DP2 Briefing

The structural alternative five decades of fieldwork documented. Why it is repeatedly misread, and what designing for it involves.

Open Systems Theory distinguishes two underlying ways of organising work. These are called genotypical design principles. They describe where coordination authority sits inside an organisation, and the choice between them shapes almost everything that follows. The first, Design Principle 1, locates coordination above the work and is the dominant design across the global economy. This briefing turns to the second, Design Principle 2.

What DP2 is

Design Principle 2 locates responsibility for coordination and control with the people doing the work. The mechanism that makes this possible is redundancy of function: each person carries more skills than they are using at any one moment, so the group can flexibly cover whatever the work requires. The redundancy is built into the people rather than added between them.

Two consequences follow. First, the work does not have to be specified narrowly, because the people doing it are not interchangeable parts; they are differently skilled members of a group whose collective capability covers the work. Second, coordination is possible from inside the group itself, because the people doing the work can see what the work needs.

That is the move. Once coordination is located inside the work, the rest of DP2 follows: shared accountability for an outcome, distributed decision-making, multiskilling, and a different role for the management above the group. Management's role changes from directing the work to securing the conditions under which the group can do it.

The formal test for whether a structure is DP2 or DP1 is precise. Ask where responsibility for coordination and control is located. If the answer is "with the people doing the work", the structure is DP2. If the answer is "with someone above the people doing the work", the structure is DP1. The test cuts through most of the vocabulary that surrounds these conversations: autonomy, empowerment, self-managing teams, flat organisations. The vocabulary may point towards DP2 while the structure remains DP1. The test does not.

What DP2 can look like in practice

DP2 is a design principle, not a prescribed form. The principle is singular, coordination authority located with the people doing the work, but how that is expressed depends entirely on the nature of the work. The resulting structures can look very different from one another. Two parts of the same organisation may be unrecognisable as sharing a design principle, and that is not a contradiction.

Three cases are worth working through because each addresses a common objection. They are illustrative, not exhaustive.

The multi-skilled group is the most straightforward expression. Members are cross-trained across the tasks of the group. The skills matrix shows varying levels of competence, but all members carry more capacity than they require at any moment. The group allocates work internally, coordinates without external direction, and holds collective responsibility for its goals. This works wherever tasks can be learned across the membership.

The specialist coordination group addresses the objection that DP2 cannot handle deep specialism (where roles require extended professional training or technical expertise that cannot reasonably be distributed). It can. Each specialist retains control of their function; what changes is the coordination obligation. Collectively, the group is responsible for meeting shared goals, and that obligation is as binding as the individual functional one. Formal arrangements should carry both. The senior role in this configuration is primarily boundary-spanning (bringing information in from the environment, representing the group outward), with direct intervention reserved for two circumstances: where the group is not cooperating to meet its goals, or where the goals themselves have been overtaken by a change in conditions.

The project team addresses the objection that DP2 cannot handle highly variable work where fixed group composition is neither possible nor useful. In organisations where the predominant work unit is the project (varying in duration, specialist requirement, and size), the group takes a fluid form. Staff work across multiple projects simultaneously, with time allocation shifting as demands change. When a decision is required, those available convene and that meeting acts as the decision-maker. This form is particularly applicable in research, professional services, and knowledge-intensive environments.

These three cases span a wide range of working contexts. Many others exist. The test in every case is the same: is coordination authority located with the people doing the work? If it is, the structure is DP2. What it looks like beyond that is a function of the work, not of the design principle.

How to recognise it

DP2 is easier to mistake for DP1 with good intentions than to recognise on its own terms. Two practitioner mistakes recur. The first is reading DP2 as flat. DP2 organisations have hierarchy. The hierarchy is doing different work: it sets strategy, allocates resources, and develops the people in the groups, without directing the moment-to-moment coordination of the work. Levels remain. What they lose is the authority to instruct downward on content and method. Change can be initiated at any level and is negotiated up and down the structure. This is a hierarchy of functions, not a hierarchy of dominance.

The second mistake is reading DP2 as leaderless. DP2 groups have leadership. It is distributed and specific to the situation, with different members leading the customer call, the safety check, the learning. What DP2 removes is the permanent right of one person to direct others, not the function of leadership.

Look for: groups responsible for an outcome rather than individuals responsible for tasks; collective decisions about how the work is allocated; pay and recognition tied to the group's capability and contribution rather than to individual position; promotion paths that allow people to grow inside the work, not only out of it.

One further marker: in a DP2 structure, information must be open. The group cannot coordinate on partial or withheld information. Performance data, financial data, and salary information all flow freely up, down, and across the organisation. Information asymmetry is actively corrosive in DP2. If information is withheld as a matter of practice, the structure reverts.

The six criteria as the test

Six conditions determine whether people experience their work as worth doing. The first three concern the content of the job: adequate elbow room, continual learning, and an optimal level of variety. The next three concern the social climate of the work: mutual respect and support, meaningfulness, and a desirable future. Together they are the practitioner's diagnostic for whether a DP2 design is producing the conditions it is designed to produce.

