Case study: Spotify’s model
In 2012, Spotify introduced a unique approach to organizing teams to enhance productivity and innovation. The model was designed to enable Spotify to quickly adapt to industry changes, and to maintain a competitive advantage by creating a culture of collaboration and innovation across its engineering teams.
In this model, the teams were organised into structures known as squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds. These structures enabled different types of interactions among the teams:
Squads (product teams) were multidisciplinary and had a high level of autonomy that allowed them to act quickly and adapt to feedback. These teams engaged in interactions with adjacent product teams in order to maintain alignment with the company’s overall goals.
Chapters and guilds created opportunities for cross-pollination and innovation between different teams, and for knowledge consolidation within specialties. In short, the model aimed to balance autonomy with alignment, and horizontal cross-pollination with vertical depth of knowledge and specialisation
The Spotify Model was, for a time, the shiny new framework that many tech companies were quick to copy. However, the model’s limitations became evident quickly, and teams at Spotify stopped using it.
One of the key limitations was the assumption that cross-functional alignment and collaboration would happen naturally as a result of team structure. That was not the case.
When cross-functional teams don’t work
Spotify is not the only organisation to have experienced ineffective cross-functional collaboration. Research has consistently shown that teams underperform. One study estimated that 75% of cross-functional teams fail in multiple areas, including (among others) meeting client expectations and maintaining alignment with their company’s corporate goals.
This translates into wasted resources, increased costs, and the persistence, or worsening, of complex problems despite well-intended efforts to solve them.
Why traditional models for collaboration fail
Like Spotify, many organisations recognise the importance of cross-functional collaboration as a source for innovation and competitive advantage, and as a way of solving complex, systemic problems.
However, many approach it too narrowly: as a value to cultivate—not a skill to build and nurture.
Often, the assumption is that, bringing a group of different people together and identifying a shared goal is enough for collaboration to succeed. That isn’t the case when:
- each person is working on their own part
- they assume that it is the others who need to change
- they don’t appreciate the impact of their own actions on others and on the situation they are facing
- they operate with a competitive, zero-sum mindset.
What many traditional models of collaboration overlook is that, bringing together multiple stakeholders with different perspectives, and different incentives also brings with it the complexities of aligning these stakeholders, of managing their conflicting interests, and harnessing their collective intelligence.
A new paradigm for collaboration
Effective collaboration requires a mindset shift. For real impact, teams need to be open to each other’s perspectives, to be able to work well across silos and disciplinary boundaries.
They need to see how their work fits in the bigger picture, how it impacts others and contributes to the overall outcomes.
Only by having this mindset can they be truly motivated and capable of generative collaboration, i.e. collaboration in order to co-create and support a desired and shared outcome.
This is where we believe that systemic intelligence can make a big difference to how multiple actors in a collaboration relate to one another. Instead of thinking about their own piece of the puzzle, or trying to convince others to change, collaborators are aware of the big picture and of their role within it. This can uncover new opportunities for alignment and innovation.
