Emergence of Soft Roles

Google’s early success is partly attributed to the use of commodity hardware that were expected to break occasionally. Rather than demanding perfection from complex systems it is far more effective to expect and design around imperfections¹.

As we design products, so we must design our internal processes. We once again assume that our teammates are fallible, prone to making occasional mistakes, and operating under some number of misconceptions².

Fallibility runs both ways up and down the org chart. Leaders operate under vague, incomplete, and sometimes wildly inaccurate information³. Further complicating matters, it is impossible to understand the capabilities and shortcomings of each individual person or understand every nuance of what must constitute a role.

The result is that team roles are neither comprehensive nor precise. In any given team structure people are expected to adapt to a broad range of situations that are unpredictable, and frankly unknowable. Some (most?) of those situations are directly due to other team members.

As teams mature, the actual role each person takes on will gradually anneal around individual strengths and weaknesses forged by need and cemented through consistency.

So in reality, what is intended to be a neat and well circumscribed role profile becomes irregular, illdefined, and dynamic.

In short: Following the spirit of designing with imperfections, team organization must always account for this fluidity of roles.

• Roles in a team will rarely be circumscribed by the corresponding job description. People will always do work outside their scope.
• Roles will overlap in ways that will run counter to the intents of the official role allocations. People will do other’s work occasionally.
• Roles will emerge that are not mentioned in anyone’s job description. Sometimes called soft roles.

In this series we will look at a few of these soft roles that emerge often and look into the critical work that these roles perform.