Beyond the Machine: Team Topologies Second Edition and the Future of Humane, High-Performing Organizations

News

27 Aug

Written By Matthew Skelton - Team Topologies

Team Topologies encourages flourishing, humane ecosystems.

The second edition of the book Team Topologies provides vital success stories, analysis, commentary, and clarifications to help leaders plan and execute transformations in every industry sector and geography.

🚀 Join the launch event online on 25 September 2025: https://teamtopologies.com/launch

📗 Buy or pre-order the second edition (published on 23 September 2025): https://teamtopologies.com/book

Overview: helping leaders to navigate rapid change

Since its initial publication in 2019, Team Topologies has sparked a significant shift in how organisations approach structure and purpose, resonating far beyond its original expectations in IT and software. The core message, emphasising that clearly articulated intent and purpose are essential for achieving agility at speed, has driven remarkable success across various industries. Now, the second edition amplifies these insights, presenting an evolved framework designed to build not just efficient machines, but flourishing, humane ecosystems.

This update arrives at a critical juncture, with rapid technological change, geopolitical shifts, and global disruptions demanding new organisational models. The second edition provides crucial guidance for leaders – COOs, CTOs, Heads of HR, VPs of Engineering – seeking to navigate this complex landscape, offering pathways to enhanced staff well-being, improved business outcomes, increased agility, and a greater ability to address emerging opportunities and threats.

The subtitle of the second edition of Team Topologies is “Organizing business and technology for fast flow of value”, a subtle but important shift from the first edition (“Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow”) because the techniques from Team Topologies are valuable well outside simply reorganizing teams; Team Topologies patterns shape how entire capabilities are arranged to support and accelerate value flow.

The Human Element Takes Centre Stage: Cognitive Load as a Design Principle

One of the most significant advancements in the second edition is the elevated appreciation for cognitive load as a fundamental design principle in the operation of work systems. In an environment of relentless change, centering human mental load in organisational design is not merely practical but vital. When teams are overwhelmed, quality declines, innovation stalls, and risks escalate. By optimising cognitive load within well-defined team boundaries, organisations foster environments where teams can focus deeply on their specific domains, leading to deeper expertise, more innovative solutions, and ultimately, superior outcomes.

Critically, the application of cognitive load principles has expanded far beyond IT. We've seen its central role in achieving success in diverse contexts such as pharmaceutical research and development, legal case management, HR, and emergency healthcare, all yielding safe, rapid, and compliant outcomes. The second edition introduces a scientific model for systematically assessing cognitive load in knowledge-intensive teams, developed with Dr. Laura Weis. This model identifies over twenty drivers across four clusters: team characteristics, work practices and processes, task characteristics, and work environments and tools, offering unprecedented clarity on factors impacting team effectiveness.

Leaders must adopt a dynamic view of cognitive load, recognising that temporary increases may be necessary for clear objectives like increased service ownership or productivity. However, continuously piling on responsibilities without adequate support or allowing complexity to proliferate without robust platforms is detrimental. The Creditas case study exemplifies mature usage of team cognitive load (TCL) assessments, showing how regular analysis of TCL drivers, combined with contextual team discussions, can accelerate delivery and boost team ownership and engagement.

Evolving from Machines to Ecosystems: The Power of Fast Flow

Organising for fast flow yields significant benefits in agility, purpose, and health for both the organisation and its individuals. It encourages a focus on purpose by reducing unnecessary coupling, especially when combined with genuine X-as-a-Service – where capabilities are forward-deployed and consumed as existing software services without delays or handoffs. This approach unlocks "economies of empowerment," enabling teams to innovate and drive business value even within very large enterprises.

A key challenge for leaders is to resist the temptation of achieving efficiency savings through centralisation or deduplication. Instead, the focus should be on supporting a flourishing internal ecosystem of aligned providers. This ecosystem thrives not through rigid planning, but through community-sharing events and active knowledge diffusion. This necessary shift from viewing organisations as "efficient machines" to "fruitful ecosystems" requires leaders with traditional mechanistic training to embrace more organic organisational models.

