What Makes Team Topologies Humane?

Creating human-centric workplaces that encourage mastery, autonomy, and purpose

Team Topologies defines team structures, team interactions, and team behaviour styles that are intended to create the conditions for value to flow more quickly through an organisation and to the customer whilst creating a humane experience for the participants involved.

See the Team Topologies website and buy the book from your favourite outlet - it’s a concise read with practical examples of applying team design to the challenge of delivering software quickly and effectively.

The thing that drew me to Team Topologies a few years ago was its emphasis on engineering as a sociotechnical pursuit. The authors of Team Topologies, Mathew Skelton and Manuel Pais, demonstrate a clear and deliberate aim to nurture humane working environments in software engineering environments and consider the social, and psychological aspects of the human experience of engineering throughout their book, published by IT Revolution in 2019.

Last week I attended the Team Topologies Fast Flow Conference in London and it was great to be in the company of so many people who ‘get’ that humans need structures and conditions in which they can thrive. This was followed by my participation on the panel at a gathering of engineering leaders at OxLiT (Oxford Leaders in Technology) where we were answering questions about the Team Topologies framework - and I couldn’t help noticing the nodding heads whenever I mentioned the importance of engineering culture and humane workplaces.

The Ox-Lit Team Topologies event, 12th September 2024 organised by HumanD Talent

At Human-Centric Engineering, we see Team Topologies as a humane way to deal with the difficult problem of how to organise teams for optimal performance. Author Matthew Skelton often describes a humane approach as one that emphasises mastery, autonomy, and purpose in engineering teams. This aligns well with our own approach to assessing the conditions for engineer thriving via our open-sourced Engineering Culture Index.

In this article I’m using the frame of Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose, the contributors to intrinsic motivation as defined by self-determination theory, to describe and evaluate the underlying humane nature of Team Topologies.

Self-determination theory was popularised by Daniel Pink in his book, Drive, based on earlier research into intrinsic motivation by Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan. Deci and Ryan’s work distinguishes between autonomous motivation and controlled motivation. Autonomous motivation is when you feel a full sense of willingness, volition and choice in the activity done with a sense of interest, enjoyment, and value. Controlled motivation is when you are doing something to get a reward or avoid a threat or punishment - where you are feeling pressured, obliged or demanded to do it. Mastery, autonomy and purpose are defined by Deci and Ryan as universal human needs - when these intrinsic needs are met, people will be autonomously motivated in a way and positive consequences will follow.

We all know the distinction between intrinsic/autonomous and extrinsic/controlled motivation - compare the productivity buzz from coding up your own app over a weekend to being told by your boss to implement a short-term ‘fix’ that you know will become a ticking timebomb.

Mastery

In engineering terms, we define mastery in terms of craftsmanship, professionalism, learning and creativity. Mastery is both care and quality in engineering and continual growth as teams and individuals.

“The human individual is equipped to learn and go on learning prodigiously from birth to death, and this is precisely what sets him or her apart from all other known forms of life.”

 - George Leonard, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

If you’re interested in understanding mastery, I’ve written a comprehensive summary of George Leonbard’s Mastery.

Team Topologies can contribute to a sense of mastery in the following ways:

• Clearer team boundaries and the management of cognitive load inherent in the Team Topologies approach creates the space for deep focused work and the emergence of mastery.

• Platform teams and Complicated Subsystem teams are designed to reduce the load on Stream-aligned teams whilst also providing opportunities for specialisation and focus within each team type. 

• Enabling teams can be used to support continuous learning and growth.

• Stream-aligned teams are organisational sensing organisms, using a faster flow of feedback and closer customer proximity for adaptive learning.

• Platform teams can help define and support standards for professionalism.

• The behaviours and expectations from the Team Topologies ‘Collaboration’ mode create the space for creativity, discovery and the cross-pollination of ideas.

• Stream-aligned teams are outcome-oriented rather than activity-oriented. Focusing on the outcome of delivering value can imbue engineering work with a sense of caring for craftsmanship and quality.

The Team Topologies framework not only facilitates mastery through its structured approach to team organisation but may also help to cultivate an environment where mastery can emerge organically. By optimising cognitive load, encouraging specialisation, and fostering appropriate and clear inter-team dynamics, Team Topologies can be helpful in creating a fertile ground for engineering excellence. This is in stark contrast to the oft-times ad-hoc, top-down, and inflexible approaches which are commonplace in software engineering.

The Team Topologies approach recognises that mastery is not just an individual pursuit but can be a collective endeavour, where the synergy between different team types and interaction modes can make the whole greater than the individual parts. The framework's emphasis on adaptability and customer-centric value flow ensures that the pursuit of mastery remains aligned with ever-changing real-world needs, driving not just technical excellence but also business value.

