Your org chart is fiction. Real work is brokered by a few hubs whose load is invisible until they leave.
A network read of how help, advice, and information actually flow through your organisation, and what to change about it.
- Organisational Network Analysis
- Centrality measures
- Mission coupling
The problem in depth
Org charts describe reporting lines. They do not describe how work gets done. The actual fabric of your organisation is the network of who asks whom for help, who reviews whose code, who carries whose decisions. That fabric is rarely the one drawn on the wall.
The risks that fabric carries are real. A handful of central brokers under unsustainable load. Silos that look like collaboration from the outside but route nothing across themselves. Single points of failure invisible until somebody resigns.
Organisational Network Analysis surfaces that fabric and lets you act on it.
What I deliver
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Network map
A visual map of help, advice, and information ties across the population in scope, with centrality and bridging measures computed per node.
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Broker and bridge inventory
A list of the people and teams the network actually depends on, with the load each of them is carrying.
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Silo and cluster diagnostic
Where the network breaks, what it does and does not route across, and which structural moves would change that.
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Mission-coupling assessment
A spectrum of how tightly different units depend on each other to succeed, used to inform whether sensemaking happens independently or as a cluster.
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Action set
Concrete moves on team design, role design, and knowledge-sharing rituals, paired with what to remeasure to know if they worked.
How I work
I design the survey, run it, score the results, and walk leaders through the map. The conversation is rarely "your network is broken". It is usually "your network is doing X well, and is fragile in two specific places we can change without reorganising".
Worked example
An engineering org of 400, where the map showed two staff engineers carrying 60 percent of cross-team advice flow. One was on the verge of leaving. The intervention redistributed that load via two structured rituals and a deliberate rotation. Six months later, the load was visibly distributed and the staff engineer in question stayed.
Help-and-advice network across three clusters
Three teams, each cohesive internally. Two brokers (Mei, Priya) carry intra-cluster load. One bridge (Sam) carries the only meaningful inter-cluster flow. If Sam leaves, the right-hand cluster is suddenly an island.
- Cluster A
- Cluster B
- Cluster C
- Inter-cluster bridge
Discuss a knowledge & collaboration network analysis engagement.
A 30-minute conversation is enough to know if we should keep talking.