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
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