How to scale without slowing down: a leader's guide to economies of empowerment
Read Matthew Skelton's latest article on Forbes Business Council.
Economies of empowerment enable organizations to achieve outsized outcomes by focusing on the agency of individuals, teams, and departments.
Choosing between optimizing for speed or scale? Go for speed, and you get fast time-to-market and operational agility in exchange for waste and duplication. Focusing on scale delivers you cost efficiency, standardization, and simplified management, but at the expense of pace. I've watched this pattern repeat across industries for years.
Economies of empowerment provide an ideal path to simplified transformation. This approach offers the benefits of both speed and scale, delivering value faster with fewer blockers, enabling recurring cost savings, and maintaining high team engagement and satisfaction.
When discussing economies of empowerment, four factors stand out:
Designing organizational infrastructure for agency
Using ‘vending machine‘ self-service discipline via APIs to aid value flow
Treating compliance as an enabler to enhance agency
Leveraging active knowledge diffusion to uplift engagement, awareness, and alignment
These are not the only four things that you’ll need, but they are central to the approach.
Design organizational infrastructure that enables true autonomy
Empowerment requires structural foundations that address two fundamental needs: ongoing stewardship of long-lived services and the realistic arrangement of the rapid, safe, and sustainable flow of value.
The key word here is ‘realistically’. Ignore team cognitive load, and you set your teams up to fail. When teams are overwhelmed by interdependencies, context switching, and unclear boundaries, autonomy becomes impossible.
The answer is to design teams around long-lived value streams with clear ownership boundaries, rather than constant reorganization. Establishing stable teams that steward specific services or products over time creates multiple independent value flows across your organization. These teams develop deep domain expertise and can evolve their services effectively without waiting on others.
This structure becomes your ‘infrastructure for agency’. Team Topologies practices and patterns to build the clear boundaries and stable interfaces needed for teams to operate autonomously while maintaining vital connections. The Team Topologies approach is equally effective for human teams and future integration of agentic AI, as both require the same trust, clarity, and bounded autonomy to function effectively.
In addition to these patterns and practices, the 2nd Edition of Team Topologies contains inspiring real-world examples of organizations using Team Topologies at scale to achieve extraordinary outcomes: millions in annual savings, rapid ROI, and faster time-to-value.
Create self-service platforms with a ‘vending machine’ mindset
One of the key operational principles for speed at scale is for internal and external providers to offer capabilities ‘as-a-service,’ as demonstrated over the past two decades by tech giants such as AWS and smaller players alike.
When internal teams offer capabilities, tools, and platforms as a service, the phrase ‘as-a-service’ can have different interpretations. Many leaders picture a white-gloved waiter who takes custom orders and delivers bespoke solutions on silver platters. This feels attentive, but it creates bottlenecks and absolutely won't scale.
What works is the ‘vending machine’ model. Platform teams curate restricted menus of well-maintained products and services accessible via APIs. Teams aligned to value streams check what's available and either use it or don't, just like a vending machine.
If a team needs something that's not currently available, they can request it, but there's a delay before that new item gets added. Think eight weeks, not eight minutes. The vending machine gets restocked, but on a schedule, not on demand.
This critical decoupling makes the model scalable and transformative. Teams can compose new products by bundling existing capabilities without waiting for anyone. You can get a database service, an authentication API, and a notification service, then combine them into something new, to be consumed internally or sold externally. Your organization becomes more programmable and teams can innovate autonomously.
Turn compliance into a competitive advantage
Most teams treat compliance as a blocker; merely mentioning the word can drop the room temperature. Teams operate in fear if rules remain undefined or undiscoverable, and every new decision requires risk assessment that slows everything down.
Consider a canoeist navigating a whitewater slalom course. With clearly visible guideposts marking the route, the athlete can plot the quickest path to success with speed and confidence. Without guideposts, every turn becomes a cautious search for hidden obstacles.
Compliance requirements work the same way. Clearly defined and automated controls become guideposts that empower teams to move faster. Your competitors face the same regulations, so navigating the route more quickly through illuminated compliance controls gives a market advantage.
Organizations that master the internal agility around regulatory requirements gain the capability to offer Compliance-as-a-Service externally. Compliance goes from a constraint to a differentiator. Treat compliance as a map of business opportunities to exploit rather than obstacles to avoid.
Actively share knowledge across organizational boundaries
Active Knowledge Diffusion (AKD) is a curated mechanism for spreading innovation and best practices across an organization to prevent the formation of isolated knowledge silos. In many organizations, information is "broadcast" indiscriminately through communication tools, which often results in noise, unintended duplication, and lost insights. AKD replaces this chaos with a structured, stewarded approach to sharing.
Technology and regulations change quickly, so isolating ideas and knowledge into pockets or silos within your organization results in slow adaptation, blocked value flow, and unnecessary friction.
When you adopt Active Knowledge Diffusion, you’re actively seeking out pockets of innovation and insight within your organization, deliberately spotlighting them, and curating this knowledge into focused programs rather than broadcasting indiscriminately. Instead of pushing every update into the chat tool, resulting in unintended duplication, you’re actively diffusing knowledge across the organization in a structured, stewarded way.
Internal conferences serve as a really powerful mechanism for this. Bring together people from different domains (say, the heads of marketing and databases) to present jointly on aligned goals. When people see these unlikely pairs on stage, they think, "Wow, that's really aligned." It’s an incredibly effective way to align business and technology in your organization.
Establishing a dedicated team tasked with finding beacons of excellence and making them visible across boundaries formalizes this approach. This creates systematic knowledge sharing that's curated and stewarded rather than random and chaotic.
Getting both speed and scale
Stop choosing between speed and scale, and instead, empower teams around smaller, well-defined things and actively curate what you share across boundaries.
Using economies of empowerment is the key to creating truly thriving workplaces where value streams and culture are stewarded by empowered and engaged teams. Environments where rapid delivery and cost efficiency coexist are becoming a reality. The infrastructure to build them already exists in your organization; it's probably just waiting for you to arrange it differently.
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