Newsletter (march 2025): Maximize organizational learning & return-on-investment with Facilitating interactions
This edition was curated by Eduardo da Silva
In a previous edition, we explored X-as-a-Service (XaaS) to enable teams to create effective self-serving interactions and reduce “blocking dependencies”. As organizations, we want to minimize inter-team dependencies. However, there are specific moments where strategic temporary interactions are essential to help teams learn faster and more effectively from each other to address capability gaps and other blockers to flow.. In this issue, we will explore the facilitating interaction mode, which can support such situations.
Effectively addressing missing capabilities with Facilitating interaction mode
While on a transformational journey towards fast flow, teams often face technical, process, and other challenges that can slow down their ability to innovate and create value. While many organizations recognize these obstacles, they often end up approaching those “blockers to fast flow” in sub-optimal ways. For example, they address those missing capabilities or skills in a “siloed” fashion, where each team tries to solve their challenge the best they can. This results in higher costs, as we often have many teams addressing the same types of problems, and the overall ways of addressing the challenges are sub-optimal.
Team Topologies facilitating interaction mode aims to help address this challenge. The facilitating interaction mode is a strategic approach where one team (or person) that knows or has the best expertise on specific topics helps one or more teams suffering from challenges on those topics.
We're using expertise from knowledgeable people to help others learn faster, improving the organization's overall effectiveness. When properly facilitated, these interactions create a multiplier effect across the organization - instead of everyone inefficiently tackling the same problems independently, people learn more quickly and find better solutions. This approach allows teams to become self-sufficient in certain areas faster, freeing up their mental capacity to focus on the unique challenges that create value for the organization.
The effectiveness of facilitating interactions becomes increasingly evident in bigger organizations, when many teams are facing the same sorts of challenges. For example, in a 100+ team organization moving from its data centers to the cloud, we want to help those teams on that journey and avoid the huge cost (in money and time) of having all teams trying to figure things out from scratch. This can be achieved by enabling teams to facilitate that journey (and also with the support of adequate platforms with good self-service interfaces, as these two interaction modes are rather complementary in such scaling scenarios).
Enabling Teams may be long-lived, but facilitating interaction is always temporary
A big misunderstanding we see around Enabling Teams is that they always need to be “short-lived”. Even though this may be the case in many situations, it doesn’t always need to be the case. Enabling Teams can be long-lived (or, as Eduardo da Silva calls it, "Structural Enabling Teams" - such as architects, coaches, etc.). However, what needs to be temporary are their “facilitating interactions”. We should always strive to have very specific and time-bound facilitating interactions, with a clear mission and focus, driven by the challenges of the teams being helped. We do not want to have “long-lived facilitating interactions”. Those tend to create long-lived dependencies on people that are outside of the stream-aligned team, which means the team is not self-sufficient to create value.
With these principles, (long-lived) Structural Enabling Teams will effectively have different facilitating interactions over time - as a function of the needs of the teams they are helping or working with.
The key to successful facilitation lies in its temporary and focused nature, regardless of the lifespan of the enabling team itself. Enabling teams must resist the temptation to become permanent support structures. Instead, they should work with clear exit criteria, gradually reducing their involvement as teams become more capable. This approach ensures that knowledge truly transfers and teams develop real autonomy rather than creating hidden dependencies that could hinder organizational agility.
To further explore this topic, check out the Effective Enabling Teams video course from Eduardo da Silva and Manuel Pais. In the course, they cover these and other aspects, and share several real-world examples of how to effectively leverage facilitating interactions in organizations.
Real-World Implementation Examples
Several leading organizations have successfully implemented Enabling Teams and the facilitating interaction mode within their team topologies.
Auto Trader implemented a stream-aligned office layout to foster flow-based collaboration and facilitation between teams. This setup allowed enabling teams to provide guidance and unblock stream-aligned teams effectively.
TransUnion's evolution of team topologies involved enabling teams facilitating other teams to adopt new practices and improve their workflows. This was part of their broader organizational transformation.
Capra Consulting reorganized its structure to emphasize facilitation by enabling specialized teams to support decision-making and collaboration across the organization, reducing cognitive load and fostering autonomy.
CROZ introduced a platform team that facilitated knowledge sharing and reduced the cognitive load on other teams, enabling them to focus on delivering client value.
Bol.com leveraged enabling teams and facilitating interactions to help scale the data science discipline and capability across many of its 150+ product teams. Check the Effective Enabling Teams video course for the whole case study.
These real-world examples demonstrate how structured facilitation through well-designed team topologies can create more resilient, adaptive, and high-performing organizations.
What are you trying to achieve?
Some readers may be here to learn more about Team Topologies, while others are already tackling specific challenges. We're working to refine our newsletter, enhance our content, and shape the second edition of our book. Your feedback will play a crucial role in guiding these efforts!
What’s Coming Up Next?
We are gathering all Team Topologies events on our Events page and would love to hear your feedback about the ones you have attended or the ones that we have missed
LIVE in Denver, Apr 14-15 Explore DDD Denver 2025 - Success patterns for fast flow and Team Topologies masterclass
LIVE in Oslo, Apr 24 Exclusive Roundtable on Product Organization with Manuel Pais (roundtable)
ONLINE, Apr 29 Team Topologies: Build High-Performing Teams for Sustainable Success with GetNextIT (webinar)
ONLINE Apr 29-30 Team Topologies Fundamentals with Lean Agile Ninja (course)
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