The first three are calibrated per person and are optimal rather than maximal. Elbow room is the right amount of decision-making latitude for the individual: too little produces helplessness, too much produces overload. Because the group allocates work internally, it can accommodate members who prefer more routine work alongside those who want more responsibility. The structure absorbs the variation that a DP1 structure would have to manage from above.

DP2 produces all six conditions structurally rather than by managerial effort. Elbow room is there because the group decides how the work is allocated. Continual learning is there because multiskilling is required for the group to function. Mutual respect is there because the group depends on its members to cooperate around shared work. Meaningfulness is there because the group owns a whole outcome rather than a fragment of one. A desirable future is there because growth happens inside the work: through skills acquisition, not through hierarchical advancement.

This has a direct implication for pay. In DP2, hierarchical promotion is no longer the primary career path. The replacement is skills-based pay: compensation attaches to the skills and knowledge a person holds and has demonstrated. The skills matrix the group uses to manage its own work allocation also functions as the pay framework. This is a structural requirement, not a design option, and it needs to be settled by formal agreement before any redesign work proceeds.

What the design produces in the people inside it

Four conditions become available to people in DP2 organisations that are structurally unavailable in DP1. The first is belonging: the experience of being interdependent with others on shared work, of mattering to a group that matters to you. The second is contribution: the sense that what you do is making the whole healthier than it would be without it. The third is humanity: people held above the structures and outputs they serve, rather than the other way round. The fourth is beauty: work that is worth doing for the quality of the doing, not only for the outcome it produces.

These are not values to aspire to or cultural targets. They are the conditions under which human beings are most able to contribute. DP2 produces them as structural outputs. DP1 suppresses them as structural outputs. The case for DP2 is not that it is more humane; it is that the conditions DP1 suppresses are the conditions human contribution depends on.

Designing for it: Search Conference and Participative Design Workshop

Two methods sit at the centre of OST practice.

The Search Conference is a participative planning method. A representative cross-section of the system spends two to three days together, working through the environmental conditions the system operates in, the most desirable future for it, and the actions required to move towards that future. Everybody works on every question. The output is a shared picture of the environment and an agreed set of actions the participants themselves will carry forward.

The Participative Design Workshop is the method for redesigning the work itself. Groups of people who do the work map their current arrangement against the six criteria, identify where the design is suppressing the conditions of productive work, and redesign the structure around themselves. The output is not a recommended structure; it is a new structure the group already knows how to operate.

Group composition in a PDW follows structural rules. The minimum working group size is four people. The typical upper range is twelve to fifteen. Beyond this, the response is to form multiple groups, each with a whole task. Each group must be able to own its goals and account for its outcomes.

Misreadings most likely to defeat it

DP2 is misread in four predictable directions, and each misreading defeats the design.

The first treats DP2 as the removal of structure: a loosening of control rather than a relocation of coordination authority. The result is a structure that looks like DP2 on paper while leaving the actual locus of coordination unchanged.

The second treats DP2 as a transformation that begins with the people: develop the leaders, build the culture, equip the workforce, and then the structure can change. The sequence runs the other way: change the conditions, and the people respond to the new conditions. Investing in personal development without changing the structure produces better-resourced individuals operating inside a DP1 structure.

The third treats DP2 as universal. DP1 remains appropriate in specific conditions: where skills are scarce and tasks are narrow, where the pace of environmental change is slow enough that central coordination is adequate. The argument for DP2 is not that it is always superior; it is that it is superior under the conditions that now predominate in most complex working environments.

The fourth is linguistic. The contemporary vocabulary of "self-managing teams" and "team autonomy" sounds like DP2 and frequently is not. A team can have a captain. A team can have a coach. Both are DP1 roles. The precise term is group, bounded by shared work and shared accountability, not by a captain's authority.

What to do as a practitioner

Three moves are useful when DP2 is the design the work needs.

Start from the work, not from the organisation. Identify the specific functions where DP1 is no longer carrying the work. The conversation with the sponsor is sharper when it is about specific functions and specific failures than when it is about whole-organisation transformation.

Design with the people who will live in the design. The capability for self-management is built in the act of designing the structure. Designing it for the group and implementing it on them produces a structure they did not author and cannot operate. The act of redesign is part of the transition, not a precursor to it.

Hold the structural frame against the moral frame. The case for DP2 is analytical, not moral. Under turbulent conditions, with complex and contextual work, DP2 is what works. The argument lands more cleanly when grounded in the conditions of the work than in what kind of organisation we should want to be.

Sixty years of fieldwork, from the shop floor experiments of the 1960s through to the organisations implementing the design principle today, points to a consistent finding. When the conditions of productive work are structurally present, people produce, and the design that produces those conditions is DP2. The design is choosable. The diagnosis comes first.