Redefining "Platform": The Fractal Organisation

One of the most crucial clarifications in the second edition addresses a common misunderstanding: a platform is a grouping of teams, not necessarily a single team. In organisations with more than 40 to 50 people, an internal platform typically requires more than one 8-person team to provide the necessary services, hence the introduction of the term "platform grouping". This means that while a "Platform team" might refer to a single team working within a platform, it more often denotes a collection of multiple teams operating within this grouping.

This refined understanding highlights the fractal nature of organisations, where self-similar patterns exist at multiple "zoom levels". A mature platform approach needs to be both fractal and dynamic, evolving as business needs and strategy change. Examples like Adidas's digital platform, which is a logical, high-level grouping of multiple platforms and services (each with dedicated teams, rather than a single monolith), perfectly illustrate this concept. Similarly, NAV, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, has implemented a small number of coherent internal platforms (application, data, and design system) instead of a cumbersome single platform. This model allows for flexibility while keeping cognitive load manageable for consuming teams. The second edition also introduces the concept of a "value stream grouping," generalising this multi-team approach to broader value delivery.

Beyond IT: Whole-Organisation Transformation & the AI-Augmented Future

The principles of Team Topologies have moved significantly beyond their IT origins, now driving whole-organisation transformation. We are seeing its application in diverse sectors, including:

Global pharmaceutical R&D
Legal firms and HR departments
Emergency hospital care
Government as a platform, with Singapore GovTech as a leading example for empowering citizens with digital technology. Other governments in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, the UK, and the US are also adopting these approaches.
Private equity and venture studio groups applying Team Topologies patterns across entire portfolios of companies, providing core capabilities "as a service".
Organisations like Capra Consulting, which applied Team Topologies across sales, operations, recruitment, and even their leadership group to boost employee engagement and autonomy.
Telenet, a telecommunications company, used Team Topologies for organisation-wide business agility, applying value stream, platform, and enabling patterns at the tribe level, extending beyond IT.

Looking ahead, the second edition deeply explores the impact of Artificial Intelligence. While AI is set to significantly disrupt knowledge work through automation and accelerated product experiments, Team Topologies advocates using technology to augment human capabilities, not replace human judgment or encode existing biases. The book offers a blueprint for how to trust groups of AI agents to execute autonomously, drawing parallels from how human teams are trusted: clear domain boundaries, constrained operating contexts (e.g., small language models), explainable decisions, clear audit trails, high-fidelity operational telemetry, and a sense of stewardship. Crucially, the role of human teams remains paramount in defining AI missions and overseeing their operations, reinforcing the idea that teams of around eight people remain optimal for high trust and breadth of capability.

An Evolutionary Journey, Not a Destination

The second edition stresses that Team Topologies is an ever-evolving approach, not a static, short-term change programme. Organisational design is likened to a martial art, requiring constant practice and course correction; there is no autopilot for organisational change. Rather than blindly adopting all ideas, successful transformations prioritise an evolutionary approach, selectively applying patterns based on genuine operational challenges. For instance, Kodea, an NGO, adapted platform patterns using self-service templates and guidelines to free up their communications team, demonstrating how these concepts can be instilled early, even without dedicated teams or large budgets.

The fundamental principles underpinning Team Topologies are paramount:

A fundamental focus on the flow of actual value to customers via incremental delivery.
Supporting multiple flows of value through the parallelisation of value streams and removal of blocking dependencies.
Increasing teams’ agency and decision-making capabilities (with adequate guardrails) and fostering higher trust levels.
Leveraging dynamic interactions to detect and correct breakdowns in the flow of information, knowledge, and skills.
Understanding and respecting cognitive load limits on individuals and teams.
Regular sharing and adoption of practices and solutions across teams, fostering "active knowledge diffusion."

The second edition of Team Topologies provides leadership with a powerful and practical approach for shaping dynamic, adaptable operating models that serve business strategy while remaining mindful of human constraints. It's an invitation to create more humane and effective environments where technology genuinely empowers human potential, rather than constraining or replacing it. By embracing these evolved principles, leaders can build organisations poised for sustained agility, innovation, and well-being in an increasingly complex world.