When a CEO enters an organization, it would be natural for them to think they are entering something that is structured as represented on paper. They see the functions, the business units, the reporting lines in the org chart. The same or a similar structure shows up in various systems, in budgeting, and in HR. Especially in older, storied organizations, structure may look like an independently existing thing in itself and the conclusions implied by it can feel self-evident. For instance, the CMO and CTO both report to the CEO, so they must be peers. Authority flows this way. Information flows that way. These functions collaborate because the lines connecting them suggest that they do. But very rarely does all this plumbing work as it appears on paper, because structure is a product of the assumptions, decisions, and realities of the past. The CMO and CTO may be peers structurally, while the organization, when push comes to shove, consistently prioritizes marketing over technology. That difference may not be apparent on paper but it may have become a part of the organization’s intuition by now, encoded through years of decisions, relationships, successes, and failures.

The structure of an organization is better understood as a collection of histories. There is usually an overall history of why the organization ended up where it is, but there are likely strands of that history that differ by which piece of the organization you are looking at. Sales, Marketing, Technology, and every business unit and function have their own histories. Maybe the founder was a marketer who etched its importance into the company’s culture. Maybe the organization learned to distrust Technology because a critical customer was lost because of a poor early systems implementation. Each piece’s history is a chapter in the history of the whole structure, and each helps explain why a part of the organization works the way it does now. Without an understanding of this history and how it led to the current structure, the CEO may articulate a piece of work, an initiative, or a strategy and exasperatedly watch neither the intended meaning nor force make it through the organization. The clarity of the organization’s structure promises that messages and nuance will propagate seamlessly through the organization. But not all pipes are made equal; some will preserve the CEO’s intention but compromise the intensity while some may dilute both. Many structures are especially poor at ensuring that high-quality information, insight, or feedback makes it back up to the CEO.

In order to understand how to put the structure to work for them, a CEO has to understand its history. In other words, they need to truly “inhabit” the structure. The org chart shows what the end point of those histories is but it says very little about how things got to that point. You can always count on an organizational historian, if one is available, to tell you the stories and myths of the organization, but the best way to understand the history is to be on the ground and explore with some mix of purpose and openness.

The CEO can begin at the obvious starting point: the parts of the structure their early strategy depends on and the places where formal structure already conflicts with observed behavior. If Marketing and Technology are peers on paper but Marketing wins real tradeoffs, start there. Speak with people who lived through the relevant period, ask when this pattern began and what strengthened it, then check their accounts against old org charts, budget shifts, reorganizations, and leadership changes. Each line of investigation will have gone far enough once the history explains the current behavior well enough for the CEO to anticipate how work will move. If accounts of the past still conflict or leave an important gap, widen the inquiry by speaking with people from another part of the organization or going back to the decision that changed authority or resources. The CEO can then move to the next relationship or function most likely to affect their initial strategy and so on.

With time, the CEO will gain a strong understanding of how the structure works in reality. Once that happens, their focus can shift toward nurturing the structure and getting it to work in a way they can predictably anticipate. That predictability can be quite specific. For instance, say one business unit, because of macro realities, has to hire from a limited talent pool, leaving positions filled by people who have a tendency to be too tactical for the titles they must be given. The CEO may know that a major change in that business requires going three or four levels deeper than it would elsewhere because the strategic acumen needed is just not there. Another part of the organization may need much less involvement. The CEO nurtures the structure by understanding these differences, compensating for them, and shaping what can be shaped. They know where the structure is softer and where it can be trusted as-is. They know more accurately what work they are creating for themselves when they announce what needs to be done. This is what makes true scale possible. The CEO has developed something beneath them that they understand and find sufficiently predictable. Information, intention, and intensity can move through it well enough that the CEO can anticipate where work will weaken and where their own involvement will be required.

Once a CEO has put in all the diligent effort needed to shape a structure in a way that gives them genuine leverage and lets them think at scale, a new risk becomes possible: the CEO can become too beholden to that structure, psychologically and through the way they organize their work. They get used to assuming that a certain amount of scale is always available and begin charging toward it. Their attention and their calendar become a reflection of the work that the structure now makes possible. But an organization’s strategic foundation can change at any moment and affect the validity of structural assumptions. Such a strategic shock can come from the economy, regulation, or other disruption. It may also come from an opportunity the CEO unexpectedly sees and chooses to pursue. Either kind of shock can require the company to reconsider assumptions that its current structure was built around. A CEO who has become beholden to the structure may lack the time, space, or inclination to address that problem as fully as it needs to be addressed. Existing functions, decision rights, and ways of working can limit the solution set before the problem has been properly understood. To account for such shocks, a CEO has to be able to nimbly step away from their own creation. When done well, they temporarily disregard the structure while trying to understand the specific strategic shock the organization is facing, and the range of possible answers. Once the problem and its possible answers are clearer, the CEO can bring the structure back into consideration and decide whether it can support the response, needs to be temporarily worked around, or needs to change.

Essentially, a CEO is always in a dynamic relationship with their organization’s structure. They enter into one they did not create, with histories they do not yet understand. As they inhabit it, they learn how those histories led to how things look in the present. As they shape the structure, their own judgments and ways of working become part of the organization’s history. The structure becomes more intelligible and predictable to them, but it also becomes more theirs, and thus, difficult to disregard or step away from. But strategic shocks or opportunities need them to step away skillfully. In other words, structure should never recede into the background as a settled fact. Even when it is working, a CEO needs to keep some part of their attention on how it came to work that way, how their own decisions are changing it, and whether some needed change requires them to inhabit it more deeply, shape it, or temporarily disregard it.