Some years ago, frustrated by being handed the chart when I asked for a picture of some organization I wished to understand—like being handed the family tree when you asked to see the family album—I started to draw what I called organigraphs. (Organigramme is the French word for the chart.) I would sit down with a few people knowledgeable about the place and we would sketch on a whiteboard what really went on, how things flowed through the place, from beginning to end. As you will see, the vocabulary of chains, hubs, webs, and sets was particularly helpful in doing this.
Picture an organization at work, producing its products and rendering its services, anything from a barbershop to a space agency. What you will see are various activities, An organigraph is an effort to picture this, like a map. A map, in one image, shows the consequential places in a territory and the roads that connect them. An organigraph shows the consequential activities in an organization, and the flows that connect them This enabling people to see the place fully, even employees to their own place in it, beyond who they might boss, and bosses them..
Here ae some examples, for illustration. [Greenpeace follows, other two to come]
The hospital as a hub where sets serve the patients as hubs
The hospital itself has been described above as a hub, likewise each of its patients, who stay in their rooms as they receive most of their services, while the physicians who serve them mostly work independently, as a set, except in research, where they may form teams, each working as a web.
Aircraft production as a chain of hubs
Once a new airplane is conceived, design teams are formed for each component—wings, wiring, engines, etc.—as well as one for the overall coordination of these teams. Each is a hub for its component, but internally, these teams work as webs. Once the design is “frozen”, fabrication of each of the components begins, separately, as a set. If the plane is to be assembled on an assembly line, like an automobile, this is a chain. But when an airplane is too big to do that, it will sit In one place to which the various components are brought—in other word, it is assembled as a hub. Finally, each airplane, as a set of such planes, is flown off to its individual customer.
Greenpeace as a set of webs, local and global
Some years ago, working with people at the headquarters of Greenpeace in Amsterdam, I drew this organigraph. At the top, at. That time, it shows the organization running global campaigns, for example related to climate change, while at the bottom, it shows the local actions carried out by the national offices, for example protesting the polluting of a mine. Each of these, global and local, tends to be rather customized, to deal with the issue at hand, and therefore functions as a web, although considered together, they do form a set, albeit, with the local actions feeding into the global campaigns and the global campaigns targeting local actions. In the middle is the executive office, as a kind of hub, surrounded by advisory and administrative supports.
