Leading with the label
I’ve been sharing a few reflections on the 2025 DORA report and its team archetypes. What I like about the archetypes is that they help teams describe the conditions they’re in. But once that recognition happens, the question quickly becomes: what's next? Change efforts might turn towards new ways of working, new models, new tools, and sometimes new frameworks. This might be where the challenge begins; not with the ideas themselves, but with how they enter the room.
A while back, I wrote an article about not leading with the label — why starting with names like Wardley Mapping or Team Topologies can create resistance before teams have connected those ideas to their own problems. The DORA work has brought that back to mind; diagnosis benefits from shared language, while change benefits from starting with lived problems and outcomes. If you’re using the DORA archetypes right now, the interesting question might not be which framework comes next, but how you help teams explore change without overwhelming them upfront.
