Ask why a particular team sits where it does, in any organization that has been going a while, and you will get a story rather than a reason.

It used to be part of a different division. It came in with an acquisition and never quite got absorbed. It reported to someone who has since left, and moving it now would mean reopening a conversation that took four months last time. My favourite version of this answer, given entirely without irony: it has always been there.

Nobody sat down and designed that shape. It arrived one sensible decision at a time, each of them defensible on the day it was made, and the sum of them is a structure that no single person would have drawn on purpose and that everybody now works inside.

I find that oddly reassuring, and I think it is the most useful thing to understand about organizations. If the shape had been designed, someone would have to be blamed for it. It wasn’t. It grew.

Which is worth sitting with, because it changes what kind of thing you are looking at.

A structure that was designed can be redesigned. You find the person who drew it, establish what they were solving for, and decide whether it still holds. That is a tractable afternoon.

A structure that grew has no such person. There is no original intent to consult, because there was never one intent — there were forty, spread over a decade, each of them local and reasonable and mostly forgotten by whoever had it. Asking “why is it like this” is the wrong question, and it is the one everybody asks first. The answer is always the same and always unsatisfying: because of a sequence of things, most of which are no longer true.

Which is why organizations reorganize so confidently and change so little. Redrawing the chart is treating the shape as a design. The shape is a residue.

And it is not only boundaries that grow this way. So does the apparatus around them.

A Meeting Grew Here makes the case that governance grows where ownership is unclear. Watching it happen a few more times, I would widen that: governance also grows where trust is thin. Somebody is not confident the work will come back right, so they add a check. The check is reasonable and the person adding it would not describe it as distrust — they would call it quality, or rigour, or being responsible. But the reason it is there is that they are not sure, and the sign-off is cheaper than finding out.

Repeat that across a few years and a few dozen people and you get a structure nobody designed and everybody can justify: an approval per doubt, an extra pair of eyes per bad memory, a status meeting per relationship that never quite recovered. The org chart looks fine. The apparatus around it is a fossil record of who did not trust whom, and when.

Which is why the cost of a broken relationship between two teams is so much higher than it looks in the moment. It does not stay a relationship problem. It hardens into process, and process outlives everyone involved in the incident that produced it.

None of that makes it permanent. Grown things can be tended, cut back, and grown differently — that is most of what the rest of this paper is about. But it starts from noticing that nobody is defending the current arrangement, because nobody chose it. There is far less resistance waiting than most people expect. There is just nobody whose job it is to notice.

Some of the most expensive structures in an organization are the ones nobody ever decided on.

Cultivating this: Tending What Grew, in Part III.