Being an Account of a Field Devoted to the Study of Diagrams That Appear to Explain Organisations and Rarely Do

I. The Diagram

Every sufficiently mature management culture eventually produces a diagram that claims to reveal how the organisation really works. It is no longer, in the modern case, an org chart. The org chart belonged to a more naive administrative era, when one could still believe that authority moved downward through boxes, that reporting lines corresponded to actual power, and that the question “who decides?” could be answered by looking for the highest rectangle connected by a solid line.

The contemporary diagram is a topology.

It consists of circles, streams, hubs, platforms, councils, layers, interfaces, interaction modes, enabling functions, strategic cores, and arrows whose thickness suggests moral seriousness rather than quantified throughput. The colours are calm. The typography is expensive. The nouns have been workshopped to within an inch of their semantic lives. The diagram’s basic promise is not that it will tell you who reports to whom but that it will disclose something deeper: the hidden geometry of work itself. The organisation, which in ordinary life appears chaotic, political, and unevenly comprehensible, will be rendered spatial. Responsibility will have shape. Power will have direction. Ambiguity, previously distributed across emails and meetings and budgets and Slack permissions, will be gathered up and displayed as form.

The effect is immediate and curiously familiar. Executives leave the workshop with the feeling that clarity has been achieved. Middle managers return to their teams with the feeling that some category boundary has become newly important. Engineers look at the slide, ask who now owns the production incident queue, and receive an answer that is not wrong exactly but somehow not of the same species as the question. This paper argues that the modern organisational topology is best understood, borrowing Selb’s now standard Solaristic terminology, as a mimoid: an artefact that imitates the form of practical guidance while withholding determinate guidance itself.

The field devoted to the study, production, circulation, and interpretation of such artefacts is what the author proposes to call Applied Manageristics.

The central claim of the field is twofold. First: organisational topology is a mimoid because it creates the impression that power has become legible without yielding a stable rule for action. Second: the disciplines surrounding topology — operating model design, transformation consulting, org strategy, product-operating-system architecture, platform enablement theory, interaction-mode research, and their many adjacent certification economies — have become a form of management solaristics: an interpretive literature that increasingly studies prior descriptions of organisations rather than organisations themselves.

II. Historical Development

The Chart Period

The prehistory of Applied Manageristics lies in what the literature now calls the Chart Period, extending roughly from the post-war expansion of the corporation to the exhaustion of matrix management as a source of novelty. During this era, organisational diagrams remained primarily classificatory. They told you where a function sat, who managed it, and how many layers of vice-presidential sediment had accumulated above it. The problem with the chart was not that it was false. It was that it was merely false in a familiar way. Everyone could see that the real organisation exceeded it.

The chart’s decline began when management theory discovered what anthropology, sociology, and every experienced executive assistant had always known: that organisations are not trees. Information does not descend cleanly. Decisions are not made where the boxes say they are made. Critical work occurs laterally, diagonally, and in violation of several official lines simultaneously. The chart remained in place, but its explanatory prestige was gone. A representational vacuum opened.

The Topological Turn

The Topological Turn began when this vacuum was filled not by better description but by more ambitious metaphor. The organisation would no longer be represented as a hierarchy but as a set of flows. What mattered was not command but interaction. Teams became nodes. Platforms became surfaces. Dependencies became interfaces. The language of design, systems theory, network science, and urban planning entered management discourse with the speed and confidence typical of concepts that arrive from elsewhere and are immediately put to work explaining what the resident discipline has failed to explain for years.

The Turn was aided by three historical conditions. The first was the rise of software organisations large enough that no one could plausibly claim to understand the whole. The second was the transformation economy, which required a constant supply of new explanatory forms to justify reorganisation. The third was the emergence of slideware powerful enough to make any geometry look inevitable.

By the middle of the 2010s the topology slide had become the signature artefact of serious management thought. The old chart still existed, usually in HR systems and compliance documents, but the slide that mattered in executive offsites was topological. It showed streams, layers, radii, councils, interaction modes, cores, edges. It did not answer the old questions. It implied that the old questions had themselves been superseded by better ones.

The Morphological Explosion

Once topology had established itself as the preferred mode of organisational self-description, a familiar dynamic began. Each new topology generated not clarity but commentary. One consultancy’s “platform” proved structurally equivalent to another’s “shared capability substrate,” which in turn resembled a third firm’s “enablement layer” except where it did not, and the disagreement over whether the resemblance was superficial or essential produced a literature. Terms proliferated faster than decisions improved. Entire conference tracks were devoted to whether a team should be classified by the complexity of its subsystem, the direction of its interaction mode, or its relative distance from customer demand. A typological enthusiasm took hold. What had begun as a practical response to organisational opacity became a self-sustaining field of interpretive production.

