Kill It with Fire

Conway’s law is ultimately about communication and incentives. The incentive side can be covered by giving people a pathway to prestige and career advancement that complements the modernization effort. The only way to design communication pathways is actually to give people something to communicate about. In each case, we allow the vision for the new organization to reveal itself by designing structures that encourage new communication pathways to form in response to our modernization challenges. As the work continues, those communication pathways begin to solidify, and we can begin documentation and formalizing new teams or roles. In this way, we sidestep the anxiety of reorganizing. The workers determine where they belong based on how they adapt to problems; workers typically left out are given time and space to learn new skills or prove themselves in different roles, and by the time the new organization structure is ratified by leadership, everyone already has been working that way for a couple months.