Pars Non Totum: Specialize Without Fragmenting, with Antonio Macías

The cave is also inside the organisation

Antonio Macías Mollá has just published Pars non totum on LinkedIn, a piece that starts from Plato's cave to ask what happens when we confuse what we can see with the whole of reality. At People & Play we think it is worth reading slowly, because it names a problem that shows up again and again in clubs and companies.

The core thesis is clear. We do not decide on the whole of reality, we decide on the reality our position lets us see. Manufacturing and Quality, Commercial and Supply Chain, or any pair of areas under tension, often both have solid arguments. The clash is not always bad faith, it is different windows.

Specialisation is not the same as fragmentation

Antonio questions the mantra of "breaking the silos". Organisations need to specialise, and tension between areas can be healthy. The problem is not dividing the work, it is designing it as if the parts were independent.

• Specialisation enables focus and depth.
• Fragmentation appears when interdependencies are lost.
• More meetings do not automatically mean a better shared view.

That leads to a useful distinction, specialise without fragmenting and integrate without homogenising. If we ask for collaboration while we only reward local optimisation, the system pushes against the speech.

When talent covers a design failure

One of the sharpest ideas in the article is about boundary spanners, the people who cross borders, translate languages and make things happen between departments. They add a lot, and they can also end up overloaded.

Antonio's question is uncomfortable and necessary, are we celebrating talent or masking connections the organisational design never solved? The better those people perform, the less visible the underlying problem becomes.

Design better windows, don't tear down every wall

The proposal is not that everyone should understand the whole system all the time. It is to design mechanisms, such as the advice process or the All Blacks' Team Behind the Team structures, that widen the visible reality precisely when a decision is needed, without erasing specialisation.

• What information does each area receive before deciding?
• What consequences of its decision can it observe?
• Which behaviours do we actually reward?
• Do we depend on specific people to join what the org chart keeps apart?

It closes with an invitation we share, before blaming the department next door, ask which part of reality you are not seeing.

Read Pars non totum on LinkedIn

Here we only pick up the main thread. The full article develops examples, references (Herbert Simon, Lawrence and Lorsch, Laloux) and the bridge to elite sport performance.

Open "Pars non totum" on LinkedIn