Beyond T-shaped people; The Invisible Cost of Functional Specialisation in Organisations
in professional on team-dynamics, organisational-design, software-development
Exploring how functional specialisation creates hidden organisational debt that compounds over time, impacting both team agility and organisational adaptability
Back in 2017, I tweeted that
“Functional specialisation of individuals destroys team agility. Functional specialisation of teams destroys organisational agility.”
Years later, this observation has only grown more relevant as organisations struggle with digital transformation and rapid market changes.
Reflecting on the coming power of agentic AI driven workflows, I think the deep understanding of these concepts and how to implement them is going to be the primary differentiator between companies that surf the coming tide, and those that sink between the waves.
The Allure of Specialisation
Specialisation is seductive. It feels efficient. It’s easy to measure and manage. It maps neatly to job descriptions, reporting lines, and procurement contracts.
We’re drawn to specialisation because it promises efficiency. It’s comfortable. It’s measurable. But this comfort comes at a cost that’s often invisible until it’s too late.
The Hidden Costs
Knowledge Silos: When individuals become too specialized, knowledge doesn’t flow naturally through the team
Dependency Chains: Work gets stuck waiting for the “right person” to be available
Reduced Learning: Team members stop growing outside their specialty
Conway’s Law Effects: Our software begins to mirror our organisational divisions
Breaking Free
Let’s unpack this across three levels: individual development, team formation, and organisational design.
1. Individuals: Go Beyond T-Shaped
The T-shaped metaphor—deep in one area, broad in others—is better than hyper-specialisation, but still too static and shallow for today’s context. Instead:
- Think in terms of versatility over shape: What situations can this person adapt to? How quickly can they move across cognitive and technical domains?
- Encourage comb-shaped growth: multiple areas of depth with connected learning paths.
- Prioritize judgment, reasoning, and systems thinking over specific technical skills. Today’s full-stack engineer will be tomorrow’s full-context collaborator.
Key enablers:
- Internal mobility
- Role fluidity inside teams
- Learning budgets and time structures (e.g., pomodoro-for-learning commitments)
2. Teams: Optimize for Flow and Evolution
Team Topologies provides a much better mental model than functional roles. Instead of asking “What specialists do we need?” ask:
“What team structures optimize for flow of change, clarity of ownership, and fast feedback?”
Design teams as long-lived, cross-functional units with aligned purposes, shaped for interaction modes:
- Stream-aligned teams focused on delivering value end-to-end
- Enabling teams that lift capabilities of others
- Complicated subsystem teams owning complex internals (used sparingly)
- Platform teams that remove cognitive load by providing reusable abstractions
Avoid persistent handoffs between teams. Instead, embed, swarm, or pair across boundaries when specialisation is required.
Key enablers:
- Clearly defined interaction modes
- Lightweight team APIs (ways of working and communicating)
- Time-boxed co-working over long handovers
3. Organizations: Shape Context, Not Control
Organizations must stop trying to predefine the “perfect shape” of talent or teams and instead:
Create environments of aligned autonomy: where decisions happen close to the problem, but with strategic coherence.
This means:
- Incentives reward collaborative delivery and capability building, not heroics or individual depth
- Technical strategy is expressed through decision fitness functions and guardrails, not rigid roadmaps
- Visibility into why decisions are made (not just what is decided) is shared across levels to create organisational learning
Key enablers:
- Sociotechnical architecture reviews, not just code reviews
- Fitness functions that encode architectural and operational priorities
- Narrative transparency: shared understanding of priorities, trade-offs, and strategic goals
Moving Forward
The key is understanding that agility isn’t about doing things faster - it’s about maintaining options whilst still moving rapidly and iteratively in a desired direction. Functional specialisation reduces options, which directly impacts our ability to adapt and respond to change.
Remember: You can’t predict a complex work system using metrics, but you can use metrics to learn how to change a system to be more predictable.
