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Most of us default to the traditional hierarchical org chart to understand our organisations. It's tidy, familiar, and offers a clear picture of reporting lines and departments. But here's the catch: an org chart only tells part of the story.
Your organisation isn't just a hierarchy; it's a living, dynamic system. To make smarter decisions and achieve your strategic outcomes, you need to view your organisation through more than one lens.
The Traditional Hierarchical View
The hierarchical org chart maps out leadership levels, department structures, and reporting lines. This view is great for understanding line management and people accountabilities. It clarifies who reports to whom, where accountability sits, and the size and scope of different areas. Hierarchies can provide a sense of order, structure, and identity. They indicate career development, giving people a sense of progress and achievement.
However, people in organisations don't operate in isolation. In reality, your business thrives on collaboration—across teams, technologies, and functions. The org chart doesn't show these informal networks and cross-functional dependencies. It also doesn’t show the flow of work and information required to deliver value to your customers. For example, while your software development team reports to the CTO, their work may heavily depend on insights from customer success, direction from marketing, or approvals from legal. This messy, interconnected reality is invisible in the org chart.
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There are major business impacts with just viewing your business through the single lens of a traditional hierarchy, including:
1. Difficulty tracing business outcomes to delivery teams: Delivery teams are often structured around what the enterprise is trying to achieve via articulated business outcomes. Just looking at the traditional hierarchical view—for example, reporting lines—makes it difficult to know which team is responsible for and/or contributes to which business outcome.
2. Lack of adaptability and collaboration: Functional hierarchies reduce communication and collaboration between the different skill sets that are needed for end-to-end delivery, reducing agility.
3. Lower speed to market: When handoffs, dependencies and delays cannot be identified, teams cannot streamline processes and accelerate delivery timelines from the customer’s perspective.
4. Low employee engagement: Siloed teams do not promote mutual support, knowledge sharing, and skills development, ultimately reducing employee satisfaction and retention.
5. Lower quality: When teams hand over work to other teams, quality becomes an afterthought. For example, when teams do not run the systems they build, there is little incentive to improve quality practices. As Deming would say—making toast the org chart way—‘You burn, I’ll scrape’.
The Network View: Understanding Flow of Work and Value
To understand the interconnectedness within your organisation, you need to think of the enterprise as a living network. Instead of focusing on fixed reporting lines, the network view highlights the connections among teams, the flow of work, and the interdependencies that drive outcomes. The network view helps you understand relationships among teams—whether formal or informal, planned or unplanned—and is the lens which illuminates the many paths work can take until value is delivered to customers.
Flow of work and flow of value are distinct but interconnected concepts. Optimising the flow of work focuses on reducing delays within and between teams from idea to customer delivery. The flow of value is an iterative and incremental process that begins with work being pulled by customers and continues through customer feedback, which leads to product adaptations and improvements. Ultimately, happy customers return business value through revenue generated by great product and service experiences.
This distinction matters because the smooth flow of work doesn't automatically guarantee value creation. You need both an effective flow of work and the ability to adapt based on customer feedback to generate true value flow. When teams have flow, they can gather customer feedback more effectively and evolve their products accordingly, increasing the likelihood of delivering real customer value.
Observing Flow
Once you experience effective flow within a team, it becomes impossible to overlook its impact. Picture a team where work progresses steadily, presenting a continuous stream of engaging challenges that feel manageable and get resolved quickly. In such environments, team members collaborate effectively, clearly seeing the impact of their work through customer feedback. While this might sound idealistic, it's achievable even within large enterprises, bringing measurable improvements in value delivery speed and team dynamics.
To truly understand flow in your organisation, you need to look beyond just tracking individual work items in single teams. Flow encompasses interconnections where work moves smoothly between people and teams. The most tangible aspect starts with work and workflow, which includes not just the movement of work items between people, but also the flow of work context, impediments, status updates, and value feedback from customers.
Strategic and operational decisions are also important information flows. Organisations need clear channels for communicating strategic decisions that provide teams with clear direction, while also enabling quick feedback on trade-off decisions that impact multiple teams. Governance decisions from functions like procurement, HR, and security need predictable timing to avoid becoming bottlenecks. Similarly, funding decisions should be flexible enough to support teams in adapting to new market insights and customer needs.
