One of the hardest and most valuable things you can do as a company is the following:
1. Have a fully up to date org chart
2. Have a diagram that is not the org chart that accurately reflects how work flows through the company
3. Have an up to date and accurate diagram and explanation of what the company does and how it does it (architecture, revenue funnels, business value streams, code-bases)
Scaling decision making is *impossible* without a shared context to build alignment off of.
I would've never guessed this was the case when I first started my career, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Alignment and direction is so hard to get; clarity of what you're doing and how you fit into and contribute to a system is so hard to maintain. But it's so important that it should never be neglected.
I see executives working on decision matrices, and engineers working on refactoring, and infra building platforms, but I don't see people *actually communicating together*
@hazelweakly Yep! I work with small to medium companies and teams, helping to navigate strategy, fwiw. We've developed a few visualization methods and facilitation elements for laying a foundation of alignment and "shared meaning".
One of the most useful metaphors has been getting folks into a bucket brigade and then create an artifact that visualizes handoffs and contingencies for their value chain. You can put all sorts of meta-data onto that map.
Not too many orgs value this, though.
Hazel Weakly
jakob.pxi