The Power and the Price of Knowing How Things Really Work

If you have ever mapped a process, diagrammed workflows, or tried to make sense of the way people, systems, and tools interact, you already know this story. The more you trace how work really gets done, the more the tidy chart of “who reports to who” falls apart. Huising’s study, available on ResearchGate, found that employees who participated in deep process mapping projects saw their companies in a completely new way. What looked designed and stable turned out to be improvised, patched together, and held up by human problem-solving.

This knowledge created a powerful kind of awakening. People realized the system was not permanent. It was something people made and could remake. That gave them a sense of agency they had not felt before. But it also came with a price. Once they saw how arbitrary and inefficient much of the work had become, they could not unsee it. Returning to their old jobs felt meaningless. They saw themselves as part of the very machine that produced the problems they were trying to fix.

Huising’s interviews revealed that many of these employees made a surprising choice. They left central, high-status roles to join what she calls “peripheral change roles” in areas like Lean, Six Sigma, or organizational development. From the edge of the company, they felt more capable of shaping the future than they ever did from the middle. The usual assumption in management theory is that outsiders push for change while insiders defend the status quo. This research flips that idea. People at the center can become reformers once they fully understand the system they helped sustain.

The study’s lesson for modern organizations is clear. Knowledge of how things work is not neutral. It changes the people who gain it. Mapping workflows, building dashboards, or training teams on automation tools are not just technical exercises. They are acts that reveal the hidden logic of the organization. Once seen, that logic demands to be questioned.

For leaders, the takeaway is to expect transformation at both the system and human levels. When people finally see how work really happens, they start asking harder questions about purpose, value, and design. That curiosity can make them your strongest allies in change, but it may also pull them toward new roles and new missions. Huising’s research reminds us that when people see the full picture, they rarely go back to their corner of the map. They start redrawing it.