Mapping power in a matrix organisation: Seeing who can really make things happen

Most leaders I work with know who has formal authority over an issue. The harder question is usually who can actually make something happen, because those are not always the same people. A global leader may formally own a process but have relatively little ability to make three country teams use it differently. A country director may have plenty of authority inside their own business but relatively little influence over the global function designing the change. Somewhere between the two there may be a technical specialist, account leader or long-serving operations manager who owns almost nothing on paper but whose opinion everybody quietly checks before they commit.

This