Just Enough Roles: Less Is More

Author: Jurgen Appelo

Sometimes, roles are helpful; sometimes, they are not. The challenge in organization design is to strike a balance between clarity and flexibility. The set of Role Attributes in the unFIX Model can help you with that.

Scrum suggests only two specialty roles: the Product Owner and the Scrum Master. Why exactly two roles? Why not four or zero? Holacracy offers a Circle Lead, Circle Rep, Secretary, and Facilitator. Is that better? Is it worse? SAFe adds roles such as Product Manager, Release Train Engineer, and Business Owner. Is more roles a Good Thing? Or a Bad Thing?

Which roles do you need? And how many?

Let’s consider two extremes:

Team Clarity has precise job descriptions for everything that comes their way. Fred handles all service requests, Janet manages all customer data, Tilda oversees the backlog of work, Maurice takes care of the infrastructure, and so on. Team Clarity never has any confusion about who does what because everything they do is defined, in detail, in job descriptions.

Team Flexible, on the other hand, has no job descriptions at all. Their motto is that everyone can and should do everything. Maud, Eddy, Brenda, and Ivan are one hundred percent cross-functional in that anyone can pick up every task. Team Flexible does not depend on any person exclusively claiming any job.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. Team Clarity has complete certainty about who does what, but this makes them very rigid. This team is full of internal dependencies, and they are at significant risk of developing personal territories and a “not my job” attitude. Inflexibility is not good.

On the other extreme, Team Flexible is fully adaptable but has no clarity about who does what. Every task needs discussion, and every little piece of work can result in a negotiation. This team is at great risk of wasting a lot of time communicating about the work instead of doing the work. Waste is not good, either.

It is clear we need a compromise.

The challenge in organization design is to strike a balance between clarity and flexibility.

Organization designers should use role definitions to balance clarity and flexibility. Too many roles leads to dependencies and territories. Too few roles leads to confusion and communication overload. The art of organization design is to have just enough roles.

What is “just enough”? Well, less is more, but none is dumb.

You found a balance when there is an equal amount of complaining about “too much communication” and “not enough flexibility”, midway between Team Clarity and Team Flexible.

Too many roles leads to dependencies and territories. Too few roles leads to confusion and communication overload.

Fortunately, there is no reason to start from scratch and reinvent typical roles. The unFIX Model offers you sixteen ideas to craft specific, context-dependent roles for your teams, inspired by Scrum, Holacracy, SAFe, “the Spotify model”, and various other frameworks. Like all patterns in unFIX, none of the options are mandatory. You choose what you can use. Borrow them, merge them, discard them; it’s all up to you.

Role Attributes

For example, you may find it essential for your teams to rotate an informal Team Lead role. For the description of this role, you can consider the Captain and Producer patterns.

You may want teams to stop arguing about quality, so someone should take the lead in quality improvement. How about the Custodian or Inspector patterns?

And how to manage those pesky dependencies between the teams? Do you expect everyone to talk with everyone? Or can you make use of the Agent and Envoy patterns?

Like agile scaling frameworks, the unFIX pattern library is just a tool. None of these models know how to strike a balance between clarity and flexibility. That’s an ongoing process only YOU can manage. The difference is that frameworks give you a specific set of roles. The unFIX Model gives you ingredients to design your own roles. With sixteen pre-defined Role Attributes at your disposal, the puzzle could become easier.

Frameworks give you a specific set of roles. The unFIX Model gives you ingredients to design your own.

When it comes to role definitions, try to be like an Italian chef. The kitchen is full of high-quality ingredients, but what people get on their plates is only burrata, tomatoes, and basil, with some olive oil. An Italian chef won’t unload half the kitchen onto people’s plates, and neither should you.

Turn the options into simplicity.

Less is more (but none is dumb).

The best is just enough.