I've been told to stay in my lane. More than once.

I've also had people who worked for me tell me that one of the reasons they trusted me was because I didn't.

That contradiction has stayed with me.

My teams didn't necessarily need to understand every dependency I was following. They didn't need to know why I was suddenly asking questions about Finance, Product, Sales, a contract, or some technical decision that appeared to have nothing to do with the thing directly in front of us.

They trusted that there was a reason.

Not blind trust. At least I hope not.

Something closer to: Kendra sees something connecting these things. I don't see the whole thing yet, but I trust that there is a whole thing.

That gave them permission to concentrate.

I could hold more of the surrounding architecture so they didn't have to hold all of it themselves.

Which has made me wonder what a lane actually is.

Organizations need boundaries. People need clear ownership. Not everybody inserting themselves into everything is systems thinking. Sometimes it's just interference.

But the work itself does not respect the lines on an org chart.

A customer moves across them.

Money moves across them.

Information moves across them.

Risk moves across them.

Consequences definitely move across them.

Boundaries are still useful

A salesperson makes a promise. That promise may become a product commitment, a contract term, a billing requirement, an implementation plan, a support expectation, a revenue forecast, and eventually an accounting entry.

From the customer's perspective, it is still one promise.

Internally, we may have divided responsibility for keeping it across seven teams.

That division can be useful. Specialization is useful.

It can also make the relationship between the pieces strangely difficult to see.

This may be one reason "stay in your lane" has always been hard for me. What another person experiences as crossing a boundary can feel, from inside my cognition, like following the information.

I see the dependency.

If something happening in Product changes what Sales can promise, which changes what Finance forecasts, which changes what Operations has to support, those aren't four unrelated subjects to me.

They're one system.

That doesn't mean my interpretation is always right.

Pattern recognition has its own seductions. Once you see connections everywhere, it becomes very easy to assume every connection matters, or that your view of the whole is more complete than it actually is.

I want ownership without blindness

Other people possess information I don't.

Boundaries can protect focus. They can preserve expertise. They can keep someone like me from turning every interesting dependency into everyone else's emergency.

So I don't think the lesson is that lanes are bad. I think there are at least two kinds of boundaries worth distinguishing. Some boundaries protect people's ability to do their jobs. Other boundaries prevent anyone from seeing the thing they're collectively building. Leadership requires knowing the difference.

And maybe systems work does too.

A lot of organizational dysfunction gets described as a communication problem. Sometimes it is. But sometimes everyone is communicating perfectly well inside structures that make the larger relationship invisible.

The question then isn't "How do we get these teams to communicate more?"

It might be: Who is responsible for the space between them?

Who sees the customer promise all the way through?

Who notices when optimizing one function moves the cost somewhere else?

Who can alter the system when the problem belongs to no single lane?

I don't think crossing boundaries is inherently virtuous.

But I no longer assume staying inside them is.