Advent(ure) in System Seeing — Day 10 — Org Charts
Day 10: Draw Your Org 3 Ways
1. Draw an organization that you have been part of (where you work, community organization, etc.), at least 3 different ways. Especially when getting ideas flowing, have fun with it… do the obvious, the playful, etc.
2. Jot down reflections on what you learned about your org from doing this. What do these different views illuminate? What do you learn looking across them?
3. Now “go meta” and think about the views you drew:
What first occurred to you to draw? What do our customary views of organizations suggest? What views are helpful? Why?
Of course, the classic, as org structure doodles (all grown up into a comic) go, is Manu Cornet’s! (Which manages to be an “org structure chart” that is about power, communication, and org culture.)
“One of the hardest and most valuable things you can do as a company is the following:
Have a fully up to date org chart
Have a diagram that is not the org chart that accurately reflects how work flows through the company
Have an up to date and accurate diagram and explanation of what the company does and how it does it (architecture, revenue funnels, business value streams, code-bases)“
The inverted tree oriented org chart shown as the image for this blog is my favorite way to lay out an organization because it emphasizes the servant-leader principles that the twigs and leaves are where the work is being done, and managements job is to support and grow those profit center parts that reach out to customers. Products could even be shown as fruit on the tree to extend the analogy. The tree also shows the support functions as roots, cost centers keeping the tree stable, that are fed by the profits generated by the leaves and fruit. By showing management in a supporting role, it changes the conversation and cultural attitudes. The servant leadership ideas were first described by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.
I’ve always had problems making an org chart that looks nice, and like a tree, with the right positions in the right places. Maybe with some AI coding and image generation help this would be easier to draw.
One organization I work with as an advisor uses Slack as the primary communication channel, with very little email. Their org chart is embedded in Slack, so it’s trivial to figure out for anyone you are talking to, who they work for and what part of the org that is. The slack channels form the communication structure of the company and I think this works well.
When I worked for Sun Microsystems they had an online web based employee database. However when the company started to shrink and lay people off via a “Reduction in Force” (RIF) in 2001–2004, the HR department was trying to keep the details confidential. The RIF’d employee had their email and work access shut down, and was sent home on full pay for a few months, but their org was dissolved so they appeared differently in the database. Some people figured out that they could download copies of the employee database and track who was being RIF’d when. What followed was some back and forth as HR tried to find ways to hide the information and the engineers found ways to uncover it again.
There was a time at Netflix, in 2010 or so, when engineering was small enough to fit in one building, and there was an office-based in-person culture. There was a conscious effort to lay out the teams across the office such that the structure of the product was laid out in sequence. This meant that the user experience designers were at one end of the building, next to the front end developers, who were next to the API team, then the various personalization teams, then the database and platform teams. At the time, the systems thinking approach was to maximize internal informal communication channels, and to have less reliance on written documentation, which would slow things down. I think it worked at that scale, but for a fast growing organization, we out-grew it quickly as we needed more space for people. Netflix is now a globally distributed organization, and I recommend reading No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer as it describes how they made that transition.
