# The Principles of Sociotechnical Design

*Cherns · Culture & Context · Human Relations · 1976 · Paywalled*

Cherns takes the sociotechnical-systems tradition that grew out of Trist and Bamforth's coal-mining studies and distils it into a set of design principles, an attempt to say concretely how one designs work so that the social and the technical are optimised together rather than one being sacrificed to the other. The principles are the paper's substance and several of them read, decades on, like the intellectual ancestry of psychological safety and sharp-end voice. Minimal critical specification says designers should specify no more than is strictly necessary and leave the how to the people doing the work, preserving their discretion; the sociotechnical criterion says variances should be controlled as close as possible to their point of origin, by those who first encounter them, rather than exported up the hierarchy; the information-flow principle says information should be directed to where it is needed for action, not merely routed upward for control; and boundary location warns against drawing organisational boundaries in ways that block the sharing of knowledge and experience. Rounding these out are compatibility (a participative end state needs a participative design process), multifunctionality (build redundancy into what people can do, not just into parts), support congruence (reward and support systems must reinforce the behaviour the design intends), the incorporation of human values as a design objective, and incompletion (design is never finished; it is a continuing process). For a corpus about voice and organisational design, Cherns is the systems-design counterpart to the interpersonal account: it argues, on efficiency and reliability grounds rather than moral ones, for pushing control, information and discretion toward the sharp end, which is precisely the structural condition under which speaking up becomes both possible and consequential. Its limits are those of a principles paper: it prescribes at the level of design philosophy and leaves the hard particulars of any given implementation open. (Text drawn from the 1976 Human Relations paper, 29(8), pp. 783-792.)

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## Connected concepts (3)

- [Out of the Crisis](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/deming-1986.md) (paper)
- [Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/trist-bamforth-1951.md) (paper)
- [Sociotechnical Theory](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/sociotechnical-theory.md)