No team votes itself out of existence
Sadly, we’re not talking about that.
Let’s lead with what this image/video shows. A single engine connecting rod travels 3,000+ miles across North America to be prepared.
Aluminum from Tennessee → Pennsylvania → Canada → Mexico → finally Michigan.
This isn’t efficiency. It’s madness masquerading as optimization.
For over a hundred years, the brightest automotive minds focused on making better pistons, better connecting rods, better combustion.
They optimized the system and accepted so many assumptions.
They were siloed into groups optimizing cranks, pistons, rings, valves, camshafts, heads, blocks, intake manifolds — without the ability or interest in saying — “maybe we don’t all need to exist?
This is Conway’s Law in action: “Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.”
When you have a Pistons Department, a Connecting Rods Division, and a Camshaft Team, guess what? Your car will always have pistons, connecting rods, and camshafts.
Often, organizational design leads to the belief that a workflow is necessary because a team believes they exist to serve that workflow.
No team votes itself out of existence.
Then Tesla asked: “What if we didn’t need pistons at all?”
Result: 20 moving parts vs. 2,000.
That’s not incremental improvement—it’s a complete system re-think.
This is the difference between:
- Optimizing what exists
- Questioning why it exists
With my clients, I’m obsessed with this distinction.
When we apply AI to workflows, we don’t just make the old system faster—we ask if the system should exist at all. This means sometimes challenging our own organizational structures and beliefs.
The most dangerous words in business aren’t “let’s innovate”—they’re “that’s how we’ve always done it.
Your challenge: What complex, multi-step process in your organization needs to be completely reimagined, not just optimized? And what organizational silos are preventing that reimagining?
The next 100x improvement in your industry won’t come from doing the same things better.
It will come from someone brave enough to ask: “Do we need to do this at all?