The Org Chart Is a Fiction.
Start Writing It Like One.

Somewhere right now, in a conference room that smells like ambition and someone's leftover pad thai, a leader is pointing at a rectangle on a screen. The rectangle has a name in it. Below that rectangle, three more rectangles with names in them. Below those, more rectangles. More lines. A beautiful family tree of accountability where nobody ever gets divorced, reassigned to a project in Tulsa, or cries in the parking lot after a one-on-one.

It looks very orderly. It looks very true.

It is neither.

The org chart is the most widely circulated fiction in business — and I say that as a man who writes fiction for a living, so I know a tall tale when I see one laminated and pinned to a breakroom wall. The names are real. The titles exist. The reporting lines are technically accurate in the same way that a seating chart at a wedding is technically accurate. Sure, Uncle Dale is at Table 9. But we all know Uncle Dale is going to end up at the bar telling the caterer about his boat. The chart doesn't account for Uncle Dale. It never does.

And that's the problem. Not that the org chart is wrong. It's that it mistakes the scaffolding for the story.

The Cast List Nobody Wrote

Here's a thought experiment I run with leaders when they bring me in to look at their culture — which, by the way, is a polite way of saying when things have gotten weird enough that they've called the narrative design guy. I tell them: forget the org chart for a second. Pretend your company is a novel. Now — who are the actual characters?

Not the titles. The characters. Who's the protagonist driving the plot forward? Who's the quiet mentor everyone sneaks off to when the real decisions need made? Who's the trickster who derails every meeting but somehow — somehow — always lands on the one insight nobody else saw? And who, God love them, is carrying the emotional weight of the entire floor on their shoulders while the chart politely labels them "coordinator"?

Usually the room goes quiet for about eight seconds. It's a very specific silence — the kind where you can hear the HVAC working overtime. Then someone laughs. Then someone says a name. Then every head in the room nods like a row of bobbleheads on a dashboard. Because they all know.

They know who actually influences whom. They know who the culture flows through. They know whose two-week notice would collapse the whole operation like pulling the wrong block in Jenga — the one at the bottom that everybody's been pretending isn't structural. None of that is on the chart. The chart tells you who reports to whom. That's it. It's a power map in a relationship map's clothing. And the distance between those two things? That's where your culture actually lives — the good parts, the weird parts, and the parts nobody mentions at the all-hands.

The org chart maps authority. The story maps influence. The gap between those two maps is where culture lives — for better, for worse, and for that thing nobody wants to bring up at the offsite.

Six Polarities the Chart Hides

In Cherokee tradition — and I'm Cherokee, so this isn't a borrowed metaphor, it's a kitchen-table inheritance — we carry a concept that all living systems hold tensions in balance. Not tensions to be solved. Tensions to be navigated. The old stories don't resolve opposites. They teach you to walk between them. Which is annoyingly harder than picking a side, but that's ancient wisdom for you. It never takes the easy route.

This thinking is the backbone of what we call the Atomic Frame at storylab. Six tensions orbiting a core truth, each one shaped like a figure-eight — an infinity loop — where both sides genuinely need the other to function. Think of it as the emotional physics of your organization. The org chart pretends these forces don't exist. Meanwhile, they're running your company like an underground railroad of feelings and side-channel Slack DMs.

Here are the six. You won't find a single one of them in the boxes. Which is precisely the point.

Here's the kicker: none of these are problems to solve. They're polarities to navigate. Realities to manage. The second you try to "fix" one side, you starve the other. That's the wisdom the old stories carry — balance isn't a destination you arrive at with a strategic plan. It's a daily practice. It's annoying. It's also the whole game.

The Infinity Loop Exercise

Alright, here's the practical part, because I don't believe in provocation without handing you a tool before I leave the room. Provocateurs without tools are just people who ruined your lunch. Thanks a ton Uncle Dale, glad we invited you.

Pick one of those six polarities — whichever one made your stomach do a little flip just now. You know the one. Draw a sideways figure eight on a large surface. Whiteboard, napkin, the back of whatever strategy document you stopped reading on page three. This is your infinity loop.

In the left loop, write three reasons the first word in your polarity is true in your organization right now. Three concrete, observable, receipts-on-the-table reasons. If you chose Authority ↔ Influence, write three ways authority is genuinely working. Real evidence. Not the aspirational stuff from last year's retreat. The truth.

In the right loop, write three reasons the opposite might also be true. Three ways influence — the unofficial, uncharted, nobody-gave-them-a-title kind — is actually running the show. Where does influence quietly overrule authority? When? Between whom? Name names if you're brave enough. (You're brave enough.)

Now look at the center point. The crossing of the eight. That's where the tension lives, and that's where the story gets interesting. Because the center isn't a compromise. It's not "let's meet in the middle" — I hate that phrase, it's where ambition goes to die. The center is a conversation. It's the place where both truths exist simultaneously, and your job as a leader isn't to pick one. It's to hold them both — to walk between them the way the old Cherokee stories taught us to walk between worlds. Less comfortable than picking a lane. Infinitely more honest.

Do this for all six. Yes, all six. I know, I know. It takes about an hour. Maybe a stiff drink. What you'll have at the end isn't an action plan — it's something better. It's context. And as they say, context is everything. A map of the story your organization is actually living, not the fairy tale the boxes and lines have been performing for the board.

Read Your Chart Like a Screenplay

Here's the reframe, and it's a good one, so do me a favor and don't skim this part. Stop reading the org chart as an engineering diagram. Start reading it as a cast list. Every role is a character. Every reporting line is a relationship. Every department is a subplot. And somewhere in all of it — probably not where you'd expect — there's a protagonist carrying the central narrative forward, whether or not their title would suggest they have any business doing so.

Ask yourself: what genre is this? Is it a comedy of errors where nobody can find the shared drive? A thriller where nobody trusts the narrator? A coming-of-age story where a scrappy team is outgrowing a founding structure held together by vibes and a Notion board? And here's the real question — is the protagonist the CEO, or is it the operations manager who quietly holds the whole machine together while the CEO gets the standing ovation and the conference keynote?

When you start seeing it this way, redesigning your org becomes a completely different kind of work. You're not shuffling boxes on a slide. You're rewriting the story. You're asking: what character does this role need to become? What relationship needs a new arc? What polarity has been stuck on one side so long it's calcified into "just the way things are"?

That's narrative design applied to organizational structure. It's not soft. It's not a metaphor you trot out in a keynote and then tuck back into a drawer. It's a way of seeing that reveals what mechanical models will never show you — that organizations are made of humans, and humans, for better and worse and always, run on story.