When the Organization Works Despite the Organization
How informal networks, hidden work, and employee resilience can mask a broken operating model
Organizations are remarkably resilient.
Processes break. Systems fail to connect. Responsibilities become blurred. Priorities compete. Decisions create unintended consequences. Information stops flowing where it needs to go.
And yet, somehow, the work continues.
Customers get answers. Orders move. Problems are resolved. Deadlines are recovered. Employees find ways to accomplish things the formal process was not designed—or is no longer able—to accomplish.
From a distance, that can look like evidence that the organization is working.
Sometimes it is evidence of something very different.
Some organizations perform because of their operating model. Others perform despite it.
The difference matters.
Research on organizational networks has long recognized that the formal organization chart does not fully explain how work actually happens. Informal relationships can move information, knowledge, and decisions across organizational boundaries in ways formal structures do not. Those networks can be enormously valuable. They can also become a warning sign when employees must depend on them simply to make routine work function.
When that happens, an informal operating system begins developing underneath the formal one.
Relationships compensate for broken handoffs.
Meetings compensate for missing visibility.
Spreadsheets compensate for disconnected systems.
Institutional knowledge compensates for weak processes.
High performers step beyond their roles because someone has to close the gap.
Each response makes sense.
Together, they can hide something much larger.
The Organization on Paper vs. the Organization at Work
Every organization has a formal structure.
There are organizational charts, job descriptions, systems, processes, approval paths, performance measures, and defined responsibilities.
Then there is the organization employees actually experience.
Ask people how work gets done and you may hear:
Talk to Sarah. She knows how to get that approved.
Don't rely on that report. Marcus keeps his own spreadsheet.
Email Operations directly or it will sit there.
We have a process for that, but this is how we actually do it.
Jennifer isn't responsible for it, but she knows what's happening.
That isn't necessarily dysfunction.
Research has consistently shown that formal structures and informal networks coexist. Informal relationships can help people find information, coordinate across boundaries, and accomplish work the formal structure alone doesn't adequately support.
People adapt.
They build relationships. They find shortcuts. They develop local solutions. They learn who to trust and where reliable information actually resides.
That adaptability is an organizational asset.
But leaders need to understand when adaptation becomes dependency.
When the workaround becomes more reliable than the process, the workaround has become the real process.
Resilience or Dependency?
There is an important distinction between:
Our people can work around the process when necessary.
and:
Our people must work around the process for the organization to function.
The first is resilience.
The second is operational risk.
Informal networks themselves are not the problem. McKinsey's work on informal employee networks found that substantial amounts of organizational information and knowledge can move through these relationships rather than through official hierarchy. The same analysis also cautioned that informal networks can create complexity, confusion, and additional interactions when poorly understood or managed.
That's the paradox.
The same human adaptability that makes an organization resilient can also allow structural weaknesses to survive much longer than they otherwise would.
Someone always finds the answer.
Someone knows the workaround.
Someone pulls together another meeting.
Someone stays late.
Someone saves the customer.
The organization survives.
And because it survives, leadership can conclude that the operating model is working.
When Heroics Become the Operating Model
Leaders understandably value employees who solve problems.
They recognize the person who stays late to resolve an escalation.
They appreciate the manager who pulls several departments together to recover a missed commitment.
They depend on the employee who knows how to find information no one else can locate.
They celebrate teams that somehow deliver despite difficult circumstances.
Those people deserve recognition.
But leaders should also become curious about why the heroics were necessary.
If exceptional effort is required occasionally, the organization may simply be responding to an exceptional event.
If exceptional effort is required continually, the organization may have normalized the exceptional.
Traditional performance measures can make this difficult to see.
Was the problem resolved?
Did the product ship?
Was the customer answered?
Did we ultimately make the deadline?
Those questions matter.
But they don't tell leaders how much friction employees had to overcome to produce the result.
A more revealing question is:
What did our people have to overcome to get the work done?
That question shifts attention from the outcome alone to the health of the operating system producing it.
Organizational Debt
Software development gives us a useful analogy.
Ward Cunningham introduced the metaphor of technical debt to describe how expedient design choices can create future costs. Martin Fowler later described the “interest” on technical debt as the additional effort required to make future changes because underlying deficiencies were never addressed.
Organizations can accumulate a similar kind of debt.
Not necessarily because someone made a terrible decision.
Often the opposite is true.
Someone solved an immediate problem.
A system didn't provide the necessary information, so an employee created a spreadsheet.
A handoff wasn't clear, so two departments established their own process.
Ownership was ambiguous, so a reliable employee began coordinating work outside the boundaries of the role.
A report wasn't trusted, so managers maintained their own versions.
A recurring operational problem wasn't structurally resolved, so another meeting was created to manage it.
A customer issue crossed several functions, so Customer Service learned who to chase until an answer emerged.
Every one of those decisions may have been rational.
The spreadsheet solves today's problem.
The meeting creates today's visibility.
The relationship gets today's answer.
The high performer saves today's customer.
But the underlying weakness remains.
I think of the accumulated effect as organizational debt: the growing cost of maintaining workarounds that compensate for unresolved weaknesses in how the organization operates.
And like other forms of debt, eventually the organization begins paying interest.
More meetings.
More manual work.
More escalation.
