Post #3528712

2026-05-18 07:14 UTC

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day Team Topologies, the wrong way round Context: Leadership has read Team Topologies. The insights are compelling: stream-aligned teams owning end-to-end delivery, platform teams reducing cognitive load, enabling teams building capability. A reorganisation is planned. Teams are renamed and restructured. The new topology is announced. People find themselves in stream-aligned teams that still wait for approval from the same architects, report to the same managers, and receive priorities from the same product managers who held the backlog before. The platform team is the old infrastructure team with a new name and a mandate to serve internal customers, though nobody agreed on what that means. The enabling team runs workshops that nobody has time to attend. Six months in, the cognitive load has not decreased. Delivery has not improved. Leadership concludes that the teams need to embrace the new model more fully. Another round of communication is planned, and product coaches are hired en masse to fix people. OST explains: Team Topologies describes structural patterns that emerge from healthy organisations. Like DORA, it is a map of what good looks like, not a recipe for getting there. The patterns only function as intended when the teams operating them are genuinely self-managing, owning their work, coordinating among themselves, and making decisions without constant escalation. Imposing the topology from above while leaving the underlying design principle unchanged is a bureaucratic (DP1) move applied to a self-managing (DP2) framework. Stream-aligned teams become delivery units with a new name. Platform teams become service departments, and their internal customer model quietly recreates the same dependency it was meant to dissolve. Goodhart's law applies here as much as it does to DORA: the moment the topology becomes a target, it stops being a good topology. The book is right. The reorganisation missed the point. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #TeamTopologies

Replies (1)

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io 2026-05-19 06:35

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The external verdict Context: The organisation wants an independent assessment of the codebase. An external firm is brought in, given access to the repositories, and asked to produce a report. Sometimes the teams are interviewed individually beforehand. Sometimes they are not involved at all until the findings land. Either way, the result is a document that describes their work from the outside, written by people who were not there when the decisions were made, did not carry the constraints, and will not be there when the changes need to happen. The teams read the report. Some findings are fair. Others miss the context entirely. A few are simply wrong. The usual response is a mix of defensiveness, resignation, and quiet relief that at least some things were not noticed. Nobody feels ownership of the conclusions. The report goes into a folder. Most of it stays there. OST explains: Bringing in external experts to evaluate a team's work is a bureaucratic DP1 move, even when done with good intentions. Control and judgement sit outside the group, and the group receives a verdict rather than participating in an enquiry. The knowledge needed to assess a codebase well is distributed across the people who built it. An external reviewer can spot patterns and bring a comparative perspective, but cannot access the reasoning, the tradeoffs, or the organisational pressures that shaped every decision. Individual interviews are better than no involvement, but they reinforce exactly the individualisation that DP1 already produces, and in teams with existing tensions, they can surface conflicts that the interview format has no mechanism to resolve. What works is treating the review as a collective sense-making exercise. The team leads the process, names what it already knows is wrong, and uses external input as one source of perspective rather than as the source of judgment. In DP2 (self-managing teams), the group owns the quality of its own work. That ownership cannot be outsourced. An external consultant can be a useful mirror and a driver for change. They should never be the judge. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #review

Open ##3528710