How Teams Grow Organically
31st August 2025
Here’s how it usually starts. You’re standing in line for coffee and run into someone from finance. A little small talk, a joke or two, and then they mention it’s tax season. They’ve hired a student to shuffle CSV files from one server to another by hand.
You blink. By hand? Why not automate it? You recall that Michelle from development built a similar integration recently, maybe you rope in a business analyst. Very quickly, what began as a casual exchange becomes the start of a new project. And a brand-new team.
This team doesn’t exist on any org chart. It emerges organically, based on who knows whom.
And once you’ve been part of a team like that, something else happens: the next time finance hits a snag, your name will be the first one they remember.
Communication patterns don’t just influence software design; they determine how teams themselves are formed.
This has nothing to do with politics (I think) but it’s a very significant insight for anybody who works for a living.