Learning is an equally important but often overlooked information flow. Customer insights gathered by one team might be valuable across the organisation but frequently remain siloed. Teams discovering better ways of working need channels to share these improvements broadly. Information about impediments that teams can't resolve themselves should flow smoothly to where it can be addressed effectively.
For many teams, the most significant delays occur when other teams must help them deliver work. There are many ways other teams may need to help, it could be a dependent change on another system, a decision that is made outside the team, an approval process, or even rework or quality problems from other teams. Investigating what happens when work moves beyond your team can be surprisingly difficult in larger organisations. Work often disappears, assigned to another person who might just be a name on a work ticket. That person may then raise another ticket forming a dependency chain that is no longer visible to the originating team.
While functional hierarchies make it easy to understand who does what (by grouping people into clear functional teams like Engineering, Marketing, Sales, etc.), this very structure creates delays and coordination overhead. When work needs to flow between different functions, it can lead to handoffs between teams – creating delays and communication gaps where the context and value of the work is lost. For example, engineers hand off to testers, who then hand off to operations. Each team has its own priorities and processes, so work often sits in queues waiting to be picked up by the next function. In addition, the functional structure encourages teams to optimise for their own efficiency rather than end-to-end flow. For example, marketing might be highly efficient at producing content, but if they're not well-coordinated with sales, that content might sit unused.
The network view, on the other hand, focuses on how cross-functional teams achieve product and organisational goals. The network view supports cross-functional teams, which are designed to reduce handoffs by organising people around the flow of value rather than their functional speciality.
Whilst most organisations rely on cross-functional teams at least in part to reduce delays, there is often no way to look up which team a person belongs to outside of their hierarchical function. The broader network view of information flow between teams, including interactions and dependencies, remains elusive unless different tools and metrics are adopted.
Improving Flow
A simple first step in understanding flow in your organisation is to visualise work and how it moves within teams. For example, Kanban-style boards showing the activities or states that work moves through within a team help contributors understand where work is and if it’s moving. By breaking work down into small units, flow becomes more visible.
Once the flow of work becomes more visible, information flows become observable too. Blocked work or work that stays stuck in a state for a long time can be tracked. Queues of work become visible, showing temporary or persistent bottlenecks. By paying attention to these patterns—certain types of work getting blocked frequently or remaining blocked for long periods—systemic delays become apparent and addressable.
For product engineering teams the way code changes propagate to customers is hugely important. The pathway to production determines the smallest units of work a team can continuously learn from. It starts when a product engineering team changes a line of code or configuration through all the steps needed to get that change into production where customers can use it. It includes all automated checks, layered tests, infrastructure provisioning, schema changes, regulatory gates, observability configuration, and manual approvals that every committed change passes through until appearing as a feature in your customer’s hands. When teams can independently deploy and release changes to customers, feedback cycles are dramatically improved, leading to higher-quality products and reduced time to market.
Improving flow may require new skills, different technologies, new ways of working or different team composition. It requires viewing the system from the customer’s perspective and optimising how work and information flow from ideation to valuable features in your customer’s hands.
Improving flow also requires different leadership practices. Leaders need to help create an environment where both work and information can move freely, where end-to-end flow is measured and incentivised, where it’s safe to share information, and where individuals can learn and share knowledge.
Conclusion: Rethink How You See Your Organisation
Your organisation isn't static. Every unit of work follows its own path, where even work that appears similar may touch different parts of the organisation. Your organisation is a dynamic socio-technical system that operates through both hierarchies and networks. While the org chart gives you a valuable traditional perspective, understanding the flow of work and value through teams is an additional view that will empower you to make smarter decisions.
With the addition of network views, you can identify delays within and between teams, improve collaboration, and better align teams with strategic outcomes. Ultimately, the way you see your organisation shapes the way you lead it and the value of the software products you produce.
This post was co-written with Gareth Evans, the Co-Founder of HYPR. HYPR helps companies in Australia and New Zealand unleash their ability to anticipate, respond, adapt, ideate and innovate in super-quick time.
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