The cartoon’s bold declaration—“What we’ve done is make it dramatically easier to navigate the corporate hierarchy”—hangs ironically over what appears to be an even more convoluted organizational chart. This visual gag perfectly encapsulates Chapter 11’s examination of how organizations often complicate communication while claiming to simplify it.

During my internship at a mid-sized marketing firm, leadership proudly announced a “flattened structure” to improve transparency. Yet within weeks, we discovered this simply meant each employee now reported to three “peer managers” instead of one supervisor—tripling approval layers for basic requests. The textbook’s network analysis section explains why this failed: when information pathways multiply without clear protocols, decision paralysis sets in. Our team’s workaround? An underground “shadow hierarchy” of instant messages between frustrated colleagues.

This aligns with the chapter’s political perspective on how power structures resist true change. The cartoon’s smug proclamation mirrors my company’s all-hands meeting where executives celebrated eliminating bureaucratic “red tape” while quietly implementing 14 new compliance forms. Research cited in the communication climate section confirms this pattern—70% of employees in restructured organizations report increased confusion about chain of command.

Yet the cultural perspective offers solutions. When an adjacent department scrapped formal hierarchies entirely, they adopted a “advice process” where any employee could make decisions after consulting affected colleagues. Within months, their project completion rate soared—proving that real simplification comes from empowering people, not rearranging org charts. As both this cartoon and chapter reveal, the most effective hierarchies aren’t those that claim to be simple, but those that acknowledge their complexity while creating spaces for genuine dialogue.