ARTICLES

Pull out your org chart. It tells you who reports to whom, which teams sit under which leaders, and how the formal hierarchy is structured. It tells you almost nothing about how your business actually works.

In every organisation, there is a second map — invisible, unmeasured, and far more important for understanding how decisions are made, how information flows, and where real influence lives. This is the informal network: the web of relationships, trust, and communication that determines whether strategy lands or stalls, whether change succeeds or fails, and whether talent stays or leaves.

Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) is the methodology that makes this map visible.

 

What ONA reveals

ONA maps communication and collaboration patterns across a business — typically through surveys, communication metadata (with consent), or structured interviews — and produces a picture of the actual information and influence networks within an organisation.

The findings are consistently surprising. Informal connectors — people who are not in formal leadership roles but who link disparate parts of the organisation — are often among the most critical people in a business. When they leave, they take a disproportionate amount of the organisation’s connective tissue with them.

ONA also reveals structural risks: siloed teams that do not talk to each other, overloaded “nodes” (usually middle managers) who are bottlenecks for information and decision-making, and isolated individuals who are technically employed but effectively disconnected from the organisation’s real networks.

A 2024 study by Deloitte Human Capital found that organisations using ONA to inform restructuring, talent development, and change management consistently achieved better outcomes than those relying on org charts alone.

 

Applying ONA without enterprise software 

You do not need specialist software to begin:

1. Ask strategic relationship questions.

In your next engagement survey, add questions like “Who do you go to most often when you need help solving a problem?” or “Who most influences how you think about your work?” The answers, mapped at a team level, will show you informal influence networks you did not know existed.

2. Pay attention to departure patterns.

When a key informal connector leaves, you may not know it until communication drops, decisions slow, and teams begin to fragment. Knowing who these people are in advance lets you act proactively.

3. Use this insight in succession planning and change management.

The formal leader of a team and the informal influencer are often different people. Engaging both in any significant change initiative is the difference between change that lands and change that quietly fails.

The business you see on paper is not the organisation that runs itself every day. The one that actually matters is the invisible one — and learning to see it is one of the most powerful things a leader can do.

 

Ready to get ahead of this? Book your free 39-minute consultation at Blue Kite HR Consulting