The org chart tells you who reports to whom. It does not tell you whose opinion actually changes a decision.
What the research found
David Krackhardt and Jeffrey Hanson, in a Harvard Business Review article titled "Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart," mapped the actual networks of trust and advice inside real organizations and compared them to the official reporting lines. The two maps rarely matched. Some people with modest titles were central to how information and trust actually flowed. Some senior figures were largely bypassed. The formal chart described authority. The informal network described influence, and the researchers found influence was the better predictor of what actually got approved or blocked.
Why this is not a cynical idea
Recognizing that a second map exists is not the same as saying the formal one is fake or that the real work happens through scheming. It exists because trust and expertise accumulate unevenly, and people quietly route around the official path toward whoever they have learned actually knows, or actually decides. That is a natural byproduct of any organization large enough to need a chart in the first place.
Where to start
Before pushing a proposal through official channels alone, ask a plain question, who besides the formal decision maker would this need to make sense to first.
The people who consistently know that answer are not being political. They are working with the accurate map instead of only the printed one.
Reading who actually holds informal influence on a specific team, versus who just holds the title, is a judgment that takes time and attention to build accurately. What this gives you is the question worth asking before you assume the org chart is the whole picture.
There is a specific way to identify the informally influential people on a new team quickly, and it is worth doing deliberately rather than waiting to discover it the hard way.