Introduction to OST

The frame Fred and Merrelyn Emery built for reading organisations. Most other interventions stall without it.

Open Systems Theory (OST) is an organisational design strategy: a body of knowledge, study, and concepts that helps define better ways of working. Originally developed and published by Professor Fred Emery and Dr Merrelyn Emery, it gives organisations and communities a practical framework, backed by decades of action research, for designing how they work, how they respond to change, and how they create the conditions for sustained engagement and strong outcomes.

Where it came from

OST has evolved over many decades of real-world application. The lineage begins at the Tavistock Institute in London, where Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth studied Yorkshire coal mines that had moved from short-wall hand methods to long-wall mechanised methods. The technical shift was managed competently; productivity collapsed anyway, because the social design had not been redesigned alongside the technology. Trist named what he was looking at "sociotechnical". The finding has held since: the way work is designed determines how people behave inside it, regardless of the technology or the intentions of management.

Fred Emery, an Australian social psychologist, joined the Tavistock in the late 1950s and worked with Trist to extend the sociotechnical frame into a wider theory of how organisations relate to their environments. Their 1965 paper, The Causal Texture of Organisational Environments, is the founding statement of OST. Merrelyn Emery joined the work from the 1970s and has carried it forward since, including a turning-point realisation in 1972–73 that the Search Conference itself needed to be structured on the democratic design principle it was trying to promote, a redesign that fundamentally transformed how the method worked. The first Search Conference had been designed by Fred and run in 1959. The body of work the OOSTKit tools draw on includes the two design principles, the six criteria for productive work, and the two participative methods that put OST into practice: the Search Conference and the Participative Design Workshop.

Why it matters now: the turbulent environment

OST emerged when it did for a reason. From the 1950s onwards, Emery and Trist identified a qualitative shift in the character of the environments organisations inhabit. They described this as a turbulent environment, one in which the ground itself moves.

In earlier, more stable environments, an organisation could adapt by reading its immediate context and adjusting its tactics or strategy. In a turbulent environment, that is no longer sufficient. Past experience becomes an unreliable guide, not because change is faster, but because the nature of the uncertainty has shifted. What catches organisations out is not the speed of change but its discontinuity, the moment when what was true yesterday simply stops being true, with no warning. The nuclear power industry's overnight collapse in public confidence after Three Mile Island in 1979 is one example: one day it was growing, the next you could not sell a plant. Nothing in the gradual trend line predicted the reversal.

In this kind of environment, individual organisations cannot adapt alone. Strategy and planning that worked in more stable conditions are not adequate. What is required is a collective response: people and organisations working together toward shared goals, with structures designed to learn and adapt continuously rather than execute fixed plans. OST provides the framework for understanding that condition and the practical methods for responding to it.

What "open" actually means

An organisation that treats itself as a closed system, one that can be understood and fixed purely by looking inward, will keep solving the wrong problems. The structure inside the organisation shapes behaviour, but so does everything outside it: the economic conditions it operates in, the expectations people bring from their communities, the wider culture that surrounds it. These are not background noise. They are active forces on the system.

What OST calls "open" is the recognition that organisations exist inside an environment, and that the two are in constant interplay. Any design that ignores the environment produces an organisation that is perpetually at odds with the world it is trying to operate in. OST gives practitioners a way to read both together.

The design principles

OST identifies two fundamental ways of organising work, and one important absence of organisation that is often mistaken for a third. Understanding the difference between them is where OST's practical value begins, because the choice is rarely conscious: most organisations simply inherit one or the other, and then spend years wondering why training, culture work, and engagement programmes don't stick.

DP1: What happens when coordination sits above the work

In a DP1 organisation, the people doing the work are not responsible for coordinating it. Decisions travel upward; instructions travel down. Roles are narrow by design, one person, one job, one set of tasks, which means knowledge is fragmented across individuals who rarely see the whole. When something goes wrong, the response is to escalate, wait, or work around the system rather than fix it.

The practical results are familiar: decisions pile up at the top because that's where authority lives; people stop offering ideas because nobody asked; errors get hidden because surfacing them invites blame; managers are perpetually overloaded while the people closest to the problem sit idle. Helping a colleague means doing their job for them, which the incentive structure penalises. The organisation learns slowly, if at all, because learning requires feedback loops that the hierarchy interrupts.

