By Dr Leandro Herrero
Most of what really happens in organisations — the ideas, the insights, the bonds of trust — lives in the informal organisation, not in the charts and reporting lines. Yet management has long struggled with what it cannot control or measure. The time has come to design for informality — not to formalise it, but to make space for it to thrive. Because without it, the organisation runs out of oxygen.
In every organisation there are two distinct but interwoven worlds.
World I is the world of the formal. It is the visible, structured architecture of orders, reports, and meetings. It runs on hierarchies and documents, on systems of accountability and control. It is a world of information pipes and valves, a machine designed for efficiency and predictability. In this world, management’s fundamental goal — explicit or not — is to reach a predetermined target with minimal deviation.
This model of organisation has dominated Western management thinking for a century. It has shaped the way we teach MBAs, design dashboards, and reward people for compliance. It is the world of communication, not conversation; of plans, not possibilities. It is tidy, familiar — and desperately incomplete.
Then there is World II — the world of the informal.
Here, life flows differently. It’s the spontaneous exchange of ideas between colleagues bumping into each other in the corridor (or its digital equivalent). It’s what happens in the cafeteria, in the smokers’ corner, or during the five minutes before a Zoom call officially starts. It’s a world of relationships, not roles; of emergence, not instruction.
No one would deny that both worlds exist. But for too long, management has behaved as though only one truly mattered.
The informal organisation is the oxygen of corporate life. It sustains trust, nurtures creativity, and powers change. Remove it, and the formal structure remains — but hollowed out, airless.
Think of a professional conference. There are the formal sessions, increasingly compressed into fifteen-minute bullet-pointed talks, and then there are the breaks. The coffee breaks, the impromptu chats in corridors, the shared reflections over lunch. Everyone knows where the real value lies: in those unscripted encounters. That’s where the unexpected connections are made, where ideas incubate, and where careers quietly take shape.
If you could design your company to feel like an endless coffee break — alive, curious, conversational — you would be closer to a real learning organisation than most strategic plans ever achieve.
The informal organisation is not new. It has always been there, quietly running parallel to the formal one. What’s new is our awareness of its importance.
Traditional management — including its academic counterpart — has simply not known what to do with it. The discipline of management has been built around the observable, the measurable, the explicit. It is comfortable with systems, indicators, and feedback loops — everything that can be targeted and “delivered.” The unsaid, the implicit, the relational — these are alien territories.
So informality was ignored, even when everyone intuitively knew it was where the action really happened. As a result, organisations have often over-engineered the formal while starving the informal. The consequence is sterile efficiency: predictable, perhaps, but lifeless.
Yet informality does not have to be accidental. It can be encouraged, nurtured — even designed for.
For years I have used the expression “designed informality” to describe precisely this: creating physical and psychosocial spaces where spontaneous interaction is not only possible but likely. It is not about managing informality or turning it into another process. It is about enabling the conditions in which human encounters, serendipitous conversations, and unscripted collaborations can flourish.
Architects and workplace designers have long intuited this. They know that a well-placed bench, an open staircase, or a shared kitchen can spark encounters. Yet too often, organisations confuse design with prescription. They produce “benign dictatorships of fun”: latte corners and ping-pong tables that instruct you to relax, as if joy could be mandated. The result is contrived culture — informality without soul.
Designed informality, in contrast, is not decoration. It’s the deliberate creation of breathing space within the formal machinery. It’s about cultivating trust, autonomy, and the subtle permission to connect beyond the org chart.
The informal organisation can now be made visible in ways our predecessors could only guess at. With Organisational Network Analysis (ONA), we can map real flows of information, influence, and collaboration — not the official reporting lines but the lived networks.
An ONA map often reveals a more truthful picture of the company than its organisational chart. It shows the hidden influencers, the knowledge brokers, the quiet connectors who hold the system together. This is management’s next frontier: to integrate network understanding into everyday practice, not as a curiosity but as a strategic asset.
The informal world — World II — is not an optional extra. It is the bloodstream of organisational life. Yet its survival depends on deliberate care. Every time we add another process, another compliance mechanism, another digital form of surveillance disguised as engagement, we risk cutting off that circulation.
The future belongs to those who understand that formality and informality are not opposites but complements. The formal provides direction; the informal gives life.
If management is serious about culture, innovation, and change, it must learn to design for informality — not to control it, but to make space for it to breathe. The challenge is not to replace the machine with a café, but to make sure that the machine still has air.
Dr Leandro Herrero
