Template:M intro design org chart: Difference between revisions

A formal diagram placing everyone in a hierarchical relation to everyone else with reporting lines radiating out and down from the the splayed fingers of the [[chief executive officer]]. A centrally-sanctioned, aspirational, blueprint: to the executive suite what the “built environment” is to the town planner: a plausible account of how the organisation is ''meant'' to work, but that bears no relation to how it ''does'' work.

But organisations have a way of frustrating their executives’ best-laid plans, just as cities delight in upsetting their urban planners’ platonic aspirations. This is not an accident but necessary consequence of forward motion into an uncertain future: an organisation that devoutly obeys its present operating manual is, to all intents and purposes, on [[Work-to-rule|strike]]. That is, in fact, the definition of a “[[work-to-rule]]”.

For an organisation is what it ''does'', not what it ''is''. What it is, when not ''doing'' something, is a dematerialised pile of papers.

Org charts say as much about what an organisation ''does'' as an ordinance survey map does about what the weather will be like, or how people will behave if it rains. Being static, they speak to what is ''meant'' to happen in an expected future that behaves according to the historical model. They cannot accommodate contingencies, opportunities, and unexposed risks. They contain only the vertical communication channels that personnel are ''meant'' to use to respect the firm’s governance structure, not the lateral ones they ''must'' use to move the organisation forward, much less the informal ones they ''do'' use, because they ''want'' to, and because — to hell with the rules — these have proven the best way to get anything done.