When Mandating “One Team” Creates Dysfunction
Systems Praxis: Why collaboration initiatives keep producing the opposite of what they intend — and what the structure is actually telling you
The “One Team” initiative is not failing because of resistance. It is producing exactly what its structure makes probable. The primer establishes that a system is a collection of individuals whose parts or functions are interdependently committed to achieving the aim of the system. When an organization mandates collaboration between groups whose work does not require interdependence, it is not building a system. It is applying system logic to a heap — and the heap will behave like a heap regardless of what the initiative says.
The intervention follows from the diagnosis. And most organizations diagnose this wrong.
Forcing a whole onto a heap doesn’t create a whole. It creates a performance of one.
Ervin Laszlo draws a precise distinction between wholes and heaps. A whole has properties irreducible to its parts — change one element and the nature of the thing changes. A heap is additive. Adding a component or removing one makes a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. The heap’s essential character does not shift.
Most organizations have both. A product team whose members must coordinate daily to ship a feature is a system. A group of specialists who each contribute a discrete deliverable to a shared project may be a heap. Neither is better. They are structurally different. And they require structurally different approaches.
Research on team effectiveness confirms this. The design of the work — specifically the type of interdependence required — determines whether a group should function as an integrated system or a coordinated collection. When the work requires genuine interdependence, system logic applies. When it does not, applying system logic creates coordination overhead without coordination benefit.
The “One Team” initiative typically arrives without this distinction. All groups are brought under the same collaborative framework. Extended cross-functional meetings replace clean handoffs. Specialists attend sessions with limited relevance to their contribution. A collaboration score appears in performance reviews. The result is energy directed at performing team-ness rather than doing the work the team exists to do.
The standard interventions fail for the same structural reason: they treat collaboration as a value rather than a structural property.
Culture work addresses attitudes toward collaboration. It does not address whether the work itself requires the collaboration being mandated. A specialist who genuinely wants to collaborate and whose work does not require it will still experience the overhead as friction — because the friction is structural, not attitudinal.
Team building events create relational warmth. They do not create interdependence. Interdependence is a property of how work flows between parts, not of how much the parts like each other. A heap whose members have excellent relationships is still a heap.
Shared OKRs impose a goal layer onto groups that may not share operational reality. The goal is shared. The work is not. The OKR creates the appearance of alignment without the structural conditions that produce it. People learn to speak the shared goal language while executing independently. The language changes. The structure does not.
What gets called a “collaboration problem” is usually a misdiagnosis of structure.
Different stakeholders describe this problem differently and none of them are wrong. Leadership sees a culture problem — the teams are siloed and resistant to integration. Middle managers see a workload problem — the collaboration requirements are consuming time that the actual work needs. Specialists see a relevance problem — the meetings do not connect to what they are accountable for producing. Each description is accurate from inside the frame it comes from. None of them is complete.
Every intervention aimed at increasing collaboration changes the dynamic around collaboration. The team that has been through a “One Team” workshop now has that framework in the room with every cross-functional interaction. More effort applied to the current approach does not resolve the friction. It deepens it — because the structural mismatch between the collaboration mandate and the work’s actual interdependence requirements remains intact.
The question is not: How do we get these groups to collaborate better?
The question is: What does the work actually require — and does the structure match that requirement?
If this reframe has explanatory power — if it accounts for what the standard approach cannot — there is a way to work with it directly.
The Heap Check Protocol addresses the structural diagnosis — distinguishing between groups that require system logic and groups that require heap logic, before the intervention is designed. (Free)
The Output Lens Protocol addresses where attention goes once the diagnosis is made — redirecting a system's gaze from agreements about collaboration to what the group actually produces together. (Free)
Forcing a whole onto a heap doesn’t create a whole. It creates a performance of one.
The structure will keep producing what the structure makes probable. The question is whether you are diagnosing the structure — or the people inside it.
🎧 Thank you for reading.
© 2025 Victor Nuñez / LABKOM Co. Ltd. Thailand. All rights reserved.
Further Reading
Laszlo, Ervin. The Systems View of the World. George Braziller, 1972.
Wageman, R., et al. Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great. Harvard Business Review Press, 2008.