You Ship Your Org Chart

What an observation from the world of software design can teach us about change management.

The other day, in a conversation with an old software developer friend of mine, he mentioned that his current company is the perfect encapsulation of Conway’s Law. He didn’t mean it as a compliment…

In 1967, the programmer Mel Conway submitted a paper to the Harvard Business Review titled “How Do Committees Invent?”. It was rejected (Harvard wanted to see more evidence that the thesis matched real-world data). A year later, Datamation, a leading IT magazine at the time, published the article in April 1968. Conway’s original wording of his insight was:

“[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs that are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

In other words: Your product ends up shaped like your org chart. Conway’s insight became legendary, is now shorthanded as “Conway’s Law,” and is something one can observe in companies of all kinds. From tech giants to German SMEs making pencils – Conway’s observation is universally applicable and as true today as it was sixty years ago. You ship your org chart. You can work with it, work around it, but you can’t beat it. Conway always wins.

Which also means that if you want to change, you often need to change your org chart. Or more broadly speaking, the way you run your business. Leaders want their organization to be agile, adaptable, and flexible, yet all too often, they try to build it with rigid, hierarchical, and siloed organizations. It never works. If you want to change the output, you must first change the system that creates it.

All of which begets the question: So what is the right system for today’s environment of constant change and high uncertainty? Perhaps we look to Dee Hock, the founder of VISA. He didn’t create a company; he created a “chaordic” system. A portmanteau of chaos and order. It was an organization based on a core set of shared principles (the order) that allowed for immense autonomy and adaptability at the edges (the chaos). Member banks compete fiercely but cooperate on the central rules of the VISA network. It is decentralized, self-organizing, and built for evolution. Hock’s chaordic model is a proto-org structure for our times. It’s an organization designed to thrive in uncertainty.

But that is a topic for a future post… For now, consider that the work of building a better product is not always product work. Often, it’s the work of organizational design.

@Pascal