Truth Behind The Truth

I’m now six months into a new full-time gig, just about the time when it feels like getting settled. As I was going back through old drafts to get published, this one felt particularly applicable in this moment.

Every organization has two org charts: the official one, which is usually traceable via something like Outlook Org Explorer or internal tooling like the one at Amazon whose name I won’t say (but that I enjoyed immensely, and even wrote software to interact with it programmatically).

The other is less obvious, rarely written down, and can only be discovered through concerted social effort. It’s also the more important of the two, because it’s through the multi-layered collaborative connections woven throughout a company where the actual work gets done.

It’s incumbent on leaders to make some efforts to bring these two org charts into alignment (a Platonic ideal of sorts), but it’s ultimately not possible, because human collaboration is complex. Complaining about the fact of two hierarchies and sets of inter-relationships doesn’t help either (believe me, I’ve tried). The only path forward, even when it’s frustrating, is to accept the reality and operate within it.

In short: know how your org works.