Org-chart Blindness

Org-chart blindness is the propensity of managers to overemphasize an org structure’s role in solving problems while largely ignoring other aspects.

A repeated pattern at work were managers that have managed to grow their report list who then ended up not liking “silos,” areas of individual specialization: some SWEs worked mostly in system A, others in system B and were reluctant to switch. To address their need, the managers tended to institute some kind of a reorganization.

In one instance, a manager wanted engineer-to-system allocation to be more flexible. They wanted to move engineers between projects as they saw fit without being concerned about engineer stickiness. They mandated that what was previously called a team, would now be called a “unit,” and announced that they will move individuals from unit to unit each quarter according to business needs. Also, all systems were now under “shared ownership” across a wider team of 20-or-so people. There was a single oncall for all those systems, and anyone from the team could push any change to any of the systems under the wider team. There were to be no “silos.”

The folly of org-chart blindness is in ignoring how people actually work and what motivates them. It wasn’t the org chart that discouraged people from working on multiple systems. It was the fact that the systems were complex and significantly different — often to the point of using a completely different tech stack. It takes a lot of time to understand a new setup to be effective. Yet, such material considerations were largely ignored.

The manager could have done any of the following:

• Instructed technical leads to address technological heterogeneity to make expertise more transferable.
• Asked system experts to update onboarding documentation.
• Put time towards training the wider team in all those new systems.

Any of these would have gone a long way towards the reorganization’s goal, but no. Instead, we got multiple presentations on how the new org would work with a promise that it will make the organization more agile. As if the problem was how an HR database represents our work relationships and lack of motivation. It was particularly jarring given how my workplace made engineer flexibility possible with a monorepo and internal tech platforms.

This is not to say that the org chart plays no role in tech. Conway’s law is the famous counterexample. The blindness is about the pathological extreme of ignoring non-organizational sides of an issue. It’s as if a military commander forgot about logistics.