I’ve been around the same family-owned manufacturing business since I was eight years old.
At first, obviously, I wasn’t thinking about organisational structures, operational strategy or management systems.
It was simply the business.
Over time that changed. I grew up around it, eventually started working within it, and later became part of the management team responsible for helping it operate, improve and change.
That has given me the slightly unusual experience of seeing the same business from very different perspectives.
And one thing has become increasingly obvious:
Businesses rarely work exactly the way the organisation chart says they do — if one even exists.
An organisation chart can tell you who reports to whom. It can show departments, managers and formal responsibilities.
What it can’t necessarily tell you is who people actually go to when something goes wrong.
It doesn’t show where decades of experience sit. It doesn’t explain why one person can get something resolved in five minutes that might take somebody else half a day. And it certainly doesn’t capture all the history and relationships that influence how decisions really get made.
The messiness is often a strength
It would be easy to describe blurred roles and informal structures as problems that need fixing.
I don’t think that’s always true.
Some of the greatest strengths of an SME come from exactly that flexibility.
People wear several hats. Departments help each other. Managers step outside their formal responsibilities. Someone notices a problem, walks across the factory, finds the right person and sorts it.
There isn’t always a meeting, a ticket number or an approval process.
Sometimes there probably isn’t even a form.
And things get done.
That ability to move quickly can be incredibly valuable. The challenge comes when the same flexibility that helped a business succeed begins to create problems as it grows.
When flexibility becomes dependency
Informal systems work brilliantly — until the person who understands them isn’t there.
Knowledge can slowly become concentrated in individuals. Everyone knows that if this happens, you ask that person.
Eventually that person becomes involved in almost everything.
What originally looked like expertise can quietly become a bottleneck.
The same thing happens with responsibilities. If everyone is prepared to help with everything, it can eventually become unclear who actually owns anything.
And when ownership isn’t clear, problems have a habit of travelling upwards until they reach somebody willing to make the decision.
Usually the same few people.
That’s when a flexible organisation can gradually turn into a firefighting organisation.
So we add structure
The obvious response is usually more structure.
Procedures. Systems. KPIs. Forms. Reporting. Responsibilities.
And sometimes that’s exactly what the business needs.
But I think there is an important distinction between adding structure and adding bureaucracy.
Good structure makes work easier. It makes responsibilities clearer. It makes information easier to find. It allows people to make decisions confidently without constantly asking somebody else. It captures knowledge that previously existed only in somebody’s head.
Bad structure simply creates additional work while leaving the original problem untouched.
You now have the same problem — plus a form.
The difficult bit is knowing which is which
When you’re trying to improve an established business, particularly one with a lot of history, it’s very easy to assume that anything informal must be replaced by something formal.
But sometimes the informal process works.
Sometimes there is a very good reason people do something in a particular way.
And sometimes the person saying “we’ve always done it this way” isn’t resisting change.
They may be telling you that twenty years of experience has taught them something you haven’t spotted yet.
That doesn’t mean nothing should change. It means understanding the existing system before replacing it.
Because the objective shouldn’t be to make an SME look like a large corporation. It should be to give people enough structure to operate effectively while protecting the flexibility that made the business successful in the first place.
And not everything valuable fits on a spreadsheet
We naturally look for tangible benefits when making improvements: cost reduction, higher output, less downtime, improved efficiency.
Those things matter.
But I’ve increasingly found myself thinking about the intangible improvements too.
Less frustration. Clearer responsibilities. Better communication. People having confidence in a process. Fewer unnecessary interruptions. Managers having enough space to actually manage rather than constantly solving today’s emergency.
Those things are much harder to quantify.
But over time, they may have an even greater effect on how well a business operates.
Why I’m writing this
That’s really the idea behind Where the Org Chart Ends.
I’m interested in the parts of management that aren’t always captured by formal structures.
How do you introduce accountability into a business built heavily on relationships and loyalty?
How do you capture knowledge without devaluing the people who built that knowledge?
How do you bring in better systems without creating unnecessary bureaucracy?
When does flexibility become dependency?
And how do you keep improving tomorrow’s business when today’s production problems keep landing on your desk?
I don’t pretend to know all the answers.
Some of the things I write about will be lessons from things that have worked. Others will be things I’m still figuring out.
And I’m sure there will be some ideas that looked fantastic on a spreadsheet and considerably less impressive once they met the real world.
But that’s exactly what I want this to be about.
Because an organisation chart might tell you how a company is structured.
The interesting part is what happens where the org chart ends.
