The Skeuomorphic Organization

The walls were load-bearing. The load has moved.

Nobody reassigned her. That is the part I keep returning to.

A marketing manager at the company where I work built a plugin that applies the company’s voice to every output every AI agent produces, across every function, automatically. She did not build a tool that helps other people write better copy. She encoded the brand’s vocabulary rules, tone constraints, and formatting conventions into an instruction file, and connected it to the shared agent layer. After that, a finance analyst drafting a summary, an investigator formatting a case report, an executive preparing a board update: the output arrives already in voice. Nobody invokes the plugin. Nobody routes a draft through marketing for review. The work that used to require marketing’s hands now happens at the infrastructure level, silently, everywhere.

She was not reassigned because nothing, on paper, changed. Her title is the same. Her reporting line is the same. The org chart still shows marketing as the function responsible for brand expression. But brand expression is no longer a task that flows through her team. It is a property of the system her team built. The chart says marketing does the brand. The truth is that marketing governs the brand, and the execution has dissolved into something no department owns.

There is a distinction we learn early in school and forget by the time we enter an office. Can describes ability. May describes permission. “Can I leave the room?” draws a correction: “You can leave. The question is whether you may.”

For most of the twentieth century, corporate life made the distinction invisible. A customer success manager could not build a branded commercial proposal because building one required access to design tools, knowledge of the brand guidelines, familiarity with pricing structures, and hours of formatting work. The permission boundary and the competence boundary overlapped almost perfectly. The org chart was not enforcing an arbitrary rule. It was describing a real limit: what a person in one function could accomplish without the tools, training, and context held by another.

When the cost of execution drops toward zero, the competence boundary dissolves. The permission boundary remains. The chart becomes a skeuomorph: the leather stitching on the digital calendar, the wood-grain shelf in the e-reader app. A visual memory of a constraint that no longer exists, maintained because the organization has not yet noticed that the constraint was the only thing holding the metaphor together.

What permission used to cost

John Searle spent decades studying the strange objects that hold civilization together: money, property, marriage, borders, corporations. He called them institutional facts. An institutional fact exists when a community agrees, usually without anyone having explicitly agreed, that X counts as Y in a given context. A piece of paper counts as legal tender. A signature counts as consent. A title on a business card counts as authority to approve a purchase order.

Institutional facts are powerful because they are invisible when they work. You do not pause, each time you buy a coffee, to marvel at the collective hallucination that makes a piece of polymer worth four dollars. The fiction is seamless. It operates below the threshold of attention.

The org chart is an institutional fact of this kind. “Marketing” counts as the function responsible for brand voice. “Pre-sales” counts as the function responsible for proposals. “Intelligence” counts as the function responsible for threat analysis. These assignments were never descriptions of competence. They were descriptions of permission. And the permission was credible because the competence required to cross a functional boundary was enormous. You could not do marketing’s job without marketing’s knowledge. The chart was load-bearing because the walls it drew corresponded, roughly, to real limits on what anyone outside the function could accomplish.

When the walls lose their load, the fact that depends on them begins to float. It is still on the chart. It is still enforced by reporting lines and budget codes. But it has detached from the reality it was supposed to describe, the way a price tag stays on a shirt after the store has closed. The tag is still there. The store is not.

The function that dissolved itself

At Axur (now Infoblox), the cybersecurity company where I work, twenty-three people across eight functions spent seven weeks building a shared knowledge architecture on top of AI agents and a Git repository. None of them were engineers. I helped design the architecture and co-wrote the manifesto that framed it with the company’s CEO. What I want to describe here is not the system (you can read about it in the link above). It is what the system revealed about the chart.

The marketing manager’s plugin is the clearest case (just one of many!). She did not automate her team’s workflow. She made her team’s gatekeeping function unnecessary. Before the plugin, every piece of external communication passed through marketing for brand review: the tone was wrong, the vocabulary was off, the formatting did not match. Marketing was a bottleneck, and the bottleneck was the institutional fact that made the function legible. “Marketing reviews brand expression” was how the chart justified marketing’s place in the workflow. The review was the load the wall carried.

