Never, Ever Play With a Smoo
Why organisations keep enforcing rules nobody remembers making
In Julia Donaldson’s The Smeds and the Smoos (illustrated by Axel Scheffler), two groups of creatures live on the same planet but want nothing to do with each other. The Smeds are red. The Smoos are blue. The rules are simple and absolute:
According to Grandfather Smed, you should “Never, ever play with a Smoo.”
According to Grandmother Smoo, you should “Never, ever play with a Smed.”
No one can quite explain why. No one needs to. The rule is old enough and loud enough that it has become the organising principle of daily life.
If you’ve spent any time inside a large organisation, or even a mid-sized one with enough history, you’ll recognise this dynamic immediately. Two teams, two departments, two offices, two professional tribes who occupy the same structure but operate as though a wall runs between them. They may share a building or a stated mission. But they do not share trust. The fracture is so embedded in daily practice that most people on either side couldn’t tell you when it started or what originally caused it. They just know the rule: you don’t work with them.
This piece is about how those fractures form, why they persist long after anyone can remember the original cause, and, at the end, what it actually takes to shift them.
The origins are usually disappointing
When you trace an entrenched organisational divide back to its source, you rarely find a dramatic betrayal or an irreconcilable clash of values. What you tend to find is something smaller: a restructure that split a team in two, a hiring decision that felt like a slight, a project that went wrong and left behind a residue of blame. Sometimes it’s even more banal: two leaders who didn’t get on, a turf dispute over a client or a budget line, a merger that forced two cultures into proximity without any real integration work.
And sometimes there isn’t even a grievance to point to, just difference. In Donaldson’s book, the Smeds and the Smoos don’t share any history of conflict. They wear different shoes, style their hair differently, listen to different music and move in different ways. And that turns out to be enough. The same logic shows up in organisations more often than people like to admit. Difference on its own can be enough to seed a fracture, particularly when nothing in the wider culture actively pulls people across it.
The point is that the severity of the original cause has almost no relationship to the depth of the eventual fracture. A minor grievance can calcify into decades of mutual avoidance if the conditions are right. This is especially true in large organisations, where it’s easier to stop talking to people you don’t need to talk to on a daily basis.
The Art of Asking Questions is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Why fractures outlive their cause
The interesting question isn’t really how these divides start, but why they survive so long after the original cause has ceased to matter. Three things tend to keep them alive.
The fracture becomes a story
At some point, the specific grievance gets replaced by a narrative. “They don’t understand what we do.” “They always get the resources.” “They think they’re better than us.” These stories are rarely examined because they don’t need to be: they circulate as received wisdom, passed from old hands to new joiners during onboarding, lunch breaks and corridor conversations. The narrative does the work of maintaining the divide without anyone having to make a conscious choice to sustain it.
What makes these stories so resilient is that they’re self-confirming. Once you believe that another team doesn’t respect your work, you start interpreting ambiguous signals as evidence. A delayed email becomes a deliberate snub. A meeting you weren’t invited to becomes proof of exclusion. The story filters perception, and filtered perception feeds the story.
The fracture does identity work
This is the part that makes repair genuinely difficult. Organisational fractures actively contribute to defining groups: knowing who “we” are depends partly on knowing who “they” are and how we’re different. The operations team defines itself partly against the strategy team’s perceived detachment from reality. The creatives define themselves partly against the commercial team’s perceived indifference to design. Fractures give people ways to locate themselves and to feel coherent as a group, to know what they stand for.
This means that a fracture can become a resource that people draw on, often without realising it. And any attempt to close the gap threatens something that people are inadvertently using, which is why well-intentioned collaboration initiatives so often meet passive resistance.
The keepers of the fracture are the most invested
The authority figures who maintain the “never play with a Smoo” rule aren’t cruel or self-serving. They believe, sincerely, that the prohibition protects their group. In organisations, the people who sustain fractures are often very loyal and embedded in their groups. They’ve been around long enough to “remember what happened last time.” Their resistance to bridge-building isn’t cynicism, but a form of institutional protectiveness that feels, from the inside, like wisdom.
This makes the dynamic hard to challenge, because the people you’d most need to bring on board are the people who have the most invested in the current arrangement. They have status, knowledge and relationships that are all structured around the existing divide. Asking them to rethink it means asking them to reconsider part of their professional identity.
