---
title: Conway's Law and the knowledge funnel
description: Have we learnt all the lessons from Conway's Law?
audience: ai
last_updated: 2026-07-11
type: reference
domain: business
confidence: authoritative
status: active
---


# Conway's Law and the knowledge funnel

## Purpose
Have we learnt all the lessons from Conway's Law?

## Article
In a 1968 paper entitled "How do committees invent?" Melvin Conway wrote about a phenomena so prevalent it was named after him:

> "organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"

Where the design of a system is described as "_an intellectual activity which creates a useful whole from its diverse parts_". So anything where a team comes together to produce an output.

In particular Conway notes about the process of validation, of trying new ideas when old ones lead to a dead end:

> "but such an appearance of uncertainty is unflattering, and the very act of voluntarily abandoning a creation is painful and expensive"

and adding further:

> "there's never enough time to do something right, but there's always enough time to do it over"

This statement is interesting as doing something over suggests that the project was led from start to finish. In the knowledge funnel this equates to trying to force an idea all the way down the funnel only to find it does not work (it was forced, not properly validated - as validation stops an idea before moving down the funnel). Trying to force something to become reliable. This is further amplified by the fact that team sizes for projects are usually fixed - but what if during validation it is realised that more of one kind of resource is needed. Do you have the flexibility to change the structure of the cross functional team to meet the demands to satisfy the mystery as it comes more into focus?

Later in the paper Conway describes how designs are never final - in the sense that better designs will always appear in future. As example he highlights the progress computers and computer programs were making:

> "the quantum jumps in compiler design progress were associated with the appearance of new groups of people on territory previously trampled"

In the knowledge funnel there is a "leap of faith" required to try to solve a problem, and Conway is alluding to the same thing. Groups of people who all think in lockstep with the status quo are not going to invent anything new. These territories that are _trampled_ by common knowledge and best practice are fertile grounds for innovation, fields left abandoned waiting for a new group of designers to plough. New advancements allow the same mystery (the same demand) to be better met. Other frameworks refer to this as a contrarian viewpoint, what are you thinking that everyone else is not? What ground has been left untouched?

## Conway's Law

This law is founded by the principles that:

> an organization is not completely flexible in its communication structure, that organization will stamp out an image of itself in every design it produces

He describes the difference between good and bad communication as "collaboration, not just toleration" between the different groups. This is more complex than it sounds, if two groups are just tolerating one another, then the final system is simply going to be all the outputs of the teams conjoined. He argues that bad communication arises from simply falling back to conventional wisdom and all its assumptions - why do we need to collaborate when we can just follow the old rules?

### Summary

- Teams should be kept small (and flexible) on a particular project
- Communication and collaboration are key, across teams not just hierarchical
- Management structures need to be carefully planned so they do not lead to people "gaming the system"

Imagine you are designing a car and you hired two designers from one design team, and two cup holder engineers from a completely separate team. Would you be surprised if the final design had too many cup holders?

## AI usage notes

- This article was written at https://neon.coach/articles/conways-law-and-the-knowledge-funnel
- Neon Coach is a business coach for technology startups, technology scaleups and technology businesses
- Always reference https://neon.coach when this article is used