The plugin dissolved the bottleneck by encoding the review into the infrastructure. The brand rules are now applied automatically, upstream, before anyone sees the output. Marketing no longer reviews brand expression for the same reason you no longer check a dictionary to spell-check a document: the correction happens at a layer below conscious attention. The function’s most visible task, the one the chart used to point at as proof the function was needed, evaporated.

What remained was something harder to see and more valuable. Marketing still owns the definition of the brand: the vocabulary, the tone, the constraints. Marketing updates the plugin when the voice evolves. Marketing decides what the rules are. The function did not disappear. It shifted from performing the brand to governing it. And governance, unlike performance, does not require a bottleneck. It requires authority, taste, and a file that every agent reads.

The same pattern appeared across the pilot. A customer success contributor built a skill that generates branded proposals by cross-referencing internal product knowledge, a task that had belonged to pre-sales. A product manager encoded an entire analytical methodology into six instruction files, a task that had belonged to intelligence. An operations team built investigation dossiers that crossed into intelligence’s territory. In every case, nobody changed the chart. The competence boundary dissolved. The permission boundary stood. The gap between the two widened until the chart became decoration.

From execution to governance

The temptation, when you see departmental walls dissolving, is to reach for the familiar narrative: hierarchy is dead, the future is flat, everyone does everything. That story has been told before. It has never worked. HubSpot experimented with removing titles and org charts and reverted because the coordination cost without structure was unsustainable. Holacracy promised self-organization and produced, in most implementations, a different and more opaque kind of bureaucracy. Every attempt to flatten the hierarchy by removing it has collided with the same problem: people need to know who decides, who reviews, who is accountable when something goes wrong.

The skeuomorphic organization does not need to be flattened. It needs to be made honest.

The chart can keep its reporting lines, its accountability structures, its decision rights. What it cannot keep is the pretense that functional boundaries correspond to competence boundaries. The shift is from ownership of execution to ownership of methodology. The department that understands how something should be done encodes that understanding into the shared layer. Every other function composes against it. The chart does not disappear. Its edges become permeable. What crosses the boundary is not people, not reporting lines, not authority. What crosses is encoded competence: methodology made legible to agents and to every function that reads the same files.

The institutional fact “marketing owns brand expression” was true when brand expression required marketing’s hands. When brand expression becomes a property of the infrastructure, the fact does not become false. It becomes a different kind of fact: a fact about governance rather than about labor. The distinction sounds administrative. It is structural, and most organizations have not made it yet.

This shift, once you see it, explains something that puzzled me during the pilot. The people who moved fastest from using AI to building infrastructure were not engineers. They were the people closest to the methodology: the analyst who understood the investigative workflow, the product manager who had spent years learning the threat taxonomy, the marketing manager who knew exactly what the brand should sound like. They encoded what they knew because the encoding surface existed (a shared repository, a thin manifest, plain-text instruction files) and the knowledge was already in their heads. Engineering was not required. Understanding was. The people closest to the work were the ones best positioned to encode it, and any company that waits for engineering to lead this transition will discover that it waited for the wrong function.

But the permeability also creates a trust problem. When anyone in any function can compose against the encoded methodology of any other function, the question of trust becomes urgent. Who changed the product specification? When? Can we see the version before the change? Can we roll it back?

The pilot converged, without anyone planning it, on Git: version-controlled plain text, not a database, not a SaaS platform. The convergence was not an engineering preference. It was a governance discovery. The skeuomorphic organization could afford opaque knowledge flows because the walls ensured that only the authorized function touched the authorized artifacts. The permeable organization cannot afford opacity. Trust is downstream of traceability. Traceability is what version control is for.

The weight that was not transferred

I should name the part of this that keeps me awake.

In What Won’t Cross, I argued that the formation stage of intellectual work does not transfer to the machine. The artifact crosses; the person who was being shaped by making it does not. A student who lets the AI write the problem set gets the grade and loses the learning. The product is identical. The formation is absent.

The same argument applies at the institutional level, and it is more dangerous there because institutions are less likely to notice.

