The problem isn’t inside the organisation.
At least, not entirely.
The delay lives somewhere between people. Between teams. Between suppliers. Between organisations that all technically agree they are trying to achieve the same thing.
Everyone is doing their part.
And still, the whole thing feels stuck.
We’ve all seen this.
The council depends on the supplier.
The supplier depends on legal.
Legal depends on policy.
Policy depends on political timing.
Procurement depends on governance.
Governance depends on information that is currently “with someone.”
No single part is obviously broken.
The difficulty lives in the connections.
If the machine gave us structure, the organism adaptation, culture meaning, politics power, the algorithm invisible rules and narrative shared reality, this next lens asks us to look somewhere we often avoid.
Not at the parts.
At the relationships.
Because increasingly, organisations do not behave like contained entities.
They behave like networks.
We Keep Managing Boxes When the Problem Lives Between Them
Gareth Morgan gave us extraordinary metaphors in Images of Organization, but if we were rewriting it now, I think the organisation as network would need its own chapter.
Not hierarchy.
Not boxes on an org chart.
A web of relationships, dependencies and flows.
- Information flows.
- Trust flows.
- Delay flows.
- Influence flows.
And often, formal authority matters far less than where those flows actually go.
The org chart says one thing.
Reality usually says something far more interesting.
Traditional governance loves boundaries.
- This team owns this.
- That team approves that.
- This is in scope.
- That sits elsewhere.
It makes accountability cleaner.
It also creates a dangerous illusion.
Because most modern delivery problems do not live inside a box.
They live in the handover.
The dependency.
The awkward stretch of ground where everybody partially owns the problem and therefore nobody really does.
Transformation usually fails there.
Not in the centre of the machine, but in the joints.
The Real Risk Is Often the Relationship
We are very good at documenting operational symptoms.
- Supplier delay.
- Legal dependency.
- Procurement blockage.
- Governance issue.
These are useful labels.
But often they are descriptions of the visible problem, not the real one.
The real issue is relational.
- Trust is low.
- Expectations differ.
- History exists.
- Someone remembers the last failed project and is quietly behaving accordingly.
We report the symptom because it is easier to put into a board paper.
We rarely report:
“People do not trust each other enough to take the risk.”
But that is often the truth.
And because relationship quality feels soft, governance tends to ignore it until it becomes hard enough to be expensive.
By then, it is usually too late.
I Learned This Properly in Mosaic
The Mosaic upgrades taught me this more clearly than most textbooks ever could.
Technically, the challenge was reporting, log shipping, supplier dependencies, infrastructure timing and all the other respectable nouns we use in programme management.
But the real work was coalition building.
Getting The Access Group, Agilisys and internal teams to behave like a shared system rather than separate contractual islands protecting their own edges.
That was not a technical problem.
It was network leadership.
The project did not succeed because the Gantt chart was beautiful.
It succeeded because enough trust, pressure and shared understanding existed across the network for people to act when formal process alone was not enough.
Most complex programmes work like that.
We just tend to write the lessons learned as though the spreadsheet was the hero.
It rarely is.
The Org Chart Is a Work of Fiction
Not a malicious fiction. A useful one.
But still a fiction.
If you want to know how work actually gets done, do not start with the structure chart.
Start with simpler questions.
Who gets called first when something breaks?
Who can get an answer in ten minutes that takes everyone else two weeks?
Who gets invited before the official invite goes out?
That is the real organisation.
The network.
Built on trust, credibility, history and informal legitimacy.
Sometimes the most influential person in the programme is not the sponsor.
It is the person everyone quietly trusts enough to ring first.
That rarely appears in governance packs.
It probably should.
During my MBA work with Bougon’s Self-Q cognitive mapping, I was struck by something similar.
A team could clearly have direction while individuals remained slightly misaligned in how they understood it.
From the outside, it looked coherent.
Inside, it was a network of negotiated meaning and influence.
That stayed with me, because it explained why formal structure so often feels less powerful than lived relationships.
Jaws Again, Because of Course It Is
I keep returning to Jaws because it understands networks better than many governance frameworks.
Everyone remembers the shark.
The real story is the network of dependency around it.
The mayor, the police chief, local business owners, public confidence, tourism, fear.
The mayor is not simply making a bad decision.
He is trapped inside a network where every choice creates consequences somewhere else.
That is leadership.
Not choosing between right and wrong.
Choosing which relationships can absorb the impact.
We like to imagine governance as rational decision-making.
Often it is network management under emotional pressure.
Less spreadsheet, more weather system.
Platforms Changed the Game Further
Modern organisations have taken this even further.
Look at Amazon, Uber or Airbnb.
They are not organisations in the old sense.
They are ecosystems.
Their power comes less from controlling assets and more from coordinating relationships between participants.
Local government increasingly behaves the same way.
Permit schemes.
Shared services.
Translation frameworks.
Contract management ecosystems.
These are not isolated services.
They are platforms of interdependence.
Which means leadership becomes less about command and more about choreography.
Less orchestra conductor, more air traffic controller.
Usually with worse biscuits.
This Is Why AI Is Also a Network Problem
We often talk about AI as though it is a tool being introduced into an organisation.
It is more disruptive than that.
It changes the network.
- Who gets information first?
- Who becomes a bottleneck?
- Who no longer needs permission to create analysis?
- Who loses informal authority because expertise becomes easier to access?
That is why AI adoption creates anxiety that has nothing to do with software.
It redistributes position inside the network.
And networks defend themselves.
This is another reason I wrote Nobody Ever Got Fired for Saying No to AI.
The decision is rarely about the tool.
It is about what happens to status, trust and legitimacy when the network rearranges itself.
A Different Kind of Leadership
In hierarchies, influence comes from authority.
In networks, influence comes from connection.
- Can we build trust quickly?
- Can we translate between groups?
- Can we reduce friction without owning either side?
Some people become quietly indispensable because they lower the transaction cost of the whole system.
They make the network work.
This rarely looks heroic.
It often looks like endless conversations and slightly mysterious progress.
But without it, programmes stall.
I sometimes think the best project managers are less engineers and more diplomats.
Which probably explains why coffee matters so much.
A Different Question Again
So the question changes.
Not:
“Who owns this?”
But:
What depends on what, and where does trust actually sit?
That is a much better question.
Because if the answer is unclear, governance will not save us.
The project will still move at the speed of the weakest relationship.
And that is usually slower than the board expects.
Where This Leaves Us
The machine taught us structure.
The organism taught us adaptation.
Culture taught us meaning.
Politics taught us conflict.
The algorithm taught us hidden power.
Narrative taught us shared reality.
The network teaches us interdependence.
That may be the most modern lesson of all.
Because increasingly, success is not about controlling our part of the system.
It is about helping the whole thing move.
And that requires a slightly humbling thought.
Sometimes the most important work in leadership is not making decisions.
It is making connections.
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