What evidence would justify changing your teams?
Organisational changes should be treated as hypotheses informed by evidence, rather than automatically adopting a fashionable target structure.
Reorganisations are usually announced with a diagram of the destination. They are much less often accompanied by a description of the problem, the evidence that it exists, or how anyone will know when it has been solved.
A target structure is a hypothesis. It deserves to be treated like one.
Organisational patterns travel fast. A pattern language such as Team Topologies gives people a shared vocabulary for team types and interaction modes, and that vocabulary is genuinely useful. The trouble starts when a vocabulary becomes a target: when the goal is to have stream-aligned teams and a platform team because that is what good organisations have, rather than because specific observed problems point towards that shape.
The alternative is to treat structural change the way a careful engineer treats any other intervention in a complex system. Start with observations: what is actually happening, measured or witnessed, rather than reported second-hand. Look for signals, the recurring symptoms that suggest something structural is going on, such as work that always waits in the same place or a team that is involved in every decision. Form a view about the constraint responsible. Then describe the candidate outcomes you would expect to see if the constraint were relieved, and how you would recognise them.
Written down, this becomes a Flow Decision Record: a short, structured note of why a change is being made, what evidence prompted it, what is expected to happen and how it will be assessed. It is modelled on the architecture decision records many engineering teams already keep, and it serves a similar purpose. It makes the reasoning available to the people affected, and it makes the decision revisitable when the evidence comes in.
Why this is worth the effort
Reorganisations are expensive. They cost attention, relationships, context and months of reduced flow while people learn new boundaries. A change made on the strength of a diagram has to earn back that cost on faith. A change made on the strength of evidence can be evaluated, adjusted or reversed, and the organisation learns something either way.
The question is not whether your teams should change. Most teams should, eventually. The question is what you would need to see to be confident that a particular change is the right one, and whether you have seen it yet.
What would you expect to see within three months if the change were working — and what would make you reverse it?
Being willing to name a reversal condition is a good test of whether a change is a hypothesis or a decision already made.
Rich Allen
Rich Allen is a UK-based sociotechnical architecture consultant. He helps organisations improve the flow of value through people, teams, technology and organisational structure. He is the author of User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters, a long-standing Team Topologies Valued Practitioner and the creator of the Fast Flow Toolkit.
He works with engineering and product leaders to make the flow of work visible and to change team boundaries on evidence. Flow Awareness Sessions are a low-commitment place to start.
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Sometimes an outside perspective helps make a difficult organisational problem clearer. If one of these questions resonates, I’d be happy to explore it with you.