Information Architectures Mirror Organizational Structures
The Principle
The way an organization presents information tends to mirror its hierarchical structure. Information gets filtered, summarized, and flattened as it moves up the chain, and presentation formats that match this filtering feel natural, while formats that don’t feel awkward.
Why This Matters
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that PowerPoint’s hierarchical bullet structure reinforced NASA’s bureaucratic filtering. The tool matched the organization’s shape. Information that survived the trip up the hierarchy fit neatly into bullets; information that didn’t fit, uncertainty, dissent, context, dropped out.
This is Conway’s Law applied to information design: Organizations design communication systems that mirror their own structure.
The implication: when you choose a presentation format, you’re implicitly choosing which organizational dynamics to reinforce. Hierarchical bullets reinforce hierarchical filtering. Executive summaries reinforce executive authority over details. Dashboards reinforce monitoring culture over investigation culture.
How to Apply
- Recognize the match. When a format feels natural to an organization, ask what it’s optimizing for, and what it’s losing.
- Deliberately mismatch. If you want to surface information that hierarchy buries, choose formats that don’t nest: tables, side-by-side comparisons, prose narratives with integrated evidence.
- Watch the translation. When information crosses format boundaries (report → slides → verbal briefing), track what drops out at each step.
When This Especially Matters
- Technical analysis for non-technical decision-makers
- Risk communication where uncertainty matters
- Cross-functional work where different functions have different norms
- AI systems that summarize and filter by design
Limitations
Sometimes hierarchical filtering is appropriate (executives shouldn’t see every data point. The failure mode isn’t hierarchy itself; it’s hierarchy without awareness of what’s being lost.
Related: 02-atom—format-shapes-cognition, 02-atom—hierarchical-bullets-bury-uncertainty, 07-molecule—ui-as-ultimate-guardrail