Start With the Org Chart

Published 2026-07-02 · Updated 2026-06-26 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: Digital Transformation, Enterprise, Team Building & Culture, Product Strategy & Development

When I step into a new role, the first thing I do is go wide, fast, and the document I reach for before almost anything else is the org chart, because that single page tells me more about how a company actually behaves than any deck or strategy memo ever will. It is where the separations happen, and they tend to happen organically at first, the way water finds its level, until those informal divisions harden into processes, then into practices, and eventually into something nobody can quite name anymore but everybody calls the culture. I have come to believe that you cannot really change a company without first understanding the lines that already divide it, because those lines are not arbitrary. They are the accumulated history of every decision someone once made about who owns what, and they persist long after the reasons for them have been forgotten.

There is a trick I use that sounds glib but holds up surprisingly well, which is that you can usually map a company's org chart just by looking at its website. The way the site is organized – the top-level navigation, the product groupings, the seams where one section clearly does not talk to the next – mirrors, almost exactly, how the company is organized internally. If two things that obviously belong together live in separate corners of the site (different language, different design, different tone), it is usually because they live in separate corners of the building too. The website is the org chart made visible to strangers. Once you start seeing it that way, it is genuinely hard to stop.

But here is the part that actually matters, and it is the part most transformations miss entirely. The real opportunity does not live inside the boxes; it lives in the gaps between them. When I look for where to spend my energy, I am hunting for the projects that span org charts, the work nobody fully owns because it falls in the seam where two or three groups touch and then politely back away. That is where the value has been quietly pooling, unclaimed, sometimes for years.

The clearest example I can point to, because it is public and I have talked about it on stage, is AT&T, which ran an enormous transformation that I think remains badly under-appreciated. As an incumbent, the company had spent heavily for decades training people into siloed roles – installers were trained to install, salespeople to sell, support people to support – and each of those investments was made against its own slice of the chart, optimized for that box and nothing beyond it. The realization was a deceptively simple one. The gaps were the opportunity. An installer standing in a customer's home is also, functionally, a support person, because they are right there at the moment something matters most. A salesperson with the right tools in hand can see and sell the very thing an installer does every day. So the work became digitizing those processes, cross-training the people, and putting the right tooling where it had never been. Suddenly a salesperson could sell internet and a range of other services, an installer could upsell and support on the spot, and everyone had access to information they had simply never been given before. Connecting the dots between the boxes was the whole win; the boxes themselves were already about as good as they were going to get.

Reading the chart is only the start, of course. After that I go talk to customers, and I go talk to people from different parts of the chart – deliberately different parts, the ones who do not normally end up in the same room – and slowly I assemble a picture out of what each of them can see from where they sit. No single person has the whole view. That is exactly why the gaps stay invisible for so long; everyone is honestly describing their own box, and nobody is describing the space in between.

I want to be honest about the hard part, because it would be dishonest to make this sound clean. Nine times out of ten, a transformation of this kind changes the culture, and asking people to step out of their lane, to share what they know, and to be challenged on it is genuinely frightening for a lot of them. I have seen tremendous appetite for it, people who light up the moment you hand them a wider view of the business and a reason to use it. I have also seen the exact opposite, and it only takes one entrenched person in the wrong seat – someone who reads the dissolving of a boundary as the dissolving of their own importance – to slow a transformation down, or stall it, or quietly derail it altogether. That resistance is not irrational, either, which is what makes it so hard to argue with; the boundaries you are trying to erase are the same boundaries that have kept certain people safe and necessary for a very long time.

So I keep coming back to that first document. The org chart is not just a picture of how a company is organized, though it is certainly that. It is a map of where the opportunity is sitting unclaimed in the gaps, and at the very same time, drawn in the very same lines, it is a map of where the resistance is going to come from when you finally reach in to claim it. Both things live in the same place, which is probably why I have learned to start there, and to read it slowly.