Some years ago, on Seth Godin's altMBA, our group was asked to draw a map of an organisation we knew. Not the traditional org chart, but how it really works.
Who actually has the power to say no? Who are the few who can say yes? What are the worldviews of these people? How does that affect how the organisation works?
The exercise works because every leader carries a picture of the company they run: the strategy on the slide, the values on the wall, the org chart everyone nods along to.
Employees live in a different one, shaped by who actually gets promoted, which meetings matter, and what happens to the person who raises the awkward question.
Irina Wolpert, who leads Egon Zehnder's North America Fintech Practice, gave this a name in the June 2026 HBR: the two-organisations problem.
Her point is that the gap is not a communication problem to be patched with a memo. It is the condition most organisations operate in, most of the time, often due to every layer polishing the truth on the way up.
For many years my conversations with CEOs and their teams have demonstrated the same gap. Intersecting these two organisations is another divide: the said and the unsaid.
Above the waterline sits the stated strategy. Below it sits the anxiety and the actual behaviour that decides whether the strategy is real.
Closing the gap takes a better conversation, repeated often enough that the two pictures start to merge.
So the question worth asking in your own business: if you sat with your team and drew both organisations side by side, how far apart would the drawings be?
The Two-Organizations Problem — Irina Wolpert, Harvard Business Review
Related on this site:
Beneath the Surface: What You Can't See Is Running the Show
— Why groups always run on two levels at once, and what sits below the one everyone can see.
Iceberg Model
— The tip above the waterline, and the pattern, structure and mental models holding it up.