Soft Roles as Organizational Cross Beams

Beyond the obvious team scoped function of soft roles, they also perform important functions at the organizational level. Of these two common types are:

Glue-people who are necessary to tie teams together, build cohesion, connect the dots between silos that are not effectively communicating with each other, and establish an unofficial foundation of trust that prevent teams from collapsing when the trust between leadership and their underlings inevitably crumbles.
Immune Systems are the people necessary to stop the company from shooting themselves in their corporate feet. These are the people who internally oppose measures that would cause widespread collapse of user-trust, violate privacy policies, open up the organization to litigation, irreversibly misuse customer data, unnecessarily jeopardize the operational stability or security of critical systems, or commit war crimes and human rights violations.

Individual Failure vs. Organizational Failures

Unfortunately all the lessons we learn about human fallibility tend to be forgotten the higher up the reporting chain we go. So even though we expect and build in mechanisms to deal with individual failures, we tend not to build mechanisms to deal with organizational failures. We assume that organizations fail less often than individuals. The opposite is true. Organizations are made up of people. The more people you have the more likely it is that one of them will fail. The more people you have the more likely it is that they will fail in a way that is catastrophic to the organization.