This is the dominant design across the global economy, Taylorism, the assembly line, most bureaucracies, and it is also what representative democracy is built on: coordination delegated upward, to people who then act on behalf of those who delegated it.

DP2: What happens when coordination lives with the people doing the work

In a DP2 organisation, the group doing the work takes collective responsibility for coordinating it. Members develop multiple skills so they can cover for each other, allocate tasks flexibly, and adapt to what the work actually requires on a given day. Nobody has to wait for permission to solve a problem they can see in front of them. Feedback loops are short: outcomes are visible to the people who produced them.

The practical results are also familiar, though less common: problems get solved close to where they arise; knowledge stays in the organisation rather than walking out with departing specialists; people help each other because they share accountability for the outcome; the organisation gets better at its work over time rather than consolidating around fixed routines.

DP2 still has hierarchy, levels still exist in large organisations, but it is a hierarchy of functions, not of dominance. Each level is self-managing within its own domain. What disappears is the right to tell people what to do and how to do it. As Merrelyn Emery put it: "In a DP2 structure, everybody is a manager. Everybody is self-managing."

One practical note on language: the OST tradition avoids the word "team" here, because a team can have a captain or a coach, both of which are DP1 structures. The correct term is group. This is a small distinction that compounds over time.

Laissez-faire: What happens when there is no design principle at all

A confusion almost every practitioner encounters is worth addressing before going further. The assumption that moving away from DP1 (away from hierarchy and external control) means moving toward a culture where nobody manages anything, where people do what they want, where there are no expectations and no accountability. That is not DP2. That is laissez-faire, and the two produce entirely different results.

DP2 is more demanding than DP1, not less. In a DP1 structure, individual accountability is diffuse: you do your assigned tasks, your manager handles coordination, and gaps between roles are someone else's problem. In a DP2 group, the group owns the outcome. There is no manager to escalate to when things get difficult; the group is the coordination mechanism. When something is falling through the cracks, the group notices and fixes it, because there is nobody above them to pass it to. That requires more from people, not less.

In laissez-faire, nobody owns the outcome. Coordination is supposed to emerge but mostly doesn't. People operate as individuals with nominal group membership. The organisation looks flat and autonomous (this is often how it presents itself), but when pressure arrives the hidden hierarchy reasserts itself. The manager who called themselves a coach becomes, in a crisis, the person who makes the call and takes the blame. Between crises, they call themselves a coach again.

This pattern is far more common than is generally acknowledged. A survey of 135 software industry organisations found that 56% were operating in laissez-faire (most of them under names like agile, self-organising teams, or the Spotify model) while only 3% showed a genuine DP2 profile. The laissez-faire organisations performed worse than even failing DP1 organisations. At least DP1 coordinates.

The practical test is simple: when something goes wrong, who decides what to do? If the answer is "whoever is in charge," it is DP1. If the answer is "the group, together," it is DP2. If the answer is "it depends, and it usually ends in argument or someone quietly taking over," it is laissez-faire.

Why the distinction matters

Fred Emery's 1985 reading of the situation: Western civilisation is dedicated to the notion of the second design principle and yet denies it in practice. The professed values (individual dignity, democratic participation, people as ends not means) are DP2 values. The actual structures (bureaucracy, Taylorism, representative democracy) are DP1 structures. OST's project is to close that gap, not as an aspiration but as an operational programme, beginning with the places where people spend most of their working lives.

Six criteria for productive work

Over decades of action research across dozens of countries, the Emerys identified six conditions that, when present, produce sustained motivation, learning, and genuine engagement at work. When they are absent, no amount of leadership training, culture work, or engagement programming compensates; the problems return. The six have now been measured in enough organisations, across enough cultures, that they appear to be a consistent feature of how human beings respond to work, not a product of any particular industry or context.

The first three concern the content of the work itself, and must be optimal for each person: neither too little nor too much. Too little and the work becomes stifling; too much and it becomes overwhelming. The right level varies between people and shifts over time.

