Whiteboard Reteaming
Roll the draft org chart out in public and let the people in it fix it.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Instead of designing a reorg in secret and announcing the final plan, leaders draft a starting-point team structure on whiteboards — team names, missions, open headcount, and every person's name — then physically roll it out and invite the affected people to critique it. Employees correct design mistakes leaders could not see and self-identify for roles they want. It is a middle grade of transparency between a back-room reorg and full open self-selection.
Origin
Helfand credits Christian Lyall at Spotify, whose story of reorganizing a large infrastructure team on whiteboards appears in Dynamic Reteaming. Helfand and her colleagues then ran the same play at Procore across an ~80-person platform organization. She names the more open variant — teams pitching for members in a self-selection marketplace — as practiced by Chris Smith at Redgate Software in Cambridge, UK.
Core principles
- 01Convening people to discuss anything works better with a starting point than a blank page.
- 02A draft is not a decision — but it must be clear who the decider is.
- 03People will happily take work you assumed nobody wanted; giving choice surfaces that.
- 04Transparency has grades — pick the grade of openness you can actually honor.
- 05Bias toward shorter deliberation; the more people you include, the more distracting a long process becomes.
How to run it
- 1
Draft the structure privately, as a starting point
Leaders spend a few weeks in a back office producing a first-pass design on whiteboards. Frame it explicitly as the beginning of a plan, not the plan.
- 2
Put everything on the board
Include each team's name, each team's mission, the number of open hiring slots across all the teams, and the names of people in their existing positions. Hiding any of these turns the exercise back into a back-room reorg.
Pro tip Showing open headcount is what converts the exercise from 'here is your fate' into 'here are your opportunities'.
- 3
Roll the whiteboards out and invite critique
Bring the affected people to the boards. Have courage — it is genuinely uncomfortable, because it touches everyone's day-to-day. Explicitly invite feedback on the design.
Watch out Expect this to be triggering for some people. Do it together, with leadership present, not by email.
- 4
Collect corrections and self-nominations
People will identify mistakes in the design ('this team would be better over here, and here's why') and raise their hand for opportunities ('I'm interested in this, might I be considered?'). Route each into a real conversation.
- 5
Name the decider and time-box the process
Be explicit about who decides — sometimes people participate, sometimes they don't (you don't hold a standup on whether to get acquired). Bias toward a short window; do not deliberate forever.
Pro tip Use the RIDE framework to make the decision rights explicit before you open the boards.
Watch out The longer this runs, the more brain power it drains from the actual work.
In the wild
Inspired by Christian Lyall's Spotify story, Helfand's team at Procore was splitting a platform organization of roughly 80 people from two large clusters of teams into three. After a few weeks of private drafting, they rolled the whiteboards out — team names, missions, open slots, and everyone's current position — and invited the org to react.
→ People identified design mistakes the leaders had made and surfaced internal opportunities they wanted to be considered for, instead of the plan landing as a back-room decree.
Chris Smith's team at Redgate in Cambridge runs regular open self-selection reteaming events when strategic priorities change: teams give pitches describing what they are looking for, and people declare their interest.
→ A more open grade of transparency than the whiteboard variant, showing that reteaming openness is a dial, not a binary.
Common mistakes
Assuming nobody will want the unglamorous team
Leaders pre-assign people to work they assume nobody wants. In practice people can be delighted by work another person finds boring — but only if you give them the choice to raise their hand.
Opening it up without naming a decider
Participation without decision clarity turns into a consensus stalemate. Being clear on who the decision maker is in a change is essential before you invite input.
Letting it run for weeks and weeks
Including more people makes an unbounded process increasingly distracting. Proceed as expediently as you can.
Is it for you?
Best for
A leader planning a multi-team reorg (roughly 20-100 people) who wants input and retention rather than a shock announcement.
Not ideal for
Changes where the outcome is genuinely non-negotiable and confidential — an acquisition, or a layoff — where inviting input would be theatre.
From the transcript
“it had the team structure with everyone's names on it had like the name of the team the mission of the team how many open…”
“I call it whiteboard ret teaming in my book”
“I bias towards shorter as opposed to longer you don't want to deliberate on this forever”
From the episode
The art and wisdom of changing teams
Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)