Stray Lamb - Misalignment in a Socio-technical Structure of an Enterprise when Transiting to Intelligent Products

Products from traditional engineering companies, such as cars and refrigerators, are evolving to become intelligent via combining hardware, software, sensors, and connectivity/networks. In such products, the importance of software increases exponential. Therefore, new software development units are emerging. This may cause misalignment between the traditional parts of the engineering companies and the new emerging software development units. The misalignment concerns both the technical part of the socio-technical structure of the companies, i.e. a conflict between different project management methodologies in the units, and the social part, i.e. the power roles of different unis and coordination between them. Viable System Model (VSM) has been applied to study the nature of misalignment in one such company, a large car manufacturer. This paper reports on the experience obtained during this study. With the help of VSM, misalignment was identified and diagnosed as a “stray lamb” – a pathological archetype related to a new and important unit of the company not being properly incorporated into the rest of the system.