Your product team just discovered something critical. Customer interviews revealed a fundamental misunderstanding about how people actually use your flagship feature. The insight is clear, urgent, and actionable. It could reshape your roadmap.
But first, it needs to travel.
From the product owner to the product director. From the director to the VP. From the VP to the C-suite. At each layer, it gets filtered, polished, stripped of urgency. By the time it reaches the executives who can act on it, three weeks have passed. The market has moved on. A competitor has shipped.
This isn’t a people problem. It’s a structural one. Your org chart was designed in 1854 for railroad telegraphs — and you’re trying to run it on Slack.
The Railway Blueprint We Never Questioned
In 1854, Daniel McCallum faced an unprecedented challenge. As superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad, he was managing the longest railroad in the world — 500 miles of track, thousands of employees, complex interdependencies. No organization had ever operated at this scale across such distances.
His solution was brilliant: the first organizational chart. A hierarchical tree structure that divided responsibility, established clear reporting lines, and created coordination through layers of management. Information flowed upward through telegraph and mail. Decisions flowed downward through the same channels.
It worked perfectly. For 1854.
Because here’s what that structure assumed about communication: it would be slow (days or weeks), primarily one-directional (upward reporting, downward commands), and low-density (text-only summaries). Those weren’t bugs — they were features. The hierarchy was specifically engineered for the communication technology of the time.
Then something happened. Railroads became the dominant force in American business. Other industries copied their structure wholesale. Not because hierarchical org charts were universally optimal, but because railroads were the first “big business,” and everyone assumed they must know something.
We’ve been using that blueprint ever since. Through telephones. Through email. Through instant messaging. Through video conferencing. The medium changed completely. The structure didn’t.
The Mismatch: Then vs. Now
Consider what communication looked like when the org chart was invented:
1854 Railway Communication: Days or weeks to transmit information. One direction at a time — reports up, commands down. Low information density — text summaries only. Limited channels — telegraph, mail, occasional face-to-face meetings. Bottlenecks were acceptable because everything was a bottleneck.
2025 Modern Communication: Instant transmission — 376 billion emails sent daily. Multi-directional — information flows everywhere simultaneously. High density — video, real-time data, analytics, AI-generated insights. Unlimited channels — Slack, Teams, Zoom, APIs, live dashboards. Bottlenecks are catastrophic because nothing else is.
We’re trying to stream 4K video through telegraph wire. The structure can’t handle the bandwidth.
The Engineering Failures
When you force high-velocity, multi-directional information through a serial processing structure, you don’t get inefficiency. You get systematic breakdowns:
Decision-making paralysis. 61% of employees waste most of their decision-making time navigating organizational politics and uncertainty. Remarkably, 57% of C-suite executives admit the same problem. When decisions must travel through multiple approval layers, the friction isn’t occasional — it’s structural.
Feedback dilution. That customer insight your product team discovered? It doesn’t just get delayed traveling upward. It gets sanitized. The emotional urgency that makes it actionable — the frustration in the customer’s voice, the specific context — gets stripped out at each layer. By the time it reaches decision-makers, it’s a bloodless summary that doesn’t trigger action.
Manager overwhelm. 75% of HR leaders report that managers are overwhelmed and not equipped to lead effectively. This isn’t because managers are incompetent. It’s because they’re serial processors in a parallel-processing world. Every piece of information, every decision, every approval must flow through them sequentially. They’ve become human routers, and the packets are backing up.
Network bottlenecks. When you analyze actual communication patterns in organizations, you find individuals with 44 or more connections who become structural chokepoints. They’re not bottlenecks because they work slowly — they’re bottlenecks because the structure forces everything through them.
Innovation suppression. Research shows 60% less innovative solutions emerge from hierarchical structures compared to network-based ones. Not because hierarchies attract less creative people, but because novel ideas must survive multiple approval layers. Each layer filters for risk, conformity, and comprehensibility to non-experts. By the time an idea makes it through, it’s been optimized for approval, not for impact.
These aren’t people failures. They’re engineering failures. We’ve built a system where the structure itself creates the problems.
What Needs to Evolve
This isn’t about declaring “hierarchy bad” or prescribing some utopian flat structure. The railway org chart was genuinely brilliant — for its communication context. The question is: what structure makes sense when information flows instantly and multi-directionally?
The design principle is straightforward: match structure to communication medium.
When information flows instantly and in all directions, you need to reduce serial dependencies. Fewer approval layers means faster cycle time. Enable parallel processing through cross-functional networks where decisions can happen simultaneously rather than sequentially. Push decisions to information sources — the people closest to customers, closest to the work, who have the richest context.
Design for information velocity, not control.
McKinsey’s recent research points toward “work charts over org charts” — mapping how work actually flows rather than how reporting lines theoretically cascade. That’s the right instinct. Information technology fundamentally changes the relationship between organizational structure and performance. The companies that thrive aren’t the ones with the best hierarchy — they’re the ones whose structure matches their communication reality.
Where to Start
You don’t need to reorganize the entire company tomorrow. Start with diagnosis:
Map actual information flow. Where do decisions actually get stuck? Not where the org chart says they should get stuck. Track a few critical decisions from initiation to action. Count the handoffs. Measure the delays. Identify where context gets lost.
Identify serial bottlenecks. What processes currently flow sequentially that could run in parallel? Which approval chains exist due to genuine interdependencies versus those inherited from the structure? Where are you forcing serial processing because “that’s how it’s always been done”?
Experiment with network structures. Pick one team or one product. Reduce the layers between the frontline and decision-making. Increase autonomy. Measure cycle time — how fast can you move from insight to action? Use that as your laboratory.
The org chart isn’t inherently wrong. It’s just 170 years old, built for a different communication technology. The question isn’t whether to have structure — it’s whether your structure matches the speed at which information actually moves.
Your telegraph-era org chart worked perfectly when information traveled at telegraph speed. But your team is communicating at light speed now. Maybe it’s time your structure caught up.
Ralph Jocham is Europe’s first Professional Scrum Trainer, co-author of “Professional Product Owner,” and contributor to the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack. As an ICF ACC certified coach, works with organizations to build Product Operating Models where strategic clarity, operational excellence, and adaptive learning create measurable competitive advantage. Learn more at effective agile.