What Organograms Tell Us Of Systems And People

Something that I have learned to believe in resurfaced this month — systems should work for people, rather than people working for systems. A colleague in my workspace asked — “are people not systems”?

To add some context to this conversation would perhaps be useful to explore the idea further. I happen to be working in an organization that is currently learning to deal with scaling up of operations. This is an academic institution offering higher education in the field of design. As the institution has scaled up outreach and student intake, there is a bottlenecking of academic and administrative operations. The organization wants to resolve this from within. As designers and academicians, most things for us are resolved by going back to the drawing board. In this case as well, we did go to our drawing boards to redraw organograms.

I was ecstatic to take up the opportunity to participate and co-facilitate a series of workshops for the academic team. This was planned as an exercise to rethink about the organizational structures in place at our institution. I am always deeply fascinated by maps, diagram, drawings, or almost anything visual that I can read meaning into. My intention with writing this article is to share some of my reflections and takeaways from the process. 

The workshop was planned for 3 days spread across 5-6 weeks. In each session, the facilitator opens a discussion in the first half. Everyone is invited to participate and share perspectives. The facilitator provides a prompt for everyone to respond to. One of these prompts was to draw the organogram or a diagram of the organizational structure as one perceives it. After drawing, we all share our diagrams and reflect on them. We discuss various details, nuances, or patterns that might have appeared on our sheets.

The Language Of Organisation

When I compared my visualization to those of my colleagues’, there were hardly any visual similarities except for the fact that they all looked pretty abstract. The diagrams were comprehensible, but there was not much clarity in the meaning derived. The building blocks used to make the diagrams were more or less consistent — some representations of nodes (dots, boxes, circles) and lines connecting them. Some also had arrows to show the flow (of something) while others maintained some form of categorization. In all of these visual elements, any form of written word seemed to be missing. There were hardly any textual pointers, initials, names to be found in any of the diagrams (mine included).

It was as if there was reluctance, hesitance and confusion to name things, people, teams or roles. A primary reason of this could be the lack of title-calling people like professor or sir/ma’am. As a cultural practice (since the days when I was a student here) we’d be encourage to call people by their names and not their titles or roles. But I wondered – is there more to it than this.

I started to wonder — if we don’t have the language to articulate or talk about our system, do we have any agency while we participate in it?

Seeing, Naming, Knowing

I recall a conversation with my mentor when I was a student on campus. At the time, they were seriously concerned that students did not understand their curriculum or discuss it using the language provided in the school’s curriculum document. For example, the planned academic journey for all undergrads has three themes, each reflecting not only the content but also the expected learning outcomes. However, since the student body did not share this language, confusion about course expectations almost always arose. There were struggles for learners to make sense of this academic journey they had signed up for.

In response, the verbose document was supplemented with visual storytelling, making me feel like I was on a hero’s journey and giving me a clear sense of my progress and direction. There was humor and life in the same curriculum suddenly as I saw those images and visuals come to life. Not only did I, as a learner, understand where I am going in this journey, but it gave me the language to talk about it.

Three main things changed for me as a learner when I started using this new visual-verbal language to understand the curriculum. I gained more visibility over my academic journey, I acquired the language to discuss it with peers and mentors, and I could make informed decisions about my trajectory because I understood my curriculum better. I could now see, name and know my academic journey.

Coming from traditional learning environments where the teacher is seen as the expert, for the first time, the institution emphasized that I have a voice in the system. Previously, I had always learned to conform, adapt, and follow the system’s ways. I will always remember this as an example of building systems collaboratively for the benefit of people.

Of Systems And People

These diagrams were drawn by people who see the system from the point of view of the roles that they find themselves in and the visibility that comes with it. In some cases, this was also a function of time people have spent working here as employees. But even with all the variance within these diagrams, I started to observe some common patterns —

1. There is much more free space at the top than there is at the bottom of the diagram

2. The number of actors increases as we go from top to bottom

3. The structure is more legible in the top half of the diagram than it is in the bottom half

At this point, another observation was clear: the arrangement of nodes in almost all diagrams resembled people, not a system.

Upon closer inspection, it became clear that people had depicted various social patterns they observe around them. In some cases, categorisation was based on the time spent in the organisation, grouping all senior staff members together. For some, it was on the basis of how people sit in academic/admin area. In one diagram, the basis of representation was also who is friends with whom. It’s unsurprising that none of these diagrams meet the basic expectations of an organogram, such as decision-making workflows, processes, and information access points.

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

In all of this, one thing was evident: everyone had their own interpretations of the system. Our perspectives are shaped by our backgrounds and experiences. Despite the faculty unit being relatively homogeneous, each of us had distinct views on what defines the system. Is this because there’s no system at all? I disagree. I argue that there is indeed a system in place, albeit an informal and a less visible one. This is perhaps what every small organization starts with and systems start to solidify and become known to people over time. But, it was quite clear that the diagrams we created reflect how we are trying to make sense of different parts of the elephant.

Jo Freeman’s 1970 essay, ‘Tyranny of Structurelessness,’ discusses her experiences in spaces that reject formal structures in favor of equality. She reflects on how women’s liberation groups in the 1960s rejected the overly structured society that controlled women’s lives. Similarly, radical leftist groups also embraced structurelessness as a response. However, Freeman critiques how the concept of structurelessness, once a counter to excessive control, became an unacknowledged form of power itself. For Freeman, “structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and (within the women’s movement usually) most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not).“

As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.

Jo Freeman

Freeman’s argument centers on exposing these informal structures that undermine democracy, accountability, and equal participation within groups claiming to be structureless. This echoes the confusion experienced by some of the participants of the workshop.

Freeman’s essay inform us of how absence of formal and visible structures can in fact lead to concentration of power and marginalization of groups. It is important to understand that Freeman’s argument does not endorse formal structures around us but debunks the myth of being structureless. She highlights that the idea of being structureless is an illusion. Every group, regardless of its intentions, will develop some form of structure. The challenge is to ensure that these structures are formal, transparent, and accountable to all members of the group.

Drawing Lines

The exercise to redesign the organogram does not motivate me anymore. A part of me tells me that it is a futile effort to imagine change by a bunch of network diagrams. Moreover, these diagrams can never even convey the full picture. Just like world maps, these are distortions and sites of contest. I have realised that we will never get it right – world maps or organograms. But even though these diagrams or maps deceive or lie in some form, there is a necessity to continually make and remake them. But who makes these diagrams? Whose worldview does it represent, whose position of being in the world does it make explicit, whose experiences does it conceal? To draw these lines is to ask all of these questions and so I must …