This is one of the longest games of hot potato and musical chairs I've ever seen. But someone is graciously paying for it all, so the game must go on.
There is no cohesion, structure, guidance, or any proper training among teams. There's very little (serious) interest in building any long-term value, and zero accountability from management for all this. Every quarter there is a new direction, a new mission, a new initiative, or a new goalpost. Half the time things are getting canned, the other half things are getting to customers half-baked. No one can explain why, and the further up you go, the more vague and arbitrary it gets.
If you peel back the onion of despair, some teams are barely treading water with a view to the next quarter at the farthest. Teams are frantically pleasing managers, who are frantically pleasing directors, ad infinitum. Just keep swimming until you can't, then keep swimming some more. Many have already drowned without much commotion, but no one dares look back, and the quarterly KPIs must flow.
Management is perpetually in a state of a puppet learning to walk, except it's head and limbs keep falling off (or forcibly removed), only to be haphazardly repaired with twigs and glue. The good leaders have all left, and the ones that still remain, their passions extinguished.
You can chalk it up to growing pains, but after so many years I'd describe it more like the pain that accompanies a cancerous growth.
I don't write this lightly - I've seen my fair share of infighting, undermining, rug-pulling, factionalism, power struggles, and turf wars - and all before our morning stand-up. As everyone has said before, you better be sure you are on the winning side, or you end up in the mud. My 2 cents, this culture is better suited for a civil war in a dictatorship state.
