability to influence each other. Closing the feedback loop eliminates disconnects and maps problems to solutions.