The moment that breaks companies
Your org chart is now your biggest competitor.
There's a moment in most meetings when you realize the person with the answer isn't allowed to give it.
They know exactly what needs to happen. They've done this before. They understand the customer, the market, the urgency. But they can't act because someone who's never spoken to that customer, who hasn't looked at the data, who won't bear the consequences of delay, has to approve it first.
That moment—that specific, excruciating pause between knowing and doing—is where the old world ends and the new one begins.
Last week I watched that happen in real time, and it’s been like a splinter in my mind. A director spent twenty-seven minutes explaining to her team why they couldn't make a simple pricing change without approval from three other departments. The customer was waiting. The solution was obvious. But the machine had spoken.
And I realized: this isn't just inefficiency. This is extinction in slow motion.
How we learned to love broken things
Command and control wasn't an accident. It was an answer.
In 1900, if you ran a steel mill or a railroad, you needed predictability above all else. Information moved slowly—by telegraph if you were lucky, by horseback if you weren't. Markets shifted like glaciers. Workers showed up for thirty years, collected a pension, and died.
Hierarchy worked because the world was hierarchical. Slow. Sequential. Certain.
The person at the top could actually know what was happening at the bottom, because not much was happening, and it wasn't happening very fast. Decisions could flow up and down through layers without becoming obsolete in transit. The division of labor made sense because labor could actually be divided cleanly.
Those days are gone.
Why faster is slower
Today, I can train an AI model on my laptop that would have required far more horsepower a years ago. A TikTok video can destroy a brand's reputation in six hours. People quit a corporate job on Thursday and launch a consulting practice on Friday that books three clients by Monday.
The world now moves at what I call "AI speed"—not just because artificial intelligence is fast, but because everything is accelerating toward the pace AI represents. Markets shift in real-time. Information travels at light speed. Careers change with each project.
And hierarchy? Hierarchy moves at the speed of meetings. At the speed of approval chains. At the speed of "let me check with my boss."
Which is to say: It doesn't move much at all.
Why your system is eating itself
The old model is breaking down along three predictable fault lines:
Vertical power dynamics that create latency between problem and solution
Horizontal competition that turns your own people into enemies
Siloed thinking that makes you blind to the connections that matter most
Let me explain what each of these actually costs you.
Vertical power dynamics create what engineers call "latency"—the delay between problem and solution. When the person closest to the customer has to ask permission from someone who's never met that customer, you've built failure into the system. The market won't wait for your org chart to figure itself out.
Horizontal competition turns your own people into enemies. People compete for bonuses and promotions, often in toxic, destructive ways. I've seen teams withhold information from each other, knowing that another department's success might make them look bad in comparison. You end up with a company that's spending more energy fighting itself than fighting the competition.
Siloed thinking makes you blind to the connections that matter most. The marketing team knows something the product team needs to know, but they don't talk because they're not supposed to. Meanwhile, a startup with five people in a room is connecting all the dots you can't see.
These weren't bugs in the old system. They were features. They helped manage complexity when complexity could be managed. They enforced clarity when clarity was possible. They protected efficiency when efficiency was the goal.
But when the goal becomes adaptation, they become poison.
Pain is a feature, not a bug
Here's what I know about change: Nobody does it because they want to. They do it because they have to.
The mathematician John Maynard Keynes once said, "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." The old ideas are comfortable. They're familiar. They've worked before.
But comfort is becoming expensive.
I'm talking about the cost of meetings that accomplish nothing because the person who could make the decision isn't in the room. The cost of opportunities missed because three departments couldn't agree on who should own them. The cost of talent walking out the door because they're tired of asking permission to do their jobs.
The pain of not changing is starting to exceed the pain of changing. And when that happens, change becomes inevitable.
Don't fight the old—build the new
As Buckminster Fuller put it: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
I'm not suggesting you burn down your org chart tomorrow. Evolution, not revolution.
What I'm suggesting is that you start taking small steps toward a different kind of organization. One that looks less like a machine and more like a living system.
Decentralized decision-making. Cross-functional teams. Information that flows where it's needed, not where the org chart says it should go. People empowered to solve problems, not just identify them.
This isn't chaos. It's coherence of a different kind. It's what happens when you design for adaptation instead of control.
Let go to hold on
The companies that survive the next decade won't be the ones that grip tighter. They'll be the ones that know when to let go.
They'll be the ones that realize the future doesn't belong to those who can predict it, but to those who can respond to it.
They'll be the ones that understand that in a world moving at AI speed, the only sustainable advantage is the ability to change faster than the world changes around you.
The bridge to that future is being built right now. One small experiment at a time. One permission granted. One wall torn down.
The question isn't whether the old model is dying. It's whether you'll help build what comes next.
Or wait for someone else to build it around you.
What's your experience with hierarchy under pressure? Hit reply and tell me about a time when the old rules got in the way of the right solution. I read every response.