Why Every Company Has Work No Org Chart Captures
Generalists and specialists stop competing for the same ground the moment you separate the work. In a dynamic teaming model, generalists carry the shifting, undefined work that no job description captures. That adds structural slack to the team, the way a bridge is engineered to move in wind. Specialists then stay on the work they were actually hired for.
The mistake most founders make is hiring a specialist to absorb overflow that has no owner, then wondering why the specialist is underperforming at the thing they were brilliant at during the interview.
It's a common thought that a growing company's problem is missing roles. You look at the org chart, spot the gap, and open a req. However, the work that actually slows a company down is rarely the work you can name on an org chart. It sits between named roles, it changes shape every quarter, and it belongs to whoever notices it first, which is usually the founder.
Some of what tends to live in that gap:
- Go-to-market motions that touch sales, marketing and product at once
- Customer success handoffs that nobody owns end to end
- Business ops cleanup after a tool or a process changes
- AI workflow experiments that need a person to run them, not a vendor to sell them
- Community, partnerships and the chief of staff work that only exists when the founder is underwater
Those are the functions oAT covers, and they show up in almost every engagement because they show up in almost every company [1].
Generalists as Structural Slack
Slack is an engineering decision
Slack has a bad reputation in business because it looks like waste on a spreadsheet. Tom DeMarco's argument is that organizations optimized for total efficiency lose the capacity to respond to anything they did not plan for [2]. A team with zero give is a team where every new problem displaces an existing commitment.
Physical structures make the same trade explicitly. Bridges are built with expansion joints so the deck can move as temperature and load change, because a structure that cannot move cracks [3]. Tall buildings carry dampers so they can sway in wind without transmitting the motion into damage [4].
What give looks like on a team
A generalist is the expansion joint. When the quarter's shape changes, the generalist moves and the rest of the structure holds. Britt put the model's strangeness plainly:
"It's yeah, it's it's how different we are and why it's so hard to describe of all trades as a company because I'm like, well, we're not a marketplace, but there is a little bit of the feel of the matching, right?"
What This Frees Specialists to Do
When somebody else is holding the undefined work, a defined-role hire gets their depth back. The payoff is specific:
- Uninterrupted depth. A demand gen lead runs demand gen, rather than inheriting billing questions because they answered one politely in February.
- Scopes that stay true. Specialist scopes drift when unowned work lands on the nearest willing person. Give that work an owner and the scope holds.
- Faster ramp. New specialists onboard into a working system, because someone has already built the process around the role.
- Honest performance signal. You can tell whether a specialist is strong at their craft when their craft is what they spent the quarter doing.
- Retention. People leave roles that quietly became three roles.
Kelsey has watched this play out across engagements: "specialists can thrive more in an organization where there are generalists and we've seen that time and time again."
Why Generalists Work Better in a Collective Than Solo
A generalist working alone hits two ceilings. The first is isolation. The second is competence: the breadth that makes a generalist valuable also means there will be a week where the client needs something the generalist can only do adequately.
Kelsey lived both:
"I was a solo generalist before I met you and I was like I don't know how I mean this sucks you know working by myself for different organizations not having the community"
The fix is community with real reach into other people's skills. When a client needs a go-to-market strategy, a finance view and a customer success rebuild in the same quarter, the embedded generalist stays the constant relationship and pulls in the right mix behind them. The client keeps one person who knows their business. The generalist stops pretending to be all nine functions at once.
Rigid Roles and Dynamic Teaming, Side by Side
| Rigid org chart | Dynamic teaming with generalist slack | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of design | The role | The problem |
| Response to change | Re-org, or quiet scope creep | Realignment of people, tools and agreements |
| Where unowned work lands | On the nearest willing person | With a named generalist |
| Scope | Frozen at signing | Revisited as the business moves |
| Specialist experience | Depth diluted by overflow | Depth protected |
| Source of stability | The agreement will not change | Everyone agreed change is coming |
The second column is harder to sell because it sounds less certain. In practice it is the more stable of the two, because the instability was always there and only one of these models planned for it.
