The org chart is a useful document. What it does not tell you is how your organisation actually operates. The gap between the formal org chart and the actual operating reality is almost always significant — and the size of that gap is one of the most reliable predictors of whether a scaling business will hold together under pressure or begin to fracture.
Every organisation has two structures operating simultaneously. The first is the formal structure — the one on the chart. The second is the informal structure — the one that actually determines how work gets done, how decisions get made, and where power genuinely resides.
The informal structure includes: who people actually go to when they need a real answer. Who has the credibility to move a decision forward by endorsing it. Who can kill an initiative with a single conversation without ever being formally involved. These people are not always senior. They are not always visible. But they run the place.
For any leader attempting to drive change — scaling the organisation, entering new markets, restructuring, or integrating an acquisition — failure to understand the informal structure is one of the most common and costly mistakes made.
Change initiatives that are structurally sound, well-resourced, and logically designed fail because they generate resistance from informal power centres that were never mapped, never engaged, and never brought into the design process. That resistance is rarely visible and rarely named. It appears as slow implementation, persistent misalignment, and a gap between what the leadership team believes is happening and what is actually occurring three levels down.
The informal power map of an organisation cannot be found in any document. It has to be built through observation and conversation. The starting point is a set of questions most leadership teams never ask systematically:
When a difficult cross-functional decision needs to be made, who is always in the room — formally or informally? When an initiative stalls, whose support consistently gets it moving again? When new employees are trying to understand how things really work here, who do they go to? Who are the connectors — the people who seem to know everyone and whom everyone seems to trust?
What you are looking for is: informal influencers (people whose endorsement accelerates decisions), informal gatekeepers (people whose opposition quietly kills them), and informal connectors (people who bridge silos and enable cross-functional work).
The purpose of mapping the informal organisation is not to restructure around it. Informal power structures exist because they serve a genuine organisational need, and attempting to formalise them often destroys the value they create.
The purpose is to design change with it rather than against it. This means engaging informal influencers in the design of significant initiatives before launch, not after. It means understanding which gatekeepers need to be brought into alignment before any change reaches the people they influence.
Most leadership teams spend significant time and resource on formal organisational design — structures, processes, accountabilities, incentive systems. These things matter. The organisations that perform best are also the ones whose leaders have invested equivalent attention in understanding the informal reality underneath the formal design.
The org chart tells you what should happen. The informal map tells you what will. Build both.
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