Organizations Are Hard Because Humans Are Hard

Weekend reflection: it’s surprisingly difficult to grasp how an organisation (especially a large one) truly works.

Every company begins as a small group of people with fluid dynamics. Early on, structure follows culture. Norms are shaped by how people collaborate, make decisions, and navigate ambiguity together. But then something shifts. Power dynamics begin to form, roles become formalised, processes start to solidify. Structure takes hold, and gradually, culture starts to follow it.

Google any company name and you’ll likely see a photo of a building. But buildings are just containers. The real organisation is a living system, shifting network of people and their interactions, most of which never appear in photos.

We often rely on bidimensional org charts to make sense of it all. Boxes and lines. But those diagrams are misleading, and not even in the “all models are wrong, but some are useful” sense (with apologies to George Box). They’re simply too simplistic to offer real insight.

If anything, we should imagine organisations as multidimensional, amorphous blobs. They are shaped not just by physical space and time, but by human psychologies, skill levels, relationships, shared and unshared understandings of problems, the external environment, and countless other shifting factors.

Those n dimensions are in constant flux. At any given moment, an organisation is never exactly the same as it was even a second before.

Information does not travel neatly down the lines of a chart. It behaves more like a multidimensional radio wave with a hyperspherical front, reflecting, refracting, and distorting as it moves through the complex geometry of the organisation. Lots of tricky corners that corrupt that information too. Feedback loops are fragile, and often disappear altogether.

When we try to understand an organisation, more often than not, we’re like the three blind men and the elephant in the ancient Indian parable: each of us grasping a different part, forming an incomplete picture, and believing it’s the whole.

Organisations are hard to understand because humans are hard to understand.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.