The organisation behind the organisation chart
Whenever I entered a new organisation and needed to understand how it really worked, I learned to look for certain people.
In almost every organisation, there were a few. The person everyone eventually pointed you towards when the formal answer was no longer enough. Someone who understood the history behind decisions, knew how things actually worked across organisational boundaries, or could get something unstuck when the formal process could not.
Finding these people was often an important step in understanding the organisation beyond its structure and procedures.
They were enormously valuable. Their experience, judgement, relationships and willingness to take responsibility made the organisation more effective.
But over time, I began to recognise a less visible risk.
The very people who make an organisation work can also make its weaknesses difficult to see.
When strength becomes compensation
An organisation can produce satisfactory results without having an equally effective operating model.
Responsibilities are unclear. Processes do not connect properly. Decisions depend on informal relationships. Critical knowledge sits with individuals rather than in the organisation.
Yet work gets done.
Experienced and committed people bridge the gaps. They coordinate where formal interfaces fail, resolve ambiguities that governance leaves open and find practical solutions when established processes do not provide them.
From a management perspective, the outcome is reassuring.
Performance is acceptable. Problems are resolved. Customers are served.
The conclusion is often that the organisation works.
But there is an important distinction between an organisation performing because its system works and performing because capable people continually compensate for weaknesses in that system.
Both can produce similar results. They do not represent the same organisational strength.
Why the weakness remains invisible
The mechanism is subtle.
When capable people repeatedly resolve structural problems, their interventions gradually become part of how the organisation operates.
What began as an exception becomes routine.
Colleagues know whom to call. Managers trust that difficult situations will be resolved. Informal coordination compensates for unclear responsibilities or inadequate processes.
Because the problems rarely escalate, the underlying weaknesses may not receive management attention.
And because the results remain acceptable, there is little apparent reason to question the arrangements that produced them.
Individual effectiveness can therefore create a misleading signal of organisational effectiveness.
The organisation sees the result, but may not see the effort, judgement and informal coordination required to achieve it.
Over time, it can become structurally dependent on people whose contribution is not reflected in its formal operating model.
When the dependency becomes visible
The weakness often emerges only when something changes.
An experienced individual leaves. Workload increases. Complexity grows. The organisation needs to scale, standardise or operate across new boundaries.
The informal mechanisms that previously kept everything moving can no longer absorb the demands placed on them.
In one organisation, a large legacy system had been developed in-house and was maintained by one and a half FTE. When one of them was on holiday and the other ill, the system's performance dropped dramatically.
The system had appeared stable. But its operational resilience depended on the availability of two people.
What suddenly appears to be a new organisational problem may have existed for years.
The problem did not emerge when performance deteriorated. The organisation simply lost the capacity that had been compensating for it.
This is why apparently successful organisations can prove less resilient than their historical performance suggests. Their results depended on a small number of individuals continuously absorbing organisational friction.
Transformation can also expose these dependencies.
New systems, standardised processes and redesigned structures may disrupt the informal arrangements that previously kept the organisation functioning. Unless the underlying dependencies are understood and addressed, the change can reveal weaknesses that historical performance had concealed.
The executive distinction
The answer is not to eliminate informal collaboration, individual initiative or exceptional judgement. Those are organisational strengths.
Nor should every interaction be formalised or every decision prescribed. Excessive standardisation can remove the flexibility and personal initiative that make an organisation effective.
The executive challenge is to distinguish between two very different contributions.
Enabling the organisation: capable individuals use their expertise, initiative and relationships to improve how an otherwise functional system performs.
Compensating for the organisation: those same capabilities are repeatedly required because essential elements of the operating model do not function adequately without them.
These are not necessarily different people or even different behaviours. The distinction lies in whether the organisation depends on those interventions to function adequately.
The difference becomes apparent when the individual is no longer there.
Would the organisation continue functioning effectively, even if somewhat less exceptionally?
Or would responsibilities become unclear, decisions stall, interfaces break down and essential knowledge disappear?
That distinction matters for organisational resilience, scalability and leadership succession.
What this means
A leadership team cannot assess organisational effectiveness solely through outcomes. It also needs to understand how those outcomes are produced, and how dependent they are on individual intervention.