Leadership – Manage Complexity

17/09/202517/09/2025

Organizational goal mapping

Setting goals is hard, and it is even harder to reach them. As individuals, we struggle to do so, despite our efforts being directed to achieve a few things for ourselves.

As organizations, it becomes infinitely more complicated than this. There are goals ranging from corporate objectives to individual targets, with the intention to improve balance, sales, productivity, technology, and skills, among others. These goals are all expected to bring the organisation forward cohesively.

In every organization, you see the evidence of how hard this is, because members

feel doubt about where they need to go to be successful or
experience that the goals lead the organization in what they perceive to be the wrong direction, or
experience that they can only influence goals very indirectly from their position, or
find themselves in conflict with other parts of the organization, etc.

These examples all lead to hesitation that reduces the joined force of the organization. Imagine if we had a way to avoid this waste.

25/08/202517/09/2025

What ‘Team Topologies’ becomes with a user, rather than systems, focus

I recently wrote an article¹ about a way to consistently decompose your development organization into user-focused teams to optimize value creation. Despite numerous previous attempts, I felt that no one had adequately addressed how to achieve this, even though there is general agreement that most teams should be product or stream-aligned, at a ratio of 6:1 to 9:1 compared to other team types. If you’re also frustrated by the lack of guidance on how to decompose your organization, I suggest you read my first article on this topic.

While I wrote that article, I realized that I had more to contribute to the, in many ways, a great book on team topologies by Skelton & Pais (S&P)², as well as other work in this area.

In this article, I’ll share experiences that can clarify and extend the understanding of enabling, platform, and complicated-subsystem teams.

In my experience, achieving the recommended ratio of product teams in established IT organizations is quite challenging. As a result, it’s difficult to deliver the level of value to users that would be possible with a complete shift towards a user-first mindset.

25/08/202525/08/2025

Get your Development Teams right using Value Stream Decomposition

In product development, we have learned that autonomous cross-functional teams focusing on users create the most value. The methods we use have undergone significant development over the last three decades, and it is well described how a single team should work to achieve great results; however, it has proven not to be easy or straightforward. On the contrary, many organizations are struggling to maximize value creation. Especially at scale, where many teams work on the same offerings, previous approaches have proved insufficient.

In this article, I will share how a different perspective on team structure design can overcome the typical barriers to optimizing value creation through the right team topology.

I will

challenge your beliefs on how your development organization creates most value for you and your customers.
teach you how to design a team structure optimized for value creation,
possibly also surprise you how this approach also simplifies the way the organization works.

05/03/202505/03/2025

Organizational accountability with highly autonomous teams

Dear leader,

You’re always accountable for what your part of the organization does.

This is manifested by law for top management, and in most organizations, this expectation ripples down the leader hierarchy. You are held accountable by the leader above you, and you work to keep your employees accountable to the organization. You wish to know the person you can go to when things are not going according to plan.

Western culture deeply ingrains a focus on individual accountability. Even though we know that few business successes have been achieved by individuals, we tend to celebrate the individual at the top of the organization. When things go wrong, we tend to look for an individual who made a mistake further down the ladder.

We know that it is too simplistic. Any business challenge is a complex combination of market, customers, users, technologies, etc., that all continuously develops. Business success is the sum of many decisions made by accountable people throughout the organization daily.

Organizations worldwide have successfully implemented autonomous cross-functional teams to achieve the needed business agility. Using the diverse skill sets in the team, they cope with the complexity of the multiple dimensions and iterate toward optimal solutions for the customers.

This, however, definitively breaks the illusion of a simple chain of single accountability. At the organization’s lowest level, every decision results from collaboration between a diverse group of people, who collectively balance the many concerns that each represents.

Many leaders experience a glass floor between them and these autonomous teams. They find it hard to enforce accountability like they did before. I previously wrote a little piece³ about this frustration and gave some examples of how team members are not only focussing on their individual success but also can contribute to the greater good of the organization.

In this article, I aim to illustrate how you as a leader can organize and work with autonomous cross-functional teams and secure accountability not only to local success but also to the organization as a whole. Cross-organizational accountability is necessary if you want customers/users to have a cohesive experience and if you want higher productivity through, e.g., standardization and reuse.