Organizations implicitly optimise to avoid changing existing power structures, and redefine any new practice to fit the status quo.
Larman's laws are unusually cynical and unusually predictive: any new method is redefined to leave existing roles and power intact, and consultants are hired to certify that the redefinition counts.
In practice
- An organisation adopts a new delivery method and appoints its existing managers to run it, and the method now describes what they already did.
- A restructure that would have removed two directorates arrives as a restructure that renames them.