[oostevo]

The author doesn’t spend much time on _why_ re-orgs “almost always make some people unhappy, cause employee departures, and stifle productivity,” but I’d claim it’s organizational politics. Every re-org has winners and losers, almost by definition: there can only be so many people in charge, and likewise not everyone can work on that cool new feature. This is particularly true in relatively stagnant organizations: your best chance to move up the hierarchy as a manager might be during the once-in-a-blue-moon re-org. _Of course_ zero-sum shifts in organizational status of a bunch of imperfect human beings are going to be political.

The central thesis seems to be that by “involving the team members that would be effected from the beginning and making it their decision,” the discomfort around re-orgs will be avoided.

I might be missing something obvious from the article, but I have a hard time believing that adding more imperfect humans (in fact, all of the imperfect humans the organization has!) into the mix and letting teams self-organize would reduce awkward politics rather than making them worse.

[meristem]

A few other reasons reorgs can "almost always make some people unhappy, cause employee departures, and stifle productivity": A. Most orgs have multiple unmapped communication channels that smooth operations. With reorgs those get broken and have to be reformed and operationally remapped, which creates mayhem in day-to day productivity B. Change is unsettling even when welcomed; C. The view of how work gets done and why is highly localized. Reorgs often clean up only certain hierarchical levels of this how/why coupling.

[idunno246]

I've been on the short end of re-orgs. I get that for the good of the business that some of the changes needed to happen, but where it really hurt was it came across that management didn't know what we were doing, and made it seem unimportant/useless. They shifted the focus of the team to a thing that literally every single member of the team the previous week said they didn't want to work on, and in a few months realized someone needed to focus on the original thing and tried to shift back. The company prides itself on internal mobility, by that time every person but one had quit or transferred.

I don't read it as self-organize, cause then everyone would choose to work on the new shiny, but there should be some amount of discussion that happens as input to the reorg, rather than too late when everyone is gone.