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Your brain is hard to search
Modern organizations exist as much in digital space as in physical reality, yet most still maintain their operating models—purposes, structures, roles, and decision rights—in static documents or, worse, only in the collective minds of their members.
While work increasingly flows through digital channels that enable unprecedented flexibility and speed, the underlying organizational architecture remains trapped in analog formats that resist adaptation. When network of teams (13) and team/process as product (63) become your norm, this misalignment between digital operations and analog governance impedes progress.
Important knowledge—who owns which decisions, what teams exist and why, what individuals are accountable for—remains implicit rather than explicit, hidden rather than accessible. This information asymmetry severely hampers coordination efforts; the cognitive load of maintaining mental models of complex structures eventually exceeds human capacity, especially as organizations scale.
The invisibility problem results in daily frustrations. Teams initiate redundant work because they cannot see parallel efforts. Decision processes stall when ownership boundaries remain ambiguous. Organizational memory fades as transitions occur without adequate knowledge transfer.
The situation worsens exponentially with growth. What functions adequately in a 10-person startup becomes dysfunctional at 50, and nearly impossible at 500. As Mike Arauz, one of my co-founders at August noted in First Round Review, “In most organizations today, the answers to these questions . . . exist at best in static PowerPoint documents sitting on a senior manager’s hard drive, and at worst are trapped in implicit assumptions inside the heads of all the people who need to work together.”