Thanks! I'm not sure how exactly I arrived at it, this is mostly the result of my own observation, I think - I don't have much background in organizational theo

Thanks! I'm not sure how exactly I arrived at it, this is mostly the result of my own observation, I think - I don't have much background in organizational theory. My primary training is in population genetics, which also deals with notions of information flow between individuals in a group, so I think this is where some of that thinking emerged. The rest came mostly from my experience (working for a large university) and my wife's experience (working for a large corporation), where both of us observed similar dynamics over the years with regards to communicating with management (supplemented by observations from friends in tech and elsewhere). Both of us also have a significant problem with authority, which has caused us to avoid management positions and maybe be skeptical of their utility, which might lead us to this kind of analysis. In particular I observed early on that there was a nominal organizational structure, based mostly on control of funds, which often had little to do with the operational structure, based mostly on the need to coordinate work. This separation led me to pay closer attention to who was often doing the actual work that made projects succeed, which often required communications outside of the official management channels - because these channels were simply insufficient to the effort, not through any malicious intent but simply because of bad design.