1. What is Meddlers? Meddlers is a visual and collaborative game that allows teams to discuss and redesign organizational structures playfully. It uses pieces representing people, roles, and teams (or organizational units) to simulate different possible arrangements—fostering understanding about team composition, group relationships, and value streams.
2. Why use this practice? Stimulates structuring conversations about roles and responsibilities within the organization.Facilitates the visualization of teams and connections in a simple and highly educational way.Allows exploring alternative scenarios and testing ideas before executing real changes to the org chart.Supports decisions on building agile structures , such as squads, chapters, guilds, or value streams.3. How to apply Meddlers a) Prepare the materials: Use hexagons to represent teams, hats for roles, and icons or photos for people.
b) Define a real challenge: For example: “How should we organize our product team?” or “How do we align our structure with the customer value stream?”.
c) Map the current structure: Distribute the people, roles, and teams exactly as they function today, mapping out the reality (the as-is state).
d) Test variations: Experiment with different models: cross-functional teams, reorganizing by customer, by technology, by strategic goals, etc.
e) Discuss the impacts: Analyze potential bottlenecks, role overload, collaboration gaps, or excessive dependencies between the teams generated in the new scenario.
f) Record learnings: Take a picture of the assembled map, describe the next steps, and document the hypotheses that will be tested in the real world.
Meddlers in action: turning organizational design into a tangible, visual, and collaborative process. 4. Practical examples A startup redesigned all of its squads in a 1-hour workshop using Meddlers. They only moved 3 people, but eliminated 80% of their delivery bottlenecks. A company with 3 hubs in different regions used the game to organize its guilds and clearly define regional and global roles. Marketing and product teams created shared role maps, facilitating daily collaboration and demand prioritization. 5. Observed benefits Promotes organizational transparency . Stimulates co-creation of the structure , engaging people in the change. Facilitates purpose- and value-based decisions , rather than just hierarchy-based ones. Reduces operational resistance and encourages a mature dialogue about roles . Conclusion Meddlers is a lightweight and powerful tool to design more effective, collaborative work structures aligned with the organization's real goals. By giving roles and connections a voice and a visual representation, the game helps teams better understand how they work—and how they can work even better.
Note: This article was generated with the help of artificial intelligence from the original content on the Management 3.0 – Meddlers website,
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