The problem
Why do good people still get stuck between teams?
Most organisations aren’t short of effort, talent or technology. They’re short of connection. Teams work hard, often very hard, but wherever their work meets someone else’s, it depends on informal coordination to hold together.
In more than 50 years of building and improving organisations, including more than seventy as a consultant, Alex has seen the same pattern again and again: most of the delay, rework and frustration happens between teams, not inside them.
How we got here
A management model built for a different kind of work.
The way most organisations are run was designed when work was routine, roles were fixed and most people spent their day inside one department. Work was split into functions, arranged in a hierarchy and controlled through procedure. In that world, silos were a solution. They built expertise and made large volumes of similar work manageable.
Today most of the value is created between functions, not inside them. A customer order moves from sales to operations to finance. A new product needs engineering, marketing and compliance at the same time. A new system changes how five teams work at once.
Organisations are managed vertically, but the work flows horizontally.
“Silos aren’t bad. They’re just incomplete.”
They tell us how to organise people. They say nothing about how to organise the relationships between them.
Where it shows up
The signs are familiar.
- Work waits between teams because no one owns the whole result.
- The same handoff needs chasing and correcting every time.
- Every function hits its targets while the customer’s experience gets worse.
- Meetings multiply, but decisions don’t.
- Everything depends on a few people who “know how to get things done”.
- New systems automate the old confusion instead of removing it.
The hidden cause
Collaboration is treated as a soft skill. It’s a design challenge.
The connections between teams (who needs what, by when, to what standard) are rarely designed.
They grow up informally and rely on unspoken assumptions. They work until someone leaves, priorities change or a new system arrives. Then the same conversations happen again.
An example
When every part is efficient and the whole gets worse.
Frédéric Laloux describes a home-nursing service run for efficiency. Tasks were split by skill level, requests went through a call centre and every visit was timed. Each decision made sense on its own. Patients, though, saw a different nurse each week, and none of them knew their history.
The Dutch organisation Buurtzorg instead gave small neighbourhood teams responsibility for their own patients. By Laloux’s account, both patients and nurses were better served, and fewer care hours were needed overall.
The lesson isn’t about nursing. Sensible decisions made separately can add up to a worse result for everyone.
The usual fixes
Why more effort doesn’t solve it.
Each of the usual fixes can help. None is enough on its own, because none changes how the connections between people and teams are designed.
01
More communication
More meetings and updates, but without shared structure, more talk often means more confusion.
02
Reorganisation
The boundaries move, but the gaps between them stay.
03
New technology
Without agreement on how work should flow, it reproduces the old problems faster.
04
Heroes
It works until they leave, burn out or move on.
What’s needed
Both the will and the way.
People have to want to work together, and no structure succeeds without that. But goodwill needs support: structures that bring the right people together at the right time, and clear agreements about how their work connects. That’s Structured Collaboration.
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