The finding
Consider an organisation where frontline staff have known for months that a particular process frustrates customers. Senior leadership eventually learns of it — from an external source, not from inside the organisation. The natural assumption is that this was a communication failure: people should have spoken up.
They did. Staff raised the issue repeatedly with their immediate managers, who logged it, as the process required. The logs fed into a system that produces a monthly summary, aggregating issues by category. This particular issue, real and persistent as it was, was small enough relative to its category to be absorbed into a general heading. The reporting mechanism worked exactly as designed at every step. What it was designed to do — aggregate — is also what made this specific, actionable detail disappear before it reached anyone positioned to act on it.
What makes this especially difficult to catch is that the frontline staff involved would likely, if asked, say they had raised the issue and been heard — their manager logged it, after all, and logging is what the process asked of them. Nobody in the chain has an obvious reason to believe anything went wrong, which means the gap between what was reported and what reached leadership can persist indefinitely without triggering the kind of frustration that might otherwise surface it sooner.
What it means in practice
This is worth sitting with because it overturns the usual explanation for information not reaching the top of an organisation. The failure here wasn’t that people didn’t speak up, or that managers didn’t listen, or that the system was broken. Every individual link in the chain functioned. The information simply couldn’t survive the aggregation step intact, because aggregation by category is, by design, a process of discarding specificity in exchange for a manageable summary.
This has an uncomfortable implication for how organisations typically respond once a gap like this is discovered: the instinct is usually to add another layer of reporting, or to ask managers to escalate more proactively. Both responses leave the underlying aggregation mechanism untouched, which means the same category of information — small, specific, individually below the threshold that would earn its own line in a summary — remains just as likely to disappear the next time, regardless of how diligently anyone reports it upward.
Jay Galbraith’s research on organisation design, published in Interfaces, frames this as a fundamentally structural problem rather than a behavioural one. His argument was that as the amount of uncertainty and complexity an organisation handles grows, the amount of information that needs to move through it grows too — and a hierarchy built primarily to move summarised information upward will, by its nature, compress detail as it climbs. That compression isn’t a flaw introduced by any one careless step. It’s what a hierarchy does by design, at scale, unless something is deliberately built to carry specific signals past it.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- What kinds of information does the organisation’s reporting structure make it structurally unable to see, regardless of how diligently people at the frontline report it?
- Is there any route for a specific, small-seeming issue to reach a decision-maker without first being aggregated into a category?
- As the organisation has scaled, has anything been deliberately built to preserve specificity — or has the reporting structure simply grown, layer by layer, without that question being asked?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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