Towards a Framework for Designing a Socio-technical Intervention to Mediate Organisational Learning

The history of socio-technical interventions is intertwined with reports that interventions are successful in the short to medium term but over time organisations revert back to their previous practices. It is often reported that changes in senior management or politics result in an undermining of the legitimacy of the systemic principles used in the intervention and as a result the organisation reorganises the situation according to conventional (Taylorist) principles. This paper works toward the development of a framework to design interventions that mediate organisational learning so that the sustainability of a socio-technical intervention is no longer dependent upon on the presence of specific members of management or the political environment but becomes engrained into the cognition and practices of the organisation.