Organizational anti-patterns

I was link hopping my way around Wikipedia.org recently when I came across the article for “Anti-Pattern“.

I was familiar with the idea of design patterns in the context of software development and I knew them to be reusable approaches to solve common problems. They are  not necessarily the exact answer to your problem, it’s just a template that you start with and adapt to suit. So rather than starting from scratch, you get a head start by using a proven approach that has worked well in the past.

If you are not a developer don’t bother looking these up because they are quite boring and have names like “the adaptor” or” the bridge”. The problems they  are solving are common programming issues not day to day human problems.

Meeting nieuwe leden by Voka - Kamer van Koophandel Limburg, on Flickr

So it follows that an anti-pattern is the opposite of a pattern or as wikipedia says “Some repeated pattern of action, process or structure that initially appears to be beneficial, but ultimately produces more bad consequences than beneficial results”. The key thing here is that anti-patterns are not obviously “bad” at the start. They seem just as good as anything else but they have been shown to end up doing more harm than good despite seeming like workable solutions to begin with.

Now I am fine with this definition but here is the thing about the wikipedia article for anti-pattern: While the examples given for patterns are rather abstract, the examples given for anti-patterns are of a very human scale that is easy to relate to. The list of recognised anti-patterns kicked off with examples around organisational behaviours including

• Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
• Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
• Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
• Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
• Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
• Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
• Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
• Stovepipe: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organisational communication
• Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component^[4]

Now, being wikipedia you need to take this with a grain of salt and I am not sure these are true anti-patterns. Even so these examples had a huge impact on me, not because I can cite recent personal experience of most these but because of the idea that these can be grouped together to form a kind of organisational playbook. God I would love one of those.  I wonder what the good organisational patterns would look like?

There is only one good organisational pattern that I can think of right now and that is the 3 horizon model suggested in The Alchemy of Growth. I would buy a book that sets out these ideas in the same way as software pattens are used in software engineering.