As a young professional entering an organisation, you'll encounter rigid structures: defined roles, departmental silos, and policies designed for control, governance, and risk management.
These were created with good intentions, but strictly adhering to them will limit your progress. In the AI era, you must strategically challenge boundaries, distinguishing real ones (for valid reasons like ethics or legality) from imaginary ones rooted in inertia or outdated thinking.
Here's why dismantling unnecessary boundaries should be a deliberate strategy (approached professionally, of course):
They hold you and the organization back
Resources remain locked in silos
- This is common: Marketing avoids developers, designers ignore sales, and territories are fiercely guarded to maintain comfort zones.
Hierarchical gatekeeping exacerbates the issue
- Many leaders are poor at true leadership, viewing their role as controlling everything within their budget.
- They thrive until the organisation nears collapse, then exit amid false praise—having been a drag all along.
- Leaders who demand vertical approvals and vague denials without explanation are unhelpful and should be bypassed where possible.
Staying under such leaders stunts your growth
- Silo specialists rarely develop adjacent skills, rendering them obsolete as AI highlights inefficiencies. Avoid this trap.
Cross functional efforts trigger an "innovation tax"
- Collaboration often leads to extra meetings, sign offs, and politics, prompting people to go rogue, resulting in disjointed outcomes.
The obvious solution
- Leaders should allocate resources and empower teams for success.
- However, most organisations are dominated by risk averse types—accountants, governance experts, and politicians—who sideline innovators and engineers.
- This toxicity is widespread, so plan long-term exits or build your own venture (though even there, similar patterns can emerge).
Before challenging boundaries, be deliberate:
- Role limits: Review your job description—what's explicitly stated versus implied? Look for flexibility.
- Departmental walls: Identify who enforces them—is it documented or just habitual? Often, everyone agrees they're outdated but complies anyway.
- Formal processes: Who defines and controls them? How rigid are they? Can you accelerate by coordinating directly?
- Potential blockers: Will anyone object if you cross lines? Some rules exist but are ignored in practice.
Why advocate for boundary dissolution
Being a disruptor in organizations, society, or school, can be isolating. You might absorb criticism without credit, as others later claim victories from your groundwork, especially in resistant environments.
Yet, the rewards are significant:
Faster innovation
- Sidestep politics to focus on execution.
Superior skill stack
- Develop deep expertise plus broad, adjacent abilities, a true superpower.
Unified vision
- By handling building, designing, coding, and marketing yourself, you avoid fragmented handoffs and subpar results.
Visibility and momentum
- Success attracts followers in merit-based settings (though rare).
- Empowered teams: Colleagues spot opportunities over obstacles, enabling rapid prototyping.
How to get started
Map the environment
- Document people, rules, role limits, and processes to calculate the true cost of compliance.
Cleverly circumvent obstacles
- Avoid breaking critical rules (e.g., data privacy or ethics).
- Negotiate directly with key players to streamline—most will assist if approached reasonably.
Leverage AI for quick prototypes
- Build and demo apps, documents, or agents without endless approvals, using mock data to prove concepts vertically.
Declare your wins
- Highlight achievements explicitly: "I bypassed hurdles to deliver X."
- Discuss remaining barriers to scaling and collaborate on solutions.
Watch your back
- Overstepping can invite backlash, so gauge limits and have reversal plans.
- Iterate carefully, going too far risks alienating others by encroaching on their turf.
This is why high performers often leave unless they're owners or executives: Navigating low- evel boundary politics is draining, and successes go unrecognised.
Conclusion
Traditional boundaries suit stable times- we're far from that now.
Speed is the ultimate asset.
Blindly respecting silos across roles, departments, and hierarchies is counterproductive.
I'm not advising you to quit immediately, but devise a long term plan for agency it's key to success unless you want a routine, low impact role.