More reconciliation.
More dependence on individual knowledge.
More time spent determining what is happening before anyone can decide what should happen next.
A Framework for Recognizing Organizational Debt
The pattern often develops gradually:
Workaround → Dependency → Normalization → Organizational Debt → Performance Risk
1. Workaround
Someone develops a practical solution to a gap in the formal process.
At this stage, the behavior may be exactly what the organization needs. An employee identifies a problem and acts.
2. Dependency
Others begin relying on the workaround because it works better than the formal process.
Knowledge or execution becomes increasingly concentrated in particular people, spreadsheets, meetings, or relationships.
3. Normalization
The workaround stops feeling temporary.
This is how we do it replaces this is how we're supposed to do it.
The informal process has effectively become part of the operating model even though nobody intentionally designed it that way.
4. Organizational Debt
Workarounds begin accumulating and interacting.
Employees now have to navigate both the formal organization and the informal one.
The organization becomes increasingly dependent on tribal knowledge, manual intervention, personal relationships, duplicate information, and individual heroics.
5. Performance Risk
Eventually something changes.
A key employee leaves.
Volume increases.
A major customer escalates.
A new system is implemented.
Demand changes.
Leadership changes.
The organization discovers that processes it believed were stable were actually being held together by people continually compensating for their weaknesses.
The debt becomes visible when the organization can no longer afford the interest.
The Cost Is Bigger Than Efficiency
Organizational debt can look like an efficiency problem.
It is much bigger than that.
It can affect decision quality because leaders may be operating from incomplete or reconstructed information.
It can affect customer experience because customer-facing employees cannot consistently access reliable answers.
It can affect scalability because processes dependent on individual knowledge become increasingly fragile as volume grows.
It can affect technology transformation because organizations risk automating existing fragmentation rather than fixing it.
And it can affect employee experience because capable people spend increasing amounts of energy navigating organizational friction instead of creating value.
There is evidence for that last point. Gallup's workplace research identifies unmanageable workload, unclear expectations, lack of managerial support, and unreasonable time pressure among the strongest contributors to employee burnout. Gallup has also reported that employees who frequently experience burnout are substantially more likely to leave their employer.
This doesn't mean every workaround causes burnout.
It means leaders should not assume employees can indefinitely absorb organizational friction without consequence.
Success Can Hide the Problem
There is an uncomfortable leadership paradox here.
Strong employees can make weak systems look stronger than they are.
The operation survives.
The customer is eventually handled.
Someone locates the information.
A manager coordinates another recovery effort.
A high performer assumes ownership.
The immediate crisis passes.
And because the organization recovered, the underlying weakness loses urgency.
Success can therefore reinforce the conditions that made extraordinary effort necessary.
A recovered problem should not automatically be considered a solved problem.
Leaders should ask:
Why was recovery necessary?
What failed before recovery began?
Did the system solve the problem—or did an individual compensate for the system?
And perhaps most importantly:
Would the same outcome occur if that individual were not there?
If removing one person causes a process to collapse, the organization may not have a process.
It may have a dependency.
Don't Eliminate the Informal Organization
The solution is not to eliminate informal networks.
That would be both unrealistic and counterproductive.
Research supports the importance of both formal structure and informal relationships in how organizations coordinate, share information, and accomplish work.
Organizations need employees who exercise judgment.
They need relationships that cross functional boundaries.
They need informal leaders.
They need people willing to act when a formal process cannot anticipate every situation.
The objective should be:
Preserve the adaptability. Remove the dependency.
When an effective workaround repeatedly appears, study it.
Why does it work?
What information does it provide that the formal process does not?
What barrier does it bypass?
What decision is someone making informally that hasn't been clearly assigned formally?
What should be incorporated into the operating model?
The people closest to the work may already be showing leadership where the redesign needs to occur.
Their workarounds are data.
From Heroics to Operating Discipline
Strong organizations do not eliminate problems.
They reduce the amount of organizational energy required to solve predictable ones.
Information becomes visible where decisions are made.
Ownership becomes clear.
Constraints surface earlier.
Systems support the work instead of forcing employees to reconcile information manually.
Escalation becomes the exception rather than the operating model.
Meetings are used to make decisions rather than reconstruct reality.
And high performers spend more time improving the organization than rescuing it.
That transition requires leaders to look beyond whether today's work ultimately got done.
They need to understand how it got done.
Because an organization held together by extraordinary people can look surprisingly healthy—right up until those people become exhausted, leave, or can no longer compensate for the complexity around them.
Employee resilience should be valued.
But resilience should describe an organization's ability to respond to the exceptional.
It should not be the organization's requirement for surviving the ordinary.
The goal isn't to eliminate the informal organization.
It is to build a formal operating model strong enough that employees no longer have to fight it in order to succeed.
Which leaves leaders with a different question.
Not simply:
Are we getting the work done?
But:
What are our people having to overcome in order to get the work done?
The difference between those questions can reveal the true health of an organization.
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The framework and interpretations presented in this article reflect the author's synthesis of operational leadership experience and the research cited below.
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Sources & Further Reading
About the Author
Steven Waltz is a Customer Operations and Customer Experience executive focused on service transformation, operational excellence, global delivery, AI-enabled operations, and enterprise customer experience strategy.
