The Map Is Not the Power Structure

Clients frequently arrive at an engagement with a detailed org chart of the ministry, company, or coalition they need to work with, and a genuine belief that it describes how decisions get made there. It rarely does. Formal structures describe authority as it is supposed to flow. The decisions that actually matter to our clients are more often shaped by relationships, obligations, and loyalties that never appear on any chart, and mistaking the map for the territory is one of the most consistent and costly errors we see.

Informal alliance networks run underneath the formal chart

Every institution we have worked in has an informal network of relationships that cuts across its formal reporting lines: former colleagues now in different departments, family or regional ties that predate anyone's current position, and debts of loyalty from past political battles that outlast the specific roles involved. These relationships determine who actually gets consulted before a decision is finalized, regardless of what the formal process requires. A junior official with the right informal relationship can carry more real influence over a specific decision than a senior one without it, and clients who address only the formal hierarchy are often negotiating with the wrong people without realizing it.

Directives get quietly absorbed, not openly resisted

One pattern we see repeatedly, particularly in more hierarchical institutions, is that directives from the top are rarely refused outright. They are absorbed: acknowledged, nominally implemented, and then gradually reshaped in execution by the informal networks responsible for carrying them out, until the outcome looks quite different from what was originally ordered. This is a rational response in institutions where open refusal carries real career risk but quiet reinterpretation does not. It means that predicting outcomes requires understanding not just what a decision-maker ordered but who is responsible for implementing it and what that group's actual incentives are.

A directive is not a decision. It is a starting point that the people responsible for implementing it will quietly reshape, and understanding who those people are matters more than reading the directive itself.

Reading loyalty structures takes deliberate work

We build our picture of these informal loyalty structures the same way we approach any low-visibility environment: through sustained relationship-building, careful attention to who defers to whom in practice rather than in title, and cross-referencing multiple sources so that no single relationship distorts the picture. This is slow, unglamorous work, and it does not compress well into a quarterly briefing. But it consistently produces a more accurate prediction of how an institution will actually behave than any analysis built solely from its published structure, because it accounts for the people who will determine the outcome rather than the process that formally governs it.

What this means for market entry and negotiation

For clients entering a new market or negotiating a significant agreement, the practical implication is direct: identify the informal power structure before finalizing a negotiating strategy built around the formal one. We have seen well-prepared negotiating teams lose ground not because their formal counterpart disagreed with them, but because an informal stakeholder outside the negotiating room, never on the org chart, had the standing to delay or quietly reshape whatever was agreed. Mapping that stakeholder in advance, and understanding what they actually want, is frequently the difference between an agreement that holds and one that unravels in implementation.

The chart is a starting point, not an answer

None of this means formal structures are irrelevant. They set the boundaries within which informal power operates, and understanding them is a necessary first step. But treating the formal chart as sufficient, rather than as the outer frame around a more complex and consequential informal structure, is the error we see most often and the one most correlated with strategies that look sound on paper and fail on the ground. Decoding that gap between the formal map and the actual power structure is, in the end, the core of what we do.