The literature’s expansion has by now reached unmistakably Solaristic proportions. One finds journals, certifications, maturity models, controlled vocabularies, annual surveys, quadrant analyses, benchmark datasets, and what one can only call sects. The object under study — the actual organisation, considered as a site where budgets are allocated, incidents escalated, work delayed, meetings avoided, and authority exercised under cover of procedure — has not, under the pressure of this scholarship, become correspondingly more knowable.

III. Current Schools of Interpretation

Though the field is still consolidating, four major schools can be distinguished.

The Cartographic Realists

The Realists maintain that organisational topology, properly executed, does disclose the true structure of work. On this view, the problem with most topology exercises is not form but fidelity. The diagrams fail because they are politically compromised, insufficiently observed, or based on outdated information. A better map remains possible. The Realist’s faith is touching and, to date, unsupported by sustained evidence.

The Liturgical School

The Liturgical School, strongest in London and among certain Scandinavian design consultancies, argues that the topology slide should never have been read descriptively in the first place. Its function is ritual. An operating model is not a map of the organisation but a ceremonial object around which alignment can be temporarily performed. That it does not guide action is not a defect. The point of liturgy is not to route incidents. It is to induce a shared posture toward mystery.

This school has the advantage of honesty and the disadvantage of saying aloud what many transformation offices would prefer remain tacit.

The Performativists

The Performativists hold that a topology becomes true by being circulated. A diagram naming streams, platforms, and councils may not initially describe reality, but once repeated in roadmaps, hiring plans, funding requests, and all-hands presentations, it begins to organise behaviour in its own image. Teams rename themselves. Reporting lines are adjusted. Budgets are reclassified. New committees are formed to manage the interactions the diagram has proposed as pre-existing. The topology is thus neither descriptive nor merely ceremonial. It is an intervention that succeeds by presenting itself as a representation.

The Performativists have, in the author’s view, come closest to describing what the artefact actually does.

The Quantitative School

Funded largely by enterprise software vendors and the sort of consultancies that believe all administrative uncertainty can be improved by the introduction of a dashboard, the Quantitative School seeks to operationalise topology. Their products include Topology Maturity Indices, Interaction-Mode Density Scores, Layer Clarity Audits, and one regrettable instrument called the Organisational Legibility Quotient, which claims to measure whether a company has “reduced ambiguity to within acceptable decision thresholds.” No company, in the published data, has ever scored above 41.

The Quantitative School interprets this as evidence that the work remains urgent. Its critics interpret it as evidence that the metric is itself a mimoid.

IV. The Mimoid Problem

The mimoid, in Selb’s original Solaristic taxonomy, is a formation that imitates the form of practical guidance without containing any stable directive content. It looks actionable. It sounds actionable. It generates the emotional and institutional effects of actionability. But when one attempts to derive a determinate rule for conduct from it, the content recedes.

Organisational topology exhibits this property with unusual purity.

Consider a typical topological proposition: the platform should reduce cognitive load for stream-aligned teams through carefully designed interactions at the appropriate interface. Everything in this sentence appears managerial. None of it answers a live question. Should the platform team run the deployment system? Who approves schema changes? When an incident crosses the alleged boundary between stream and platform, who wakes up? The topology can accommodate any answer after the fact, which is the hallmark of the mimoid. It does not determine conduct. It absorbs outcomes.

This is why topology reviews have the atmosphere they do. Participants often report leaving with a strong sense of conceptual progress and a weak grasp of what, exactly, has been decided. The organisation has been redescribed in a new geometry. Whether anyone’s obligations have changed is much harder to establish. In the old chart, ambiguity appeared as administrative absence. In the topology, ambiguity is rendered as morphology. The problem does not disappear. It acquires arrows.

The mimoid properties of topology can be stated more formally.

First, topology externalises conflict into shape. Instead of asking which vice president controls a budget, participants ask whether a capability should sit closer to the platform or remain embedded in the stream. The political struggle is thereby translated into geometry, which feels more neutral while remaining fully political.

Second, topology substitutes categories for commitments. Once a team has been named enabling, core-adjacent, hub-like, federated, or product-facing, the classificatory act itself produces the sensation of administrative movement. One has explained the unit by locating it in a field of terms. Whether that location yields a binding decision rule is another matter.

Third, topology invites infinite secondary literature. Because its terms remain elastic, every diagram requires glosses, playbooks, transition guidance, interaction protocols, maturity rubrics, and case studies to explain what the original topology “really means in practice.” The commentary does not clarify the mimoid so much as demonstrate its reproductive power.

V. Management Theory as Solaristics

At this point the parallel with Solaristics ceases to be illustrative and becomes exact.