Autonomy

We define autonomy in terms of self-directed teams and individuals collaborating effectively, where they have appropriate skills and access to the right contextual information, tools, and infrastructure for good sensemaking and agency over local decisions. The foundation for autonomous teams is a structure which allows for the organic development of trust, dependability, and psychological safety among team members. 

“Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”

 - L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

Team Topologies can contribute to autonomy in the following ways:

• Teams are designed to be loosely coupled with high internal cohesion, where well-defined APIs between teams define clear expectations around inter-team dynamics. This creates autonomy by design in contrast to common team operating models where complex inter-team dependencies tend to hinder the autonomy of teams. Each team type has a clear purpose and scope, reducing confusion and overlap.

• Long-lived and stable teams, as advocated for by Team Topologies, create the conditions for the development of trust, dependability and psychological safety. 

• Active ownership, or ’Continual Stewardship’ as Matthew Skelton is currently promoting, where teams have clearly defined domains of stewardship, means that teams know which areas of the system they are responsible and accountable for caring for.

• Enabling Teams help to make Stream-aligned teams self-sufficient.

• Platform teams in the Team Topologies model provide internal services that other teams can leverage. This approach ensures that stream-aligned teams have access to the right tools, environments, and automation to become self-serving and work effectively.

• The Stream-aligned team type with a team-first attitude inherently promotes autonomy, empowerment, and ownership. Teams should have the agency to make local decisions and self-organise around a fast flow of value delivery.

Compared with more prescriptive solution approaches, Team Topologies is generative in its nature, engaging people in autonomously co-creating solutions so they are invested in the emergent outcomes.

Image from  Flow Engineering by Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis,  contrasting prescriptive methodologies to generative approaches.

By structuring teams with clear boundaries, well-defined purposes, and intentional interaction modes, Team Topologies offers a framework that intentionally enhances team and individual autonomy by design.

This approach not only empowers teams to make informed local decisions but also fosters a culture of trust, accountability, and continuous improvement. The framework's emphasis on long-lived teams, clear domains of stewardship, and self-sufficiency through enabling and platform teams reinforces team autonomy. 

I would argue that Team Topologies alone is insufficient for creating an autonomous culture. For Team Topologies to be adopted in a ‘command and control’ or bureaucratic organisational structures, it may require a significant change in organisational culture to be effective. Unfortunately, such organisations are hard to turn around as an inbuilt homeostasis makes them resistant to cultural changes.

Purpose

At Human-Centric Engineering we see purpose as the deepest human need for fulfillment and being part of something bigger than ourselves. Teams imbued with purpose are highly cohesive with clarity on both the team's goals and the roles and responsibilities of team members working together for meaningful outcomes. They are supported in making their deepest contributions through good leadership, and a sense of inclusivity and belonging. Participation in purposeful teams flows with energy and vitality and lifts the human spirit.

“Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace - but you don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely.”

 - Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

Team Topologies can contribute to a sense of team and individual purpose in the following ways:

• All teams have a clearer orientation due to the explicit primary purpose of teams, aligning team structures with meaningful outcomes, and giving people a clear primary team purpose.  This also reduces the ambiguity and inherent complexity of inter-team dependencies typical in more common organisational structures.

• When people feel they have agency and can influence outcomes, they're more likely to be invested in their work and find it engaging and meaningful.

• With its emphasis on continuous stewardship, Team Topologies creates deeper connections to the engineering estate.

• Long-lived teams create a stronger sense of team identity and care for the well-being of colleagues.

• Team Topologies brings greater clarity on how someone plays their part in the overall value stream, creating a greater connection to the end user

• When teams come together in the Collaborative mode to tackle complex challenges, it can create a sense of shared purpose and accomplishment.

• Engineers want to be productive. They feel engaged with their work when they can get things done without being continually interrupted or blocked. This helps create that inner ‘flow state’ that is so meaningful for human beings. Fast flow in an organisation is likely to correlate with a sense of internal flow experienced by productive engineers.

• The inherent adaptability of Team Topology structures can help to ensure a team’s contributions remain relevant and impactful as the organisation grows and evolves.

Team Topologies offers a framework that naturally aligns with the human need for purpose and belonging in the workplace. By providing clear team orientations, fostering agency, and promoting continuous stewardship, it creates an environment where individuals can see and feel the direct impact of their contributions.

The framework's emphasis on long-lived teams nurtures strong interpersonal bonds and collective identity, while its focus on value streams connects team members to the broader organisational mission and end-user needs.

