# Organizational entropy

Every organization starts with clean boundaries between roles. Over time, those boundaries get fuzzy.

You hire a developer who loves design. A designer who's great with data. A product manager who used to be an architect. These multi-disciplinary people contribute in multi-disciplinary ways, which is mostly good.

But it creates a hidden risk: unclear ownership.

## The Entropy Effect

When people chip in beyond their core responsibilities, it builds subtle connections between roles. A developer designs a UI flow. When changes are needed, they get pulled in to discuss the history. Then the next change. And the next.

After the tenth conversation, they might as well be a designer.

As these connections multiply, once-separate functional areas start overlapping. People lose track of who owns what decisions. This ends one of two ways:

1. →No one feels empowered to make decisions because they're afraid of stepping on toes.
2. →Everyone tries to make the same decision in opposite directions.

Either way, nothing gets done.

## The Law of Organizational Entropy

Roles and responsibilities drift towards sameness unless acted upon by an opposing force.

This happens everywhere—horizontally within teams and vertically between levels. Fighting it requires two steps.

## Step 1: Define How You Work

Teams need more than vision and goals. They need to understand how they should work together.

Think of this as your "master branch" for organizational practices. It's a baseline that teams can experiment from and return to when things go wrong.

If people know that the tech lead owns bug-free code in development but the product manager owns bugs that reach production, that eliminates ownership confusion.

But be careful. Standardizing the wrong things or standardizing too much can be worse than no structure at all.

## Step 2: Find Anchors

Saying you want change isn't enough—even for CEOs. You need to anchor your ideals to existing processes and tools.

Mark Zuckerberg declared Facebook "mobile first" but nothing changed. So he refused to attend any meeting, review any idea, or look at any prototype that wasn't for mobile. Within weeks, every meeting was about mobile.

Your anchor might be a recurring meeting, a template, or a review process. The key is making it easier to work the "right" way than the "wrong" way.

Want more user research? Schedule recurring reviews with senior leadership to discuss findings.

Want better goal-setting? Add a goals section to budget requests and reject incomplete ones.

Look for places where functional areas overlap—manager-to-report conversations, cross-team handoffs, formal communication flows. These are your leverage points for change.

Organizational entropy is inevitable. The faster you grow, the more pronounced it becomes. But with clear definitions and smart anchors, you can keep it in check.