On strategic discipline vs team autonomy 🧵


Thinking about the tension between the autonomy a team needs for effective and efficient product development, and the coordination of focused action the whole organization needs for the successful execution of its strategy.

The autonomy a team needs is mostly the autonomy to solve the problem they have been assigned in the way that describes the optimum of effective solution, effective delivery and effective fit for the strategic action that was needed in the first place.

In many cases, that optimum endpoint is not reachable by any kind of direct journey, but only by a somewhat meandering repeated iteration of investigation, learning, insight, playing, rebuilding, and shipping.

So, for your organization to execute its strategy effectively, you need to be rigorous from the top down, and through the outer structure, while leaving the spaces contained within the structure flexible and unfinished, to be evolved by the team.

The outer structure, too, must be able to reshape itself deliberately as individual teams learn new things. And the team, too, must be able to change the shape of its space, and even its mission and purpose, in the light of new information.

What I’m describing here is some harmony between collective rigidity and local fluidity—plus the ability for the collective to reconfigure its skeletal structures at short notice.

What this means to me is that organizational design and work design are two critical sides of the same coin. Their most important responsibility is to define the boundaries within which the boundless can happen.

On strategic discipline vs team autonomy

I only yesterday learned of the death of Christopher Alexander, so he was in my thoughts while we visited the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens today. The gardens seemed to pulsate with aliveness.

I took a few photographic notes, which I’m sharing in this short thread.

The kids found details that worked as accent-markers for their attention; my son in particular was fascinated by the idea of designed forms as living systems.

Even the bathroom break was like a visit to a wooden forest shrine. First time I’ve had to photograph the beauty of the inside of a public toilet. 

We left the formal gardens and followed the track through the forest to the shore. It was a brisk spring day and there was a fierce breeze coming in off the Pacific.

We found refuge in the snug little wooden Cliff House, nestled in a crack in the rock above the breakers.


When it was time to head back, we did so reluctantly, lingering over tiny, ordinary, gorgeous scenes, that we would undoubtedly have passed over, had our senses not been so heightened by the walk down.

/end