Scope Creep Issue #2: Your Org Chart Is Lying to You About How Work Actually Moves.

This piece first appeared in Scope Creep, our LinkedIn newsletter about why work breaks down and what fixes it. Every edition runs here on the blog eventually, but LinkedIn subscribers get it the day it publishes. Subscribe to Scope Creep on LinkedIn and skip the wait.

There’s a stretch of grass on every college campus that the landscape architects have given up on. It’s the diagonal track between two buildings where the official walkway makes you go the long way around. The students cut through. The grass dies. The university puts up signs. The students keep cutting through. Eventually, some maintenance director gets tired and just paves the worn path.

Urban planners have a name for this. They’re called desire paths. Routes people actually take, instead of the ones the original designers thought they should.

Your organization has them too. You just can’t see them. Foot traffic leaves a trail. Email traffic doesn’t.

So the only map anyone looks at is the org chart: the official version of who reports to who reports to whom, where the department lines fall, which director owns which initiative. Then there’s the map nobody drew, the one that shows who emails whom when something is stuck at 4:45 on a Friday, which associate dean is the unofficial back-channel between IT and academic affairs, who the same three departments quietly message when they need something to actually happen before the quarter closes.

The org chart looks like a tree. The map nobody drew looks like rush hour traffic. Shortcuts, dead ends, that one alley everybody uses to skip the light that never changes.

And here’s the part that should bother you a little: the second map is the one doing the work.

Rob Cross at Babson has spent twenty years proving this with data. Through the Connected Commons, a research consortium, he runs organizational network analysis on real companies, mapping who actually talks to whom against who’s supposed to. Two findings he keeps hitting. First, collaboration overload quietly eats 18 to 24% of a high performer’s week, and it’s usually not because they can’t say no. It’s because the informal network keeps routing everything through them and the formal structure has no idea it’s happening. Second, and this is the one that should make a provost sit up: when someone is that overloaded, the people connected to them quit at rates up to 200% higher than average. The bottleneck doesn’t just burn out and leave. They take a quiet little constellation of people down with them, because the work that person was secretly holding together stops getting held, and everyone downstream feels the floor go soft.

None of that shows up on the org chart. The org chart was the last place to find out.

Where the gap gets widest

Higher ed runs the largest gap between the official map and the working one, and it pays the most to pretend otherwise.

Picture a normal provost’s-office initiative. Nothing exotic. A new interdisciplinary major, a reaccreditation cycle, a campus-wide student success push. The org chart says the provost owns it. Reality says the provost needs real work out of admissions, marketing, IT, student affairs, financial aid, the registrar, three deans, and a faculty senate committee or two, none of whom report to her, all of whom are buried in their own work and have zero visibility into anyone else’s.

So how does it actually move? Through about eight people who happen to trust each other.

There’s the coordinator in the provost’s office who has been there nineteen years, sits on five committees, and knows where every body is buried because she helped bury most of them. The associate dean who still gets the other deans on the phone because she used to be one and they owe her. The one IT director who answers email same-day while the official ticket queue runs four weeks behind. The institutional research analyst running three accreditation timelines, two reorgs, and the President’s strategic plan rollout out of a spreadsheet she built in 2019 and has never been able to put down.

That’s the desire path. The initiative happens because those eight people exist and like each other. Remove any one of them (sabbatical, a better offer from a peer institution, one bad semester where they get pulled onto a search committee) and six initiatives stall at once. The provost’s calendar mysteriously fills with meetings that didn’t used to be necessary, because the shortcut is gone and the work has to crawl back through the formal structure, which is slower and knows less.

Prosci, studying project work in higher ed, puts the polite version on record: project leadership frequently lands on faculty and administrators “whose primary roles lie elsewhere,” with no shared method and wide variation across units. Translated out of consultant: the most important coordination work on your campus is being done by people who never applied for it, weren’t trained for it, and don’t have an hour to spare for it.

Most PM tools are built for the wrong map

They sort projects by department. They draw swim lanes along reporting lines. They send notifications up the manager hierarchy. They are, in the most literal sense, software for the map that isn’t doing the work.

Meanwhile the analyst with the 2019 spreadsheet is invisible to all of it. So is the nineteen-year coordinator. So is the associate dean spending a third of her week as an unpaid switchboard. The system can’t see the people moving the work, which means it can’t help them, can’t redistribute what they’re carrying, and can’t warn anyone when one of them is three weeks from handing in their badge and walking out with a decade of institutional memory.

The question worth asking about your PM setup isn’t whether it’s tracking your projects. It’s whether it has any idea who’s actually moving them.

One thing to do this week

Ask three people who they go to when something’s stuck and the official process has stopped working. Then ask three more who report up through a different VP. The names that surface twice are your desire paths. A few of them have been doing the job so long they’ve forgotten it was never technically their job.

The org chart is the map you show the board. The desire paths are the map your campus actually runs on. The organizations that work best do the same thing: find the paths people already walk, and stop pretending the official route is the only one.

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