Team Topologies, by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, has become one of the more referenced books on my (virtual) shelf. Its four team types and three interaction modes give organisations a precise and practical vocabulary for thinking about structure. It treats team structure as a deliberate act of design rather than something that requires no thought. Too often, teams are an accident of the org chart, or they default to a simplistic and generic structure.
The book defines its own purpose this way:
A model for organizational design that provides a key technology-agnostic mechanism for modern software-intensive enterprises to sense when a change in strategy is required (either from a business or technology point of view).
That definition is worth examining. It reveals Team Topologies, in its authors’ own words, as primarily a sensing mechanism. As such, the responding half of the dynamic has less prominence. It is there, but the book’s structural vocabulary makes it easy to miss.
The Responding Half
This is where Strategy Deployment and Continuous Strategy come in. If Team Topologies emphasises sensing (noticing when a change in strategy is required), then Strategy Deployment emphasises responding (working out the adjacent possible, allowing it to emerge, and integrating it into the business). And because the sensing is itself ongoing, the responding needs to be too. Strategy Deployment meets that need. Not strategy as an annual exercise, but continuously, reflecting the ten qualities that suggest what good responding looks like in practice.
However, the split between sensing and responding obviously isn’t absolute. Team Topologies includes some response in its evolutionary team design. After all, part three of the book is all about “Evolving Team Interactions for Innovation and Rapid Delivery”. Similarly, Strategy Deployment includes some sensing, such as in the Evidence dimension of the X-Matrix. But I do think they have different emphases, and that is what makes them complementary.
Together they cover the dynamic more completely than either does alone. It’s an idea that came up in conversations I have had with Philippe Guenet, and that dynamic between them is what this post is about. What each emphasises, what each leaves to others, and how the two together cover what neither covers alone. It may lead to more collaboration between the two of us!
Fast Flow As A Strategy
Team Topologies is not strategy-agnostic. Its stated intent, a fast flow of change, is itself a strategic stance. I’ve written before that flow could be one of three agile strategies worth pursuing in its own right.
Strategy Deployment enters the picture by helping decide what to flow. Organisations almost always have more candidate flows than they have capacity to pursue. The TASTE X-Matrix offers a way to work through that choice using True North, Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics, Evidence, and their correlations. It gives an organisation a shared, visual account of which flows currently matter most, and why. And that’s not just the flow of each separate team, but also the flow of teams of teams, where multiple teams must coordinate and collaborate on some larger deliverable.
Fast flow is the goal, and Strategy Deployment helps to choose and evolve where to channel that flow.
Fracture Planes as Strategic Choices
One of the more interesting ideas in the book is the fracture plane. In Team Topologies, this is the natural seam along which to draw the lines between stream-aligned teams. Team Topologies offers several useful answers: business domain, regulatory compliance, change cadence, team location, and more.
The book doesn’t put it quite this way, but I’d argue that the choice of fracture plane is itself a strategic act. Aligning around one domain rather than another, for example, could be considered a bet about what matters most for the organisation right now. The decision shapes what teams focus on, what they leave to others, and what is deprioritised. Those are strategic choices, even if the fracture plane is described in structural terms. Wardley Mapping is one technique for doing this by visually assessing the current landscape, revealing strategic options and surfacing hidden assumptions, dependencies, or disagreements.
This is where Strategy Deployment also offers a complementary approach. The X-Matrix is a way to make the underlying elements of strategy and their relationships visible and coherent. Catchball engages a broad and diverse group in exploring and contributing a wide range of experiences and ideas. Continuous Strategy keeps it all under review as evidence accumulates for or against.
Fracture-plane thinking is a highly relevant and useful concept. What wraps around it is a way of clarifying the context and rationale behind the strategic choices transparently and collaboratively, and of regularly revisiting those choices as conditions change and new information comes to light.
Strategic Cognitive Load
Team Topologies’ use of cognitive load is one of its most compelling (and maybe controversial) contributions. The idea that a team’s effectiveness depends on whether it can hold its problem in mind might feel obvious, but it is rarely treated that way in practice.
I think something analogous matters at the organisational level, although I’ll acknowledge this is borrowing the term very loosely rather than applying it strictly. Organisations also have finite attention. They can only hold so many strategic bets in mind at once. Strategic focus, pursued well, manages that attention, and as I explored in an earlier post, Strategic Insouciance also keeps it from becoming too narrow.
Thus, Strategy Deployment creates both time and space for the strategic cognitive load. Not just for management, but also for those “closest to the problem” or “closest to the context“. It recognises strategic work as important for everyone rather than as an overhead, inconvenience, or irrelevance.
A Wrapper, and a Layer
I’m in two minds about whether to describe Strategy Deployment as a “wrapper” or as a “layer above” Team Topologies. Wrapping suggests practices that sit alongside Team Topologies and surround its team design work, rather than supervising it from a height. That feels closer to the spirit of the thing.
That said, “layer above” still works in one specific sense. As I’ve written previously about Strategy Deployment and Flight Levels, Flight Level 3 is the strategic level, above the coordination and operational levels. Strategy Deployment fits well at that level, looking across the team topology that operates beneath it. Level here is in the sense of a different scope rather than a different seniority. So I think “layer above” is fair, when used the way Flight Levels means it: a level of view, not a level of hierarchy.
A Continuous Dynamic
Hopefully I’ve been clear that none of this displaces Team Topologies. The book remains an excellent guide to how teams should be shaped and how they should interact, and it’s an approach to sensing, not strategy, that the model primarily provides.
What Strategy Deployment offers, then, is the emphasis the book leaves to one side. The response that complements continuous sensing has to be continuous itself. An organisation that senses constantly but responds only at annual planning won’t keep up. Thus, Continuous Strategy brings the regular rhythm and cadence to the response to match the sensing. And the sensing and responding combine to create an ongoing empirical strategic capability.
Team Topologies senses where change is needed. Strategy Deployment responds, continuously, with the necessary adaptation. Like two individual skilled dancers performing together, the combined dynamic can be greater than the sum of the parts.