As organizations grow, value streams rarely remain independent. They become intertwined through:
- shared platforms
- specialist teams
- governance structures
- approval processes
- common services
This creates what many organizations experience as operational complexity. In reality, the problem is dependency density.
Multiple value streams compete for:
- the same people
- the same decisions
- the same systems
- the same priorities
The consequence is systemic congestion. One delayed dependency creates downstream disruption across multiple flows. Organizations often respond by adding:
- coordination meetings
- governance layers
- planning cycles
This increases complexity further. High-performing organizations recognize that tangled value streams are not necessarily a scaling problem. They are an architectural problem. The solution is not eliminating all dependencies. The solution is reducing unnecessary ones and making the remaining dependencies visible, manageable, and strategically aligned.
Erlend Hollebosch