ThemePeople & Culture
CardCard 60 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Teams & divisions

How teams are composed & different departments

How the organization divides itself into teams, and how those teams relate to each other, is often less obvious than the org chart suggests.

Every organization has a formal structure and an informal one. The formal structure is what appears in the org chart. The informal one is how work actually gets done: which teams collaborate closely, which ones rarely talk, who the connectors are, and where the real decision-making happens. New people need to understand both.

Teams change faster than documentation tends to keep up. People move, responsibilities shift, new teams form around new problems, and old divisions dissolve or merge. A record of the current structure matters, but so does a brief account of how the structure got to where it is, since that context shapes how people behave.

This is also where it is worth capturing the purpose and scope of each team, not just their names, because team names rarely tell anyone what the team is actually for.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

Current structure & scope

Which teams exist, what each is responsible for, and who leads them, so that new people and cross-team collaborators can orient without having to ask the same questions repeatedly.

How teams interact

The regular touchpoints between teams, who coordinates across boundaries, and where handoffs happen, because the interfaces between teams are where the most friction and the most confusion tend to live.

Recent changes & why

How the structure has shifted over time and the reasoning behind significant changes, because people who join after a reorg need context to understand why things are set up the way they are.

Informal connectors

The people who bridge teams and departments in ways the org chart does not show, since their role is rarely captured but their departure is quickly felt.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What does the current team structure look like, and how does it reflect how work actually gets done?
How do teams coordinate across boundaries, and who tends to hold those connections?
Where have there been significant structural changes in the past year or two, and what drove them?
Which team relationships are the smoothest, and which tend to generate friction?
Who are the people who bridge teams and keep things moving across the organization?

Things to notice

Org charts go out of date quickly and are often out of date before they are even published; treat team documentation as something to update whenever there is a structural change, not on a fixed schedule.
Documenting only the formal structure and missing the informal one leaves new people with a map that does not match the territory.
Team scope and purpose often drift over time without being formally updated; a mismatch between a team's nominal role and its actual work creates real confusion.