Applied with the intentionality of creating humane workplaces, this holistic approach not only addresses the professional aspects of work but also taps into deeper human needs for connection, meaning, and growth, offering the potential to tackle the growing sense of alienation experienced in many modern workplaces.

Are there any ways in which Team Topologies could work against human-centric values?

Change can often be disruptive, and unsettling for those impacted. Any well-intended framework, methodology or concept can be implemented clumsily and bring about unintended consequences. Generally speaking, organisations don’t have a great track record of introducing change and transformation, and many change initiatives will be met with scepticism or active resistance. If people are not consulted or informed about change it can induce anxiety, if they are not aware of why change is needed, if they don’t have the desire or knowledge to change, if they don’t have the ability to change and supported through change, then the initiative risks reducing performance and increasing the potential for cynicism.

Team Topologies is a generative, rather than prescriptive approach to organising. It requires the support for autonomy and distributed decision-making. It is, therefore, crucial that there is widespread buy-in from contributors and stakeholders who play their parts in ensuring its adoption and success. 

Team Topologies can be implemented badly or simplistically, the most common example probably being the relabelling of existing teams as Stream-Aligned, Platform, Enabling, or Complicated Subsystems, without paying any attention to the interaction modes or behaviour styles.

Possible things to watch for

Team Topologies does not claim to be a silver bullet that will convert a ‘toxic’ or ‘bureaucratic’ culture into a ‘generative’ and humane one. Handled clumsily, or applied as a rigid one-off top-down re-org it could create unintended consequences.

• Team Topologies could create overconfidence in organisational structure to induce fast flow. Structure alone won’t create flow when there are fundamental constraints blocking flow.

• Knowledge could become siloed within teams or an overly narrow specialisation may limit an individual's opportunity for growth.

• Artificial barriers or inflexible rigid structures may develop - but this is where good use of the interaction modes is important.

• People may use cognitive load as an excuse to not tackle the hard stuff and stretch themselves.

• Social loafing is always something to watch for in team settings where an individual can hide within the team, leaving others to pick up the burden. Creating commitment and accountability within any team is key to outcomes.

• A focus on team contributions may leave individual contributors frustrated or unrecognised, limiting their personal growth or career progression.

• Could create a false sense of security or reliance on team structure at the expense of skills and capabilities development.

• Stream-aligned multidisciplinary teams may not have the broad balance of skills needed and may rely overly heavily on those people with certain skills - especially in the areas of Deploy and Operate. Mathew Skelton uses the term ‘shadow-ops’ for this which increases the cognitive burden of the person with the skills:

  • Stream-aligned teams lack the full range of skills needed to operate their systems independently.

  • There's an over-reliance on specific team members who have specialised knowledge or skills in operations, deployment, or production support.

  • Informal processes or "workarounds" develop to handle operational tasks, rather than having formalised, sustainable practices.

• Team Topologies as a structure does not compensate for poor engineering practices or management styles which are incompatible with its core human-centric philosophy.

Advice

Some bullet-pointed thoughts about adopting Team Topologies humanely:

• Support team structures and interaction modes with an intentional approach to developing a strong engineering culture. For example, monitor team sentiment regularly with our Engineering Culture Index

• Continual reinforcement  (as per the ‘R’ in the ADKAR change model) of the humane principles underpinning Team Topologies: Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose

• Involve contributors and stakeholders right from the beginning

• Frequently reassess the interaction modes, changing the interaction modes for organisational evolution

• Provide coaching and mentoring for the behaviour styles per interaction mode

• Consider opportunities for both team and individual growth, supporting team learning and individual learning

• Balance specialisation with cross-functional skills development

• Consider leadership training to develop the leadership styles necessary to support teams using the Team Topologies structures and methodologies. You could do worse than starting with our Engineering Leadership Self-Reflection survey

• Encourage and optimise feedback - up and down the value chain, as well as up and down the organisational hierarchy

Team Topologies is designed to enhance organisational performance by optimising team structures, interactions, and behaviours, thereby facilitating quicker value delivery to customers.

The framework emphasises the sociotechnical nature of engineering, promoting humane working environments that prioritise mastery, autonomy, and purpose - key components of intrinsic motivation as defined by self-determination theory.

However, Team Topologies is not a silver bullet for creating humane workplaces. Continuously assessing team dynamics, actively listening to engineers' experiences, and making necessary adjustments are crucial to ensure that the framework truly aligns with human-centric values which sees the emergence of a thriving engineering culture. Organisations must be attuned and responsive to the evolving needs of their teams and individuals, adapting their implementation of Team Topologies as needed to maintain its effectiveness and support a humane work environment.