Hi Jurgen, what happened to Harmony Pattern Language? Has the project (and website) been discontinued or moved or integrated into something else? I really enjoyed some of the ideas.
There’s a compelling ambition here, but the idea of “starting from scratch” doesn’t hold up in real systems. Humans don’t reset. They carry pattern-memory, identity, power dynamics, and nervous-system residue into every redesign—especially when AI enters the mix.
The Harmony model adds new structural language, but it still treats the emotional field as an afterthought. That’s the actual operating system. AI doesn’t just change workload; it changes meaning, status, and belonging. Cognitive load matters, but somatic load is where the resistance shows up.
If we’re serious about organizational design in the age of AI, we have to include power shifts, transitional grief, and the parts of the system that need to die, not just be renamed. Without that, any model risks being another elegant diagram sitting on top of unresolved human realities.
Thanks, I agree. But following Hofstadter's Law, no model can capture all problems. What I described in this post was not intended to address somatic load. Indeed, we need something else for that.
I like what you bring, AI need to be seen as an organizational actor. However, from an Org Topologies point of view (read it well, Org Topologies, not Team Topologies), without explicit mandate design and topology logic tied to strategic outcomes, Harmony will be a comprehensive classification system rather than a deliberate strategy-to-structure method.
In the AI era, the question is, I think, not just which functions AI occupies, but how AI changes the feasible breadth of work and skills mandates, and therefore which Org Topology an organization can and should sustain.
Hi Jurgen, what happened to Harmony Pattern Language? Has the project (and website) been discontinued or moved or integrated into something else? I really enjoyed some of the ideas.
Thanks! It got zero traction. Experiment failed. 🤷🏻
I may try another approach later.
There’s a compelling ambition here, but the idea of “starting from scratch” doesn’t hold up in real systems. Humans don’t reset. They carry pattern-memory, identity, power dynamics, and nervous-system residue into every redesign—especially when AI enters the mix.
The Harmony model adds new structural language, but it still treats the emotional field as an afterthought. That’s the actual operating system. AI doesn’t just change workload; it changes meaning, status, and belonging. Cognitive load matters, but somatic load is where the resistance shows up.
If we’re serious about organizational design in the age of AI, we have to include power shifts, transitional grief, and the parts of the system that need to die, not just be renamed. Without that, any model risks being another elegant diagram sitting on top of unresolved human realities.
Curious where you take it from here.
Thanks, I agree. But following Hofstadter's Law, no model can capture all problems. What I described in this post was not intended to address somatic load. Indeed, we need something else for that.
I like what you bring, AI need to be seen as an organizational actor. However, from an Org Topologies point of view (read it well, Org Topologies, not Team Topologies), without explicit mandate design and topology logic tied to strategic outcomes, Harmony will be a comprehensive classification system rather than a deliberate strategy-to-structure method.
In the AI era, the question is, I think, not just which functions AI occupies, but how AI changes the feasible breadth of work and skills mandates, and therefore which Org Topology an organization can and should sustain.