The Solarists, confronted with an object that resisted intelligibility, produced classifications, schools, journals, conferences, and disputes over whether the latest formation constituted response, noise, or a category error. Applied Manageristics has done the same with the organisation. The operating model, the team topology, the platform interaction schema, the concentric structure of Core and Outer, the capability map, the product operating system: each appears as a fresh formation; each generates a body of interpretation; each is soon studied through prior literature about analogous formations. Contact with the underlying object becomes ever more mediated by the accumulated archive.

Consultants arrive at companies seeking to understand how work is coordinated. They depart with diagrams. The next wave of consultants studies the diagrams and their observed effects. Scholars survey the resulting frameworks and produce taxonomies of topological types. Tool vendors build software to operationalise the taxonomies. Companies adopt the software and thereby generate new data about the taxonomies’ uptake. White papers are written on what this uptake means for the future of organisational design. At no point does anyone become proportionately more able to answer the simple field question: when two teams disagree and both claim dependency on the same platform, who wins?

This is the Solaristic drift of management theory: a gradual but unmistakable movement from organisations to literature about organisations. The field no longer studies the object directly. It studies the interpretive sediment the object has produced in response to prior observation. As in Solaristics, the archive grows. As in Solaristics, the archive’s growth is easily mistaken for progress.

There is a further and more uncomfortable parallel. The observed organisation, like the Solaristic ocean, seems to respond to attention by producing formations in the vocabulary of its observers. A company visited by transformation consultants rarely says, upon reflection, that it is governed by habit, patronage, calendar access, budget protection, historical accident, and the fact that one staff engineer knows where the authentication service is buried. It says that it is moving toward a federated platform topology with revised interaction modes and clearer ownership surfaces. The organisation does not merely receive the theory. It answers in theory’s preferred shapes.

The literature then studies this answer as though it were contact.

VI. The Question of Contact

Can management theory establish genuine contact with the organisation, or is it condemned to produce ever more refined descriptions of the formations that organisations emit when illuminated by managerial attention?

The pessimistic answer, which the author offers with reluctance and what she hopes is due administrative sobriety, is that most of what now passes for contact is topological self-reference. The organisation responds to scrutiny by generating a map-shaped object. The map is taken up by interpreters, who classify it, compare it, circulate it, operationalise it, and return with revised maps. The process is not meaningless. It redistributes vocabulary, prestige, budgetary legitimacy, and the emotional burden of ambiguity. It may even, in performative cases, alter the organisation’s subsequent behaviour. But this is not the same as contact. It is, rather, an elaborately institutionalised way of mistaking the recording surface for the thing recorded.

This is why the field’s deepest arguments now concern not organisations but representations. Is the topology descriptive or prescriptive? Should one optimise for interaction density or clarity of mandate? Are councils first-class structures or transitional scaffolding? Does the platform exist to reduce load or to concentrate it in a more governable place? These are, unmistakably, arguments internal to the literature. Meanwhile the organisation continues in its customary way: decisions made in side channels, projects stalled by budget sequencing, authority exercised through meeting invitations and who may merge to main.

The topology does not fail because it is false. It fails, or rather succeeds in its own peculiar mode, because it is a mimoid. It creates the impression that the organisation has become newly legible while leaving intact the practical indeterminacy that called for explanation in the first place. Management theory then behaves Solaristically around this artefact, producing a dignified and expanding body of scholarship whose chief output is not contact but one more school of interpretation.

One should not conclude from this that organisational topology is useless. Mimoids are not useless. They coordinate attention. They create temporary local settlements over language. They allow politically dangerous questions to be displaced into safer arguments about shape. They transform conflict into morphology, which is often the only administratively acceptable form conflict can take. The topology slide earns its place not by telling the truth about the organisation but by making the organisation discussable without requiring anyone to say whose fault anything is.

This is already a considerable achievement.

But it is not, and should not be mistaken for, understanding.

The organisation remains elsewhere: in the budget, in the on-call rota, in the executive calendar, in the build pipeline no one outside infrastructure understands, in the ancient service whose maintainer is now “platform-adjacent” but still receives every alert, in the committee that exists on the slide and nowhere else, in the fact that one team can say no and another cannot. These are not topological abstractions. They are social facts. Management theory approaches them, produces a formation, and retreats to write about the formation.

The literature grows. The object persists. The next workshop is already scheduled.

The author thanks the participants of the 2025 Vienna Symposium on Administrative Morphology, at which an earlier version of this paper was presented and at which a disagreement over whether the symposium’s seating plan constituted a covert topology consumed most of the first morning. The disagreement was, in the author’s view, productive in the precise sense this paper attempts to describe. The author declares no conflicts of interest, though she notes that she has on two occasions been paid to facilitate topology workshops and therefore cannot honestly claim to stand outside the phenomenon, only at one of its better-catered edges.