Despite being experienced managers, what they learned was eye-opening. One explained that “it was like the sun rose for the first time. … I saw the bigger picture.” They had never seen the pieces — the jobs, technologies, tools, and routines — connected in one place, and they realized that their prior view was narrow and fractured. A team member acknowledged, “I only thought of things in the context of my span of control.”

The maps of the organization generated by the project teams also showed that their organizations often lacked a purposeful, integrated design that was centrally monitored and managed. There may originally have been such a design, but as the organization grew, adapted to changing markets, brought on new leadership, added or subtracted divisions, and so on, this animating vision was lost. The original design had been eroded, patched, and overgrown with alternative plans. A manager explained, “Everything I see around here was developed because of specific issues that popped up, and it was all done ad hoc and added onto each other. It certainly wasn’t engineered.”

“They see problems, and the general approach, the human approach, is to try and fix them. … Functions have tried to put band-aids on every issue that comes up. It sounds good, but when they are layered one on top of the other they start to choke the organization. But they don’t see that because they are only seeing their own thing.”

Ultimately, the managers realized that what they had previously attributed to the direction and control of centralized, bureaucratic forces was actually the aggregation of the distributed work and uncoordinated decisions of people dispersed throughout the organization. Everyone was working on the part of the organization they were familiar with, assuming that another set of people were attending to the larger picture, coordinating the larger system to achieve goals and keeping the organization operating. Except no one was actually looking at how people’s work was connecting across the organization day-to-day.

as they felt a sense of empowerment about changing the organization, they felt a sense of alienation about returning to their central roles. “You really start understanding all of the waste and all of the redundancy and all of the people who are employed as what I call intervention resources,” one person told us.

In the end, a slight majority of the employees returned to their role to continue their career (25 cases). They either were promoted (7 cases), moved laterally (8 cases), or returned to their jobs (10 cases). However, 23 chose organizational change roles.

This study suggests that when companies undertake organizational change efforts, they should consider not only the implications for the organization, but also for the people tasked to do the work. Further, it highlights just how infrequently we recognize how poorly designed and managed many of our organizations really are. Not acknowledging the dysfunction of existing routines protects us from seeing how much of our work is not actually adding value, something that may lead simply to unsatisfying work, no less to larger questions about the nature of organizational design similar to those asked by the managers in my study. Knowledge of the systems we work in can be a source of power, yes. But when you realize you can’t affect the big changes your organization needs, it can also be a source of alienation.