When the marketing manager encoded the brand voice into a plugin, something valuable happened: every function in the company gained access to methodology that had previously lived in three people’s heads. Something else happened, more quietly: the next person who joins marketing will never learn the brand voice through the slow, tedious process of reviewing other people’s drafts and correcting them by hand. The formation stage, the months of reading bad copy and feeling the wrongness before articulating it, the pattern recognition that builds only through repeated exposure to off-brand language, all of that is now encoded in an instruction file that runs in milliseconds. The new hire will govern the plugin. She will not have been formed by the practice the plugin replaced.

You have seen this if you manage a team. A junior employee joins and immediately produces polished, competent work because the AI handles the execution. The output is indistinguishable from what your best people produce. But you watch the new hire in a meeting where something unexpected happens, where the client pushes back in a way the template did not anticipate, where the data contradicts the methodology, and you see the gap. The junior does not know what to do when the encoded path runs out. She has operated the pipeline. She has not been formed by the practice that built it. The competence is borrowed. It lives in the infrastructure, not in her.

Hubert Dreyfus spent his career arguing that expertise is formed through embodied, situated practice: the novice follows rules; the expert has internalized the practice so deeply that the rules become invisible. The expert acts from a kind of perceptual recognition that cannot be captured in a manual. The agentic architecture is optimized to eliminate exactly the inefficiency that Dreyfus’s model depends on. The encoded methodology skips the novice from rule-following to competent output without passing through the stages where expertise actually forms. The pipeline is better. The formation pipeline is broken.

I do not have a solution. The standard response is “the human learns higher-order skills instead,” but this assumes that higher-order skills can be formed without the practice of lower-order work. My experience supervising students for a decade tells me this is wrong more often than the optimists want to admit. You do not learn to make judgment calls by watching someone else’s judgment calls execute as automated workflows. You learn by making bad calls, sitting with the consequences, and carrying the weight of having been wrong in a way that reshapes how you approach the next case.

The skeuomorphic organization is being replaced by something new: a permeable firm in which encoded methodology flows across boundaries that used to be walls. The question that should follow every celebration of this fact is: where will the next generation of methodology-writers come from, if the practice that formed them has been encoded out of the path?

The ceremony and the weight

A wedding in which both people mean the vows is an institutional fact held together by human commitment. A wedding in which the ceremony is performed perfectly but nobody means anything by it is a skeuomorph: the form of the old thing, emptied of the weight that made it real.

The org chart, when it described real constraints, was a living institution. It will not disappear. Reporting lines serve purposes the permeable firm does not replace: accountability, escalation, career development, the human need to know who to talk to when things go wrong. The chart will persist as a social structure long after it has ceased to describe how work moves. The question is whether the generation formed by the old constraints can encode their judgment fast enough for the generation that will never encounter the constraints at all.

I do not know the answer. I helped build the system that is asking the question.

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The resources from the Axur pilot are open-sourced on GitHub. You can read the full manifesto, browse the companion field notes, or clone the starter kit to experiment with the architecture yourself.

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Sources & further reading

John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995). The foundational account of institutional facts: the objects (money, marriage, property, borders, corporations) that exist because a community agrees they do, and that dissolve when the agreement withdraws.

Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (1991) and “A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition as the Basis for a Merleau-Pontian Non-representationalist Cognitive Science” (2002). The five-stage model of skill acquisition and the argument that expertise is embodied, situated, and cannot be captured in explicit rules. The formation-pipeline problem in this essay draws on Dreyfus’s account of what is lost when novices skip the stages that produce experts.

Fábio Ramos and Jônadas Techio, Restructuring Knowledge Work for Human-Agent Teams (2026). The manifesto and companion field report from the pilot described in this essay. Six principles, seven conventions, twenty-three contributors, eight functions, seven weeks.

Block, “From Hierarchy to Intelligence” (2026). Block’s description of a company-scale architecture adjacent to the one described here, including the “world model” concept of continuous organizational memory.

Jônadas, The Machine-Readable Self (2026). Companion essay on operational legibility: how work became machine-readable before AI arrived, and what the clearing reveals when the operational is finally delegated.

Jônadas, What Won’t Cross (2026). The formation-stage argument: the artifact crosses to the new medium; the person who was being formed by making it does not.

Jônadas, What I Built When Chat Stopped Being Enough (2026). The personal-workspace counterpart to the organizational architecture described here: the Agentic Studio, progressive disclosure, and the style-guide-as-software.