Forgot to operationalise

Description

  • You somehow expect multiple people in (hopefully) multiple departments to spontaneously self-organise into a rube goldberg machine that gets the product marketed, sold, billed, paid for, supported…

Disproof

  • Some documents detailing what happens when integration tests succeed

Consequences

  • In addition to the usual consequences (you die), it also has a wonderful mid-term effect of destroying goodwill across the company as one team inevitably pays for another team's fuckups
  • Or, some teams might actually try to spontaneously self-organise in response to pain
    • The problem is that like neurons, teams that fire together wire together and this might not be the best thing
    • Evolution may cobble together something that works but lord will it be inefficient and have nasty externalities
    • Be inefficient enough and someone else eats your lunch

Causes

  • Usually results when the founding team could handle everything until it couldn’t, then either hired people and prayed, or just sucked at organisational design
  • Can also crop up in orgs with multiple operational teams, no clear leader and a lot of feudalism
  • This is effectively a superset of 'hope as a strategy' that relies on multiple departments to remember to both do their thing and communicate their thing, assuming they even have enough information to do so in the first place

Approaches

  • If you’ve not already mapped everything out, start there. Then get everyone on board