Someone Has to Watch the Seams
Dynamic teaming fails when nobody holds the whole picture. Kelsey's role at oAT, head of alignment, exists for exactly that reason: listening to the health of finance, product, delivery and customers at the same time, and clearing the blockers between them before they harden into a turf fight.
The questions that work asks, every week:
- Where are two functions optimizing against each other without knowing it?
- Which conversation is being avoided because it's uncomfortable?
- What did we agree to three months ago that the business has since outgrown?
- Is fear driving a decision that has a perfectly reasonable answer?
You do not need a person titled this way to do it. You do need somebody whose job includes coherence, or the seams go unwatched.
how We Do: Designing Slack Into a Team on Purpose
- Inventory the unowned work. Two weeks, one list. Everything you personally touched that is not in your job description, plus everything your specialists touched that is not in theirs.
- Sort by shape, not by function. Mark each item stable or shifting. Stable work with clear boundaries is a specialist hire. Shifting work is generalist work.
- Name an owner for the shifting pile. One person, embedded, in your tools, with standing permission to reprioritize as the quarter moves.
- Protect the specialists explicitly. Tell them what is now out of scope and who has it. Unstated protection does not hold.
- Build realignment into the agreement. Set a cadence to revisit scope. The organization is not frozen at the moment you signed [2].
- Give the generalist reach. Access to other operators for the weeks when the need runs deeper than one person's range [5].
Where Generalist Slack Breaks Down
| What you're seeing | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| The generalist is busy and nothing has improved | The shifting work was never inventoried, so the role became a catch-all with no priority |
| Specialists resent the generalist | Boundaries were moved without being explained |
| Work stalls at handoffs | Nobody is watching coordination across the seams [6] |
| Scope feels stale by month three | The agreement had no realignment cadence |
Every one of these is a design problem rather than a people problem, which is good news: design problems are fixable in a week.
What This Changes About Your Next Hire
Specialists remain essential. Deep craft is deep craft, and there is no generalist substitute for a great engineer or a great performance marketer. What changes is the order of operations. Before you hire depth, find out how much of your bottleneck is actually undefined work with no owner. Cover that first, and the specialist you hire next gets to be the person you interviewed.
Britt Gage founded oAT after a decade-plus as an early-stage operator, COO and chief of staff, from knowing what it feels like to hold too much at once [1]. The model is an answer to that specific feeling, and the answer starts with giving the fuzzy work a home.
FAQ
What is 'dynamic teaming'?
Dynamic teaming is a way of building teams around problems instead of fixed functions, where the people, tools and agreements realign as the business changes. The premise is that a scope signed twelve months ago describes a company that no longer exists. Stability comes from everyone agreeing in advance that change is coming and committing to support each other through it.
Do specialists still have a place if a company also uses generalists?
Yes. Deep specialist craft is irreplaceable for stable, well-bounded work such as engineering, design or performance marketing. Generalists take the shifting work that has no clear owner, which protects specialist focus. Kelsey's observation from oAT engagements is that specialists thrive more in organizations that also have generalists.
Why compare team structure to bridge architecture?
Bridges include expansion joints so the structure can move as load and temperature change, because a rigid structure cracks under stress it cannot absorb. Teams behave the same way: an organization with no flexible capacity turns every unplanned demand into a displaced commitment. A generalist provides the give that lets the rest of the structure hold.
Is this meant to replace full-time specialist hires?
No. An embedded generalist covers work that does not justify or fit a full-time specialist role, and often clarifies which specialist role to hire next. Many companies run both at once: specialists on stable depth, a generalist on the shifting middle. oAT sells engagements shaped around what a specific company needs at a specific size.
References
- of All Trades. https://weofalltrades.com
- DeMarco, Tom. Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. Broadway Books, 2001.
- "Expansion joint." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_joint
- "Tuned mass damper." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_mass_damper
- Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Riverhead Books, 2019. https://davidepstein.com/range/
- Haas, Martine, and Mark Mortensen. "The Secrets of Great Teamwork." Harvard Business Review, June 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-secrets-of-great-teamwork