I've turned the patterns described in this article into a twelve-point diagnostic you can use to assess a fracture in your own organisation. Free download below! 👇
What the Smeds and the Smoos get right
The resolution in Donaldson’s book is worth paying attention to, because it captures something true about how these dynamics actually shift. The fracture ends because two young creatures — one Smed, one Smoo — ignore the rule entirely. They go off together, and when they’re discovered missing, the crisis of their absence forces both sides into cooperation for the first time.
This is more realistic than most organisational change literature would suggest. Entrenched fractures rarely dissolve through planned interventions alone. Something has to disrupt the equilibrium, like a crisis, a structural change or a new entrant who doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the old rules. The disruption creates a temporary space where the usual patterns can’t operate, and, in that space, new relationships become possible.
The uncomfortable part is what comes next. In the book, the two groups reconcile fully and joyfully. In organisations, it’s messier. The old guard feels undermined. Some people grieve the loss of a clear identity. And new patterns of cooperation are fragile and easily overwhelmed by old habits.
Six moves that help
If you’ve read this far, you’ll understand why I’m not offering a framework but something more grounded and honest. Here are six practical actions that, used together and sustained over time, can shift the conditions that keep a fracture in place:
Highlight the fracture without assigning blame. The single most useful thing you can do is make the dynamic visible and speakable. Most organisational fractures thrive on being tacitly understood but never explicitly discussed. Naming it (“We’ve noticed that these two teams rarely collaborate, and we’d like to understand why”) removes some of the power of the unspoken narrative. The key is to frame it as a structural observation rather than an accusation. The moment one side feels blamed, they’ll retreat further into their own story.
Map the stories alongside the structure. Org charts will tell you where the formal boundary is. They won’t tell you what the fracture means to the people inside it. Before trying to fix anything, invest time in understanding the narratives on both sides. What do people believe about the other group? What do they believe about themselves in contrast? Where do those stories come from?
Find the boundary-crossers. In almost every fractured organisation, there are people who already work across the divide, often informally and without recognition. They may be junior enough to have missed the original indoctrination, or they may simply have a task that requires them to deal with both sides. These people are your best source of intelligence about what the fracture actually costs in practice, and they’re also evidence that crossing the boundary is possible.
Set up shared problems, not company socials. Team-building days and cross-departmental drinks are the standard prescription for organisational fractures, and they almost never work on their own. What does work is giving people from both sides a genuine problem to solve together, one where neither group has the full picture and cooperation is the only route to a result. The goal is to create conditions where people experience the other group’s competence directly, rather than through the filter of the existing narrative.
Watch the onboarding. If you want to know how a fracture reproduces itself, look at what new joiners are told in their first fortnight. This is where the stories get transmitted most efficiently. Changing the formal onboarding programme is a start, but the real transmission happens informally. You can’t control all of this, but you can be deliberate about giving new people early, positive contact with people on the other side of the divide, before the narrative has had time to settle.
Accept that repair is partial and ongoing. The Donaldson ending, where everyone reconciles and lives happily on a planet together, is a children’s book resolution. In organisations, fractures don’t get solved once and for all: they get managed and made less damaging. The goal is building enough connective tissue across the divide that the fracture stops being the dominant organising principle.
None of this is quick or clean, but if you're inside an organisation where the rule is 'never, ever play with a Smoo,' and nobody can remember why, the first step is simply noticing that the rule exists. And then asking what it would cost to break it.
Enjoyed this piece? Become a paid member and get my Consulting with AI prompt library, the full Asking Questions Like a Pro course ($199 standalone), practical templates from a decade of fieldwork, and discounts on many other resources. 🔗 See everything included in the paid tier.
Great piece Andrea, and yes this is a real problem in every organization I ever worked over the last 35 years or so. The Robbers Cave Experiment, for me is the quintessential read on how to fix this through shared awareness AND dependency. It’s not easy to set up, but when the work requires both sides to succeed, behavior is now incentivized to change.
This is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in a while! The "Never, ever play with a smoo" rule plays out in some form in all sorts of settings – even in relationships between two individuals. It was amazing to read this and scan through my relationships through this lens.