What kinds of teams and units are there (or should there be) in an organization?
One interesting trend is the introduction of typologies that are used to categorize different types of teams and units in an organization. Two recent examples are Team Topologies and Unfix.
Actually, the typologies are more than categorization frameworks—they are creative design tools that help you generate ideas for new organizational models.
In the video that I include here, I compare Team Topologies and Unfix with Russel Ackoff’s concept of the multidimensional organization, which I have been using extensively (and which I cover in my book; also see this article). At the end of the video, I show how we plan to support typologies in the Reconfig software tool.
By the way, I only cover three typologies in the video; if you want to delve deeper into this topic you might also want to take a look at the eight types of units proposed by Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell and the four types of teams in the Agile Fluency model.
Link to video: Team and unit typologies