The Two Systems of Every Organisation

Most organisations have two systems.

The first is the one you can see. Let’s call this System One.

System One is visible in the organisation chart. This system is documented and widely circulated and is available for public viewing. It tells you the formal roles, responsibilities and reporting structures. It gives you an indication of the expected channel of power and authority in an organisation.

Gaining a place in System One is often what we view as career advancement or career success. Progression is about typically gaining a particular level or role that gives us more authority, status and power than what we currently have.

The second system lies underneath System One, like a labyrinth of electrical wiring hidden by the false ceiling. This system is harder to see and yet this is the one that is powering System One. Let’s call this System Minus One.

System Minus One lives in the web of relationships, informal networks and alliances that shape and influence decisions, information and power. This system determines where power is concentrated, how it is wielded and the mechanisms through which it is accessed.

This system explains the gap between how things are supposed to work and how things work. It determines whose opinion carries weight, whose input influences decisions, whose support can swing the odds in your favour and whose resistance can quietly stall something in the formal channels. This system also determines how these things happen.

System One is the formal organisation. System Minus One is the live organisation.

Most competent and capable professionals are experts in reading System One. You know your way around the people directory, which is probably a pinned tab on your browser. It is an instinctive action to double-click on someone’s name in Outlook to see where they are placed in the organisation. When you meet someone new, you immediately map out the reporting structure all the way to the top.

You respect the chain of command and follow escalation procedures meticulously. You have demonstrated your competence, willingness and usefulness beyond a shadow of a doubt. Your career is on the rise, and your boss wants clones of you.

But there comes a point in your career when your influence stagnates. You are unable to influence decisions that directly impact you, your project or your team. You are kept out of the loop when decisions are made.

A headcount that is impossible to get at a time when the organisation is restructuring gets approved for someone else outside of the regular AOP process as an exception.

Promotions that have been on hold in the organisation get mysteriously sanctioned for another colleague’s department.

The proposal that you worked on for weeks, at the behest of your boss, and which was touted as a strategic game changer for the department is suddenly put on hold, and you have no idea why.

You receive feedback that you are rubbing your peers up the wrong way. You are told that you are too direct and intimidating, making it hard for the team to approach you. Your boss is talking to your team behind your back and no one is telling you about it.

You go through three rounds of interviews for a role that is an ideal fit for you, and yet you find out that in the last round a candidate who is nowhere close to being a fit has been offered the role.

This is often the point at which people say, with frustration, “It is all office politics.”

Sometimes it is. But what really is office politics?

This is the point at which the expected way of working does not match what is really happening. You are encountering System Minus One. System One is the map of the formal organisation. System Minus One is the terrain of the real organisation. We need the map to navigate the terrain, but in reality our journey is through the terrain. And we are blindsided when we mistake the map for the terrain. As the Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked, “the map is not the territory.”

Understanding System Minus One and how it interacts with System One is at the heart of political literacy. This opens the door to having more agency and choices in how you can engage within this system without playing ‘dirty politics’ or changing the core of what you value.

System One Organisation

System One is like the face of the organisation. It is what is known, seen and communicated to everyone. System One is the formal and documented system that is essential, like how we all need a face.

System One creates clarity about responsibility, accountability and authority. It tells you clearly where the buck stops, and who takes the fall, not just the credit for a job well done. System One gives people a shared structure for coordinating work.

System One organisation includes things such as:

• Reporting lines
• Organisational charts
• Roles and job descriptions
• Policies and processes
• Governance forums
• Decision rights
• Performance management systems
• Budget ownership and authority
• Escalation matrices
• Approval mechanisms

Without these formal structures, large organisations would become impossible to navigate. Imagine trying to run a country, bank, hospital, technology company or factory entirely through relationships and informal conversations. There would be no reliable way to know who had authority, who was accountable or how important decisions should be made. In fact, if you have to run a professional organisation, all of these things need to be in place.

System One creates order. It also ensures a degree of fairness and predictability. Processes can prevent every decision from becoming a negotiation between the most powerful individuals in the room. System One operates very well in high-stakes situations and in structures where hierarchy and processes are implemented to a great degree. You can see this in industries and companies where standardisation, safety, compliance and accountability are valuable and matter significantly to the company’s performance.

But as we all know, System One has its limits. There are always edge cases that do not follow the documented process. Decisions are influenced by people who do not appear on the organisation chart in that capacity.

System One expects people to colour within the lines. But the moment there is a line, you can expect people in the system to find ways to colour outside the lines. That’s just human behaviour. We find this in our own lives when we do not follow the codes, standards, rules and expectations we set for ourselves. It is not possible to strictly follow guidelines, processes unless the repercussions of not following them are dire and extreme.

System One is necessary but cannot account for all human behaviour, and therefore System Minus One emerges to fill the gap between expected and observed behaviours in organisations. System Minus One also thrives in organisations and situations where people need flexibility, speed, trust, interpretation and coordination beyond what formal rules can specify.

How complete is your System One map? Take the short assessment.