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Conway's Corollary

Also called The inverse Conway manoeuvre

You can't change organizational structure without changing communication structure.

The inverse Conway manoeuvre applies this deliberately: reorganise the teams to get the architecture you want, since the architecture will follow the teams regardless.

In practice

  • A company splits a team in two and the codebase develops an interface where the org chart has a boundary.
  • Merging two departments without merging their meetings produces one department with two architectures.
Subject
Organizations & Bureaucracy
Essay
Why organisations learn, harden and decline

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