• Elbow room. People make real decisions about how their own work gets done. Not micromanaged, not left entirely at sea.
• Continual learning. People set goals and get honest, timely feedback on whether they've been met. They can see themselves getting better.
• Variety. The work has enough range to stay interesting and to call on different capabilities. Not so much that it fragments into chaos.

The second three concern the climate of the workplace. These have no upper limit; there is no such thing as too much of any of them.

• Mutual support and respect. People help each other out without being asked, and can rely on the same in return. Nobody is left isolated when the work gets hard.
• Meaningfulness. The work connects to something that matters beyond the immediate task. People can see the whole product or service they're contributing to, and feel it's worth having in the world.
• A desirable future. The role leads somewhere. People are developing skills and taking on more responsibility over time, not repeating the same tasks indefinitely.

The critical point for practitioners is this: none of these six conditions can be reliably installed through training, coaching, or engagement programmes. They are produced (or destroyed) by the structure of the work itself.

DP1 removes them, one by one. Elbow room disappears when a manager makes the decisions. Continual learning stalls when jobs are simplified and feedback routes to the top. Mutual support erodes when people compete for promotion. Meaningfulness gets lost when nobody sees the whole. A desirable future becomes a management career path that most people can't access.

DP2 creates them, by structure. When a group is collectively responsible for its own coordination, elbow room is built in. When the group owns its outcomes, feedback is direct and real. When people depend on each other rather than competing, mutual support follows naturally.

This is what makes the design principle the lever, not the downstream variables. Run engagement surveys, run leadership programmes, run culture initiatives: they will produce results right up until the moment the structure reasserts itself. Change the design principle, and the culture follows.

" Mutual support and respect is probably the most critical one of the lot. Even in terrible working conditions (hot, dirty, dusty Australian workplaces) workers still score 8–9 for mutual support. "

How OST makes change happen

OST includes two specific processes for organisational redesign, together known as the two-stage model. Both are grounded in a core OST principle: that participation is not just a nice-to-have, but the mechanism by which genuine change takes hold. When people are involved in designing how they work, engagement follows, and so does implementation.

What is often described as "resistance to change" is, in OST's reading, not resistance to change at all. "People love making change. Once you've created your own system, why would you resist it?" What people resist is having change imposed on them: a DP1 act in response to a DP1 problem. Participative methods resolve this structurally, not by persuasion.

The Search Conference

The Search Conference is a strategic planning method that helps an organisation, community, or sector understand its environment and chart a course for the future. Typically two days and two nights, involving 20–35 people with relevant knowledge of the field, every participant is considered equal in standing. The group begins by scanning the wider environment (what is changing in the world?) before moving to the most probable and most desirable futures for the focal system, and then to concrete action plans.

The event is itself designed on DP2. Participants do the work in small groups; outputs belong to the plenary; the person managing the event stays completely out of the content. Four conditions are engineered into the design (openness, a mutually shared field, basic psychological similarity, and trust) that together make collective thinking possible. A Search Conference run on DP1 principles produces a different kind of event: managed, directed, and considerably less powerful.

The Participative Design Workshop

The Participative Design Workshop (PDW) is the paired method for changing an organisation's structure from DP1 to DP2. Where the Search Conference does strategic planning, the PDW does design. Typically run in groups of 24–36 people, participants first score their current work against the six criteria, surfacing the lived evidence of what isn't working, then design a new structure for how they will operate.

The PDW is, fundamentally, a knowledge-transfer exercise. External facilitators are training wheels. The aim is for the organisation to absorb the capability to run its own redesigns going forward: to understand the design principles well enough to evolve its own structures as conditions change. Because the people doing the work design the work, the result is organisations that are genuinely more responsive, more adaptive, and more engaging to be part of. And because the structural change is real (not cosmetic), the improvements in motivation and performance have somewhere to land.

A living body of knowledge

OST is not a fixed set of tools. It is a framework that has been tested, refined, and extended through more than six decades of real-world application across industries, cultures, and scales: from single workplace teams to national planning programmes involving tens of thousands of people.

The core of it is simple: the way work is designed determines what people are capable of. Get the design principle right, and the culture, the engagement, and the outcomes follow. Get it wrong, and no amount of training, leadership development, or culture work will compensate.

That is the argument. The evidence for it is extensive, and the methods for acting on it are practical, tested, and available.