The Proliferation Problem

Byline: SHARAN BAL

I've been in this work long enough (going on 15 years) to watch the same insight cycle through organizations twice. So it goes with the challenges associated with siloed persistent teams.

Cross-functional work is widely recognized as the hardest thing for organizations to get right and the biggest barrier to doing important strategic work. Yet no matter how deeply leaders know this, their underlying structures struggle to move. If anything, they feel more calcified than ever. I’m seeing teams overwhelmed with longer and longer backlogs. Being perpetually “full up” is so normalized, people have stopped questioning it.

I call this the proliferation problem, and it's the reason organizations struggle to benefit from change even when they want to.

Here's the dynamic:

Most organizations are built around persistent teams where people with similar skills report to the same manager and effectively operate as their own small company. Each has its own priorities and its own claim on people's time. The work that creates value (a.k.a. cross-functional work that ultimately gets something to a customer) has to thread through all of them. But every individual team is already at capacity before that value-compounding work arrives.

I’ve seen this pattern most sharply in HR and enablement functions.

These teams straddle an impossible tension: They're expected to demonstrate value to the business, so they produce programs, initiatives, and frameworks, all of which get delivered into an organization that can barely absorb anything. The volume of output becomes its own problem.

I've sat in rooms with leaders who'd just spent months building a strategy they believed in, but when it came time to move, the honest response was: “We don't feel ready to execute on this until next year.”

Not because the direction was wrong. Because there was nowhere to put it.

“A new layer on top of an old design.”

The proliferation problem rarely announces itself as a structural failure. Instead, it shows up as exhaustion. As the feeling that you can't take any more change. As the moment when a practice that was working beautifully starts collapsing under its own weight.

Mission-based teams (MBTs) are a genuine solution to the cross-functional execution problem. They bring people together from across an organization to deliver against a specific mandate, and build skills and ship real work in the process. Mission-based teams work, so they often spread.

Every function wants one, because every function struggles to execute across teams. But then the question becomes how to govern all the MBTs and keep them from mushrooming. Meanwhile, the persistent structure underneath—the thing that made an MBT necessary in the first place—often remains unchanged. A new layer on top of an old design.

AI is following the same arc. Most teams are using it to produce more inside their silo, without investigating whether any of that additional output is what the organization needs.

Flipping the persistent-to-dynamic ratio.

Right now, most organizations run something like 90% persistent teams to 10% dynamic ones. People are locked into standing functions, with only a sliver of bandwidth for cross-functional and emergent work. In a world where change is constant, that ratio needs to flip. Organizations built to benefit from change will have more people organized dynamically around the work that matters in a given moment, and fewer roles that exist just because they “always have.”

Getting there requires a different conversation at the leadership level, one that happens alongside resourcing, budgeting, and planning cycles rather than after them.

A place to start: Take stock of the MBTs (or other cross-functional initiatives) you've run, what they required, and what they taught you about how much slack you need to execute. When you're doing strategy, treat the question of how you'll protect capacity to deliver on it as part of the strategy itself.

And look hard at what each team calls a priority. If your annual plan is an aggregation of every team's backlog, you don't have a strategy. Real portfolio pruning, where leaders take work off the table, is what frees up the capacity to actually move.

The proliferation problem is real and getting harder to ignore. But the design choices that created it can be made differently.