The Brain Doesn't Experience Your Organizational Chart

An organizational chart is very neat and clear. Authority cascades from the executive director to the program director, to the manager, and down to the staff. Everyone knows a reporting relationship and who approves what. But what actually happens?

Take, for example, what happens when a client calls with a problem that doesn't fit the procedure. A staff member remembers how someone handled it last time, or you can text the development director because she knows who has the answer.

Another example is someone walking down the hall to ask a colleague rather than submit a request through the official system because they know that sending a form to Person A means waiting three days, while sending it to Person B means getting the problem solved before lunch.

None of this appears on the organizational chart. Yet a surprising amount of work happens this way.

Your organization has two maps

The first is the formal organization, the one you can draw with boxes and arrows. It tells you who reports to whom, who has authority, and where responsibilities are supposed to sit.

The second is the organization people actually experience while doing the work. It's harder to draw because it consists of relationships, routines, informal knowledge, interruptions, workarounds, handoffs, exceptions, and decisions made in the moment.

Organizational researchers Feldman and Pentland (2003) explain that organizational routines are recognizable patterns of interdependent actions. These patterns aren't simply dictated by procedure manuals. People create and adapt them through their actions and interactions over time.

A routine is what people repeatedly do to get the work done. That's why changing one person's job can affect five other people. The organizational chart shows the reporting relationships, but it doesn't show all the connections that make the work possible.

The work nobody puts on the flowchart

When organizations introduce a new system, program, technology, policy, or process, leaders tend to describe what's being added. What they don't always account for is the additional work the change creates.

In a 2012 study published in the AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, researcher Laurie Novak examined the implementation of barcode medication administration in a hospital. She found that nurses had to take on additional cognitive and physical tasks as they incorporated the technology into their existing work. Some of that work wasn't apparent from the formal description of the new system.

Medication administration had to fit with pharmacy schedules, patient movement, emergency procedures, and information coming from units that used different systems. Each process might make sense on its own. Putting them together created complications the formal workflow didn't capture.

Novak studied a hospital, not a nonprofit, so we shouldn't assume every finding applies directly to our sector. But her research raises a question worth asking whenever an organization introduces a change: What additional work will emerge when the new process meets the routines and responsibilities already in place? Because your organization probably has intersections, too.

When Strategy Meets Daily Realities

Imagine a nonprofit decides to improve client access; then the strategic plan will say, Improve access to services. Excellent. Then a client arrives without the required documentation. The person who can approve an exception isn't available. Now the online form doesn't work. The problem then ripples into the organization's commitment to accessibility colliding with a procedure written five years ago. Someone has to decide what happens next. Usually, it's the person closest to the problem, several levels below the person who wrote the strategy.

Michael Lipsky's (1980) influential work on street-level bureaucracy helps explain this dynamic. Lipsky examined how frontline public service workers interpret broad policies and make decisions under real-world conditions, including limited resources, competing demands, and incomplete information. What people experience as policy depends partly on how workers put it into practice.

You don't have to work for a government agency to recognize the pattern. A case manager decides how to handle an unusual situation. These employees may not have the authority to redesign the organization, but they still have to make the work happen.

The workaround is telling you something

Leaders sometimes misread what employees do when formal processes fail to meet their needs. The first question is, “Why aren't they using the system?” Maybe the better question is: What does the workaround let them do that the system doesn't? If a manager makes an exception, before asking why the manager isn't enforcing the rule, consider what the exception reveals about the rule.

Feldman and Pentland's research on organizational routines offers a useful reason to investigate before treating every deviation as a failure to follow instructions. Routines take shape through repeated actions and interactions, not just formal procedures. A workaround may expose a gap between how a process was designed and how people must perform it in practice.

Of course, a workaround may be inefficient or create risk. It may need to go. But before eliminating it, understand what job it's doing. Otherwise, you might remove the workaround without fixing the problem that made it necessary. That's one way to streamline a process straight into a bigger mess.

Your strategic plan may have missed the real work

This idea of missing the organization’s real work connects directly to my earlier article, “The People Your Strategic Plan Forgot.” Organizations sometimes ask staff for input through surveys, focus groups, or listening sessions. The consultant collects the data, the leadership team discusses the findings, and the plan gets written.

Somewhere along the way, the people who actually perform the work may disappear from the conversation. Those employees carry knowledge the organizational chart doesn't contain. They know where processes break, which handoffs fail, and which policies create extra steps. They know which exception happens and which new initiative will require six workarounds before it functions.

Implementation researchers Kathleen P. Conte and colleagues explored how teams develop and use practical knowledge while putting interventions into practice. In their 2019 ethnographic study, they found that implementation teams used informal tools and technologies alongside formal systems. These helped them manage relationships, troubleshoot problems, support teamwork, and capture knowledge developed through experience.

The lesson is straightforward: understanding implementation means looking beyond formal plans and systems to see how people make the work happen. Yet organizations sometimes collect that intelligence through staff surveys and focus groups, then carry on as if nobody said anything. Asking people for input isn't the same as using what they know.

When staff repeatedly identify a process problem, leaders should be able to explain what they did with that information, even if they don't adopt every suggestion. Otherwise, the organization wastes useful knowledge and gives people little reason to participate the next time.

What does the organization look like from inside the work?

Here's the question I'd put at the center of this discussion: What does the organization look like from the brain of the person actually doing the work? Think about the person sitting at a desk when three things happen at once. What must they remember, decide, track down, and work around? Which processes help, which get in the way, and what do they know that never makes it into the documentation? Most importantly, what work are they doing that nobody thinks of as work?

Novak's study offers a concrete example of how new technology can introduce cognitive and physical tasks that leaders may overlook when they focus on formal processes. Conte and colleagues (2019) show another part of the picture: implementation teams often develop informal tools and practical knowledge to address problems that formal systems don't fully handle.

Neither study suggests that every workaround is useful or that every informal practice should continue. They show why leaders need to understand what's happening before deciding what to change.

How implementation matters

A strategy can look perfectly reasonable on paper and still create a mess in practice. Not necessarily because the strategy is bad, but because it interacts with an organization that already has activities, practices, and procedures.

That point is consistent with a broad body of implementation research. In their 2008 review of more than 500 quantitative studies, Joseph A. Durlak and Emily P. DuPre found that the level of implementation was associated with program outcomes. They also identified a range of contextual factors that influence implementation, including organizational functioning, training, and technical assistance.

Their review focused on prevention and health promotion programs, not every kind of nonprofit strategy. Still, it reinforces an important distinction: having a sound idea isn't enough. The conditions under which people put it into practice matter, too. That's why implementation deserves more attention than the familiar “Who does what by when?” checklist.

Before adding something new, ask what it will affect. Which routines will change? Who will have to coordinate differently? What decisions will move closer to the frontline, and what new information will people need? Also, consider the extra work created where processes intersect. Where will people improvise? What happens when the new process meets its first real exception? Because there will be a first real exception.

Draw the informal organizational chart

You don't need to abandon the traditional organizational chart because it's still useful. Just don't mistake it for a complete picture of how work happens. Try drawing the other one.

Put the client, or whatever the program focus is, in the middle and trace what actually has to happen. Trace how work actually gets done: who contributes, shares information, makes decisions, and waits on others. Identify where workarounds fill gaps, information gets lost, and routines collide. You may discover that the person with the lowest position on the organizational chart holds an extraordinary amount of organizational knowledge. That breakthrough is worth knowing before you redesign a process. It's especially worth knowing before you announce that you're “streamlining” it.

The bottom line

Your organizational chart tells you who is connected by authority. It doesn't necessarily tell you who is connected by work. Those aren't the same thing.

The real organization happens in the handoffs, conversations, interruptions, institutional memory, workarounds, exceptions, and decisions nobody thought to include in the procedure manual.

If you want to know whether a strategy can actually be implemented, don't just look at the organizational chart. Look at what people's brains have to do to make the process work. That's where your real organizational map begins.

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