Every time I join a new organization or inherit a new team, someone hands me the org chart. I’ve learned to treat it the way you’d treat cached data: a reasonable approximation of something that was accurate at some point, and probably not right now.
The boxes show who reports to whom. They don’t tell you who engineers actually consult when they’re stuck, or who anyone will tell the truth to when something is going wrong. Those things don’t live in any chart. They live in patterns of behavior accumulated over months or years, shifting constantly without announcement.
The boxes tell you who reports to whom. They never tell you who people actually trust.
David Krackhardt and Jeffrey Hanson mapped this gap systematically in a 1993 HBR paper I keep returning to. Their argument: the formal organization is the skeleton; the informal organization is the nervous system. What actually moves through an organization isn’t information traveling down reporting chains — it’s relationships doing quiet, invisible work that no hierarchy designed.
They identified three distinct networks worth mapping. The first — the advice network — shows who people actually consult for technical guidance: the real experts, independent of title or seniority. Separate from that is the trust network, which shows who people will share sensitive information with and count on when things get politically complicated. A third, the communication network, tracks who talks to whom about work, which reveals where information pools and where it stops flowing entirely.
The most useful finding in the paper: managers’ mental models of these networks are usually wrong. You can map the relationships immediately around you with some accuracy. Past that, assumptions take over — and assumptions are where organizations quietly break.
Their clearest case study involves a CEO who appointed Tom Harris to lead a strategic task force. Harris was central in the advice network: people relied on him technically, and his knowledge was genuinely deep. The task force deadlocked almost immediately. Network mapping showed Harris was near-isolated in the trust network. People didn’t believe he would advocate for their interests in closed rooms. The technical credibility that got him the appointment couldn’t substitute for the trust credibility the work required.
The CEO brought in a co-leader who was central in the trust network — someone people believed would tell them the truth and fight for their concerns behind closed doors. The task force unstuck. Not because the technical work changed, but because people finally felt safe enough to be honest in the room.
I’ve watched versions of this play out without the explicit mapping. An engineer whose initiatives keep stalling — not because the ideas are bad, but because they haven’t built the trust relationships that make people willing to absorb disruption on their behalf. A leader with formal authority to direct a change, finding the change resisted in ways that are difficult to name, because the resistance is happening in networks they can’t see.
Conway’s Law adds the engineering-specific dimension. Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, building on Melvin Conway’s 1968 observation, argue that organizations produce software systems that mirror their communication structures. The org chart doesn’t just describe how decisions get made — it shapes what gets built. When two teams rarely talk, the systems they own will have weak, poorly-designed interfaces at their boundary. One-directional information flow within a team shows up in the architecture.
The chart is doing active work, not passive description. A stale one is generating the wrong software as a side effect.
What I’ve started doing: before any team restructure, I try to understand the informal networks first. Who do engineers actually go to when they’re blocked? Whose opinions carry weight in technical debates regardless of title? Where does information slow down or disappear? The answers are rarely where the org chart would suggest.
Restructuring without this picture tends to produce the same dysfunction in a different arrangement. You’ve moved the boxes, but the nervous system is still the old one. In some cases, the restructure severs the informal connections that were holding things together — the reorganization succeeds on paper and breaks something essential that nobody can name afterward.
If you’re designing against only the formal chart, you’re working from a model that was already out of date when you picked it up.
If you’re navigating a restructure or trying to understand why something isn’t moving the way it should — reach out. These things are almost always clearer once you map the network you can’t see.
David Krackhardt and Jeffrey Hanson — “Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart” (HBR, 1993)
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais — Team Topologies