This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: Organizations and Garbage Collection Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

Many stable, complex systems produce some sort of garbage - waste material. If allowed to accumulate, waste material interferes with the function of such systems. So systems of this sort tend to have provisions for garbage collection and removal.

I propose that an organization's waste material consists in large part of constraints. Contraints arise from procedures, rules, habits, norms, definitions, titles, etc. These are initially thought up to make things more regular, less chaotic, and therefore easier to arrange in effective ways. With time, and as new rules (etc.) pile up and interact, their effectiveness lapses. Only the rigidity remains.

A colleague of mine wants to install a Wiki for a work group, but he is not allowed to install anything on a server that's not on a corporate list of approved software. There is one thing remotely like a Wiki, that costs a few thousand euros a year, that he was told they'd be glad to install for him if he but asked. Nor can he just install a wiki on a local workstation - that's also locked down by corporate policy.

One sanitation system consists of collective purpose - people decide that there are some results they value more than they value the stale constraints they operate under, and negotiate the constraints away.

(I'd been thinking about this topic for a while, and where does it pop up but on the AYE conference wiki. Kind of spooky - the conference that reads your mind.)