Today we speak with Roland Flemm, co-creator of Org Topologies and co-author of 10X Org — Powered by Org Topologies. Roland has spent decades in the trenches—first as a developer, then in infrastructure, and finally as a Scrum Master, trainer, and organizational design consultant. In this episode, he explains why even teenagers with zero corporate experience instinctively create departmental silos, why making every team faster doesn’t make the whole organization faster, and how leaders can use the Org Topologies map to see their organization as it actually is—not as the org chart says it should be.
From Developer to Org Designer: Four Decades of Hitting the Same Wall
“I felt many, many times the limitations of organizational structures stopping me from using my common sense to make people work together in a proper way.”
Roland’s career spans over 40 years, starting as a developer in 1984. After a decade writing code and another decade in infrastructure, he moved into Scrum and agile coaching. But even as a highly effective Scrum Master, he kept hitting the same ceiling: local team improvements couldn’t break through organizational boundaries. You could have wins with your team, but the moment you needed multiple teams to work together, someone higher up would shut it down. That frustration led him to Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, which offered a more educated approach to multi-team collaboration—and eventually to co-creating Org Topologies as a way to help leaders see and change the structures that block real collaboration.
The Hydrogen Car That Built Its Own Silos
“If you don’t think about your org design—the way that you want to collaborate—then something like this happens.” Continue reading BONUS: Why Every Organization Reinvents Silos—And What to Do About It, With Roland Flemm
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