At a Glance: Traditional organizational charts frequently mask the underlying systemic issues that cause business strategies to fail. Rather than blaming individual employees for poor performance, leaders should examine the informal networks and structural bottlenecks that create “friction” within a company.
In the early 1920s, a Hungarian writer named Frigyes Karinthy proposed that the world was shrinking. He suggested that any two people on Earth could be connected through a chain of five acquaintances. It was a whimsical idea at the time, eventually popularized as “Six Degrees of Separation.” We’ve spent a century obsessed with the breadth of our networks—how many people we can reach.
But in the modern corporate world, the problem isn’t how many people we can reach. The problem is how many people we must reach to get a single thing done.
If you’re stepping away from the screen, the audio version offers a different way to sit with the same ideas.
When a Private Equity firm acquires a mid-market company, or a CEO initiates a massive digital transformation, they start with a map. That map is the organizational chart. It is a beautiful, symmetrical document of boxes and lines that tells you exactly who is in charge. It tells you who has the title, who has the budget, and who should be held accountable.
There is only one problem: the org chart is deceptive. Indeed, it may even lie.
The Myth of the Bad Driver
Imagine you are standing on a hill overlooking a highway. Below you, traffic is at a dead crawl. Horns are blaring. From your vantage point, you see a red sedan weaving aggressively, trying to gain an inch of ground. You see a blue SUV stalled in the middle lane. Your first instinct is to blame the drivers. The person in the red sedan is reckless. The person in the blue SUV is incompetent.
If you were a CEO looking at an underperforming department—say, a Project Management Office (PMO) with a tarnished reputation—you would do exactly what that observer does. You would look at the “drivers.” You would assume the people are the problem. You would call for a restructuring. You would “clean house.”
But if you zoom out—if you look across the horizon—you might see something the observer on the hill cannot. Three miles ahead, a bridge has collapsed. The lanes have narrowed from four to one.
In this scenario, it doesn’t matter if you have a Formula 1 driver in that red sedan. They are still going to be late and maybe acting uncharacteristically under the weight of external pressure they can’t control but will still be held accountable. The “recklessness” you see isn’t a personality trait; it’s a symptom of a system that has failed them.
This is the central paradox of the “Science of Execution.” We spend billions on strategy, yet 70% to 80% of those strategies fail to meet their objectives. Why? Because we treat organizational failure as a “personnel” problem when it is almost always a “system” problem.
The Hidden Nervous System
To see the “bridge,” you need a different kind of map. You need Organizational Network Analysis (ONA).
ONA is the study of the informal nervous system of a company. It ignores titles and looks at flow. It asks: Who do people actually go to for information? Who is the bottleneck? Who is the bridge? When we apply ONA, two specific types of geometry usually emerge that explain why performance is stalling.
1. The Hub (The Centrality Trap) In many organizations, we find what I call the “accidental hero.” This is a Director or a legacy manager who has high Centrality. On paper, they are efficient. In reality, they are a “Hub” through which every single decision must pass.
I recently heard a story about a leader who took over a struggling division. Their boss, the CEO, wanted her to restructure (aka, fire) core parts of the team because their reputation was shot. But when she did her due diligence, she found a “Hub” problem. A single person had designed a process so restrictive that every document, every approval, and every minor pivot had to cross their desk.
The team wasn’t “bad.” They were just stuck in a 10-mile backup created by a process-driven bottleneck. If that leader had followed the CEO’s advice and fired the team, she wouldn’t have fixed the problem. She would have just replaced the “cars” while the bridge was still collapsed.
2. The Bridge (The Betweenness Gap) Then there is Betweenness. These are the people who connect disparate islands—the “translators” between IT and Marketing, or between the Home Office and the Field.
In turnaround scenarios, where I spend much of my time, we often see “Relational Tax” accumulate because these bridges are broken. We call it “culture clash,” but it’s actually a failure of connectivity. If the person acting as the bridge is a gatekeeper rather than a conduit, the two departments will eventually stop trying to cross the chasm (aka, stop working together effectively). They will retreat into silos, not out of spite, but out of exhaustion, frustration, or just cultural signals ingrained over time as “this is how we do things around here”.
Relational Due Diligence
Many of our Private Equity clients are the masters of due diligence. They will spend months poring over spreadsheets, EBITDA leakages, and commercial forecasts. They believe—rightly so—that if you understand the numbers, you understand the risk.
But they almost never perform Relational Due Diligence. They buy a company based on its financial prospects but they ignore the relationships that bring the product to market—the white space between the boxes where the actual work materializes. Misalignment in these informal networks doesn’t show up on a P&L statement until it’s too late. It manifests as a 20% to 40% loss in productivity—a silent tax on every dollar of invested capital.
When a turnaround specialist enters a distressed business and starts firing people to “cut costs,” they are often performing a lobotomy on the organization’s nervous system. They might accidentally fire the one person who knows how to fix the legacy server, or the one “Bridge” who keeps the sales team from quitting.
They are trying to fix the “drivers” before they’ve checked the “road.” It’s a costly mistake we see far too often.
The Proper Order of Operations
The lesson of ONA is that there is a strict order of operations for high-stakes leadership.
First, fix the geometry. You must use data—not vibes or “culture surveys”—to identify where the hubs are clogged and where the bridges are broken. You have to widen the lanes. You have to ensure that the process-product connection is sound. This is “infrastructure work.”
Second, assess the drivers. Once the bridge is fixed and the road is clear, then you can look at the drivers. If the “lanes” are the right size and the signs are clear, and a driver still hits the guardrail? Now you have a talent problem. Now you can be surgically precise in your personnel changes.
The beauty of this approach is that it is fundamentally more humane. Instead of chastising an entire group for the “reputational tarnish” of a department, you identify the root cause. You realize that “Diane” in Accounting isn’t slow; she’s just being asked to do the work of four people. You realize that the PMO isn’t tarnished; it’s just being strangled by a Hub-and-Spoke nightmare.
The Science of Execution
We have spent decades obsessing over “A-Players” and “B-Players,” searching for “heroic” leaders who can transcend the system. But history has shown that a system of synchronized “average” parts will always beat a collection of “stars” who can’t connect.
If you want to solve the 80% strategy failure rate, stop looking at the boxes on your org chart. Start looking at the lines.
In the end, the value of your organization isn’t found in who you hired alone. It’s found in how they relate to one another. Before you restructure the team, understand the map. Only then will you see who is actually driving the mission forward—and who is just waiting for you to fix the bridge.
References
Beer, M., & Nohria, N. (2000). Cracking the code of change. Harvard Business Review.
Brynjolfsson, E., & Hitt, L. (2000). Beyond computation: Information technology, organizational transformation, and business performance. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(4), 23–48.
Cross, R., Borgatti, S. P., & Parker, A. (2002). Making invisible work visible: Using social network analysis to support strategic collaboration. California Management Review, 44(2), 25–46.
Cross, R., & Parker, A. (2004). The hidden power of social networks. Harvard Business School Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Karinthy, F. (1929). Chains. In Everything is different. (Original work published in Hungarian).
Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review.
Milgram, S. (1967). The small world problem. Psychology Today, 2(1), 60–67.
Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.
A similar pattern has been playing out at Apple Inc.. Long before leadership changes were announced, the organization was already signaling a shift—subtle changes in how ideas flowed, where decisions slowed, and which functions held influence. By the time Tim Cook stepped down, the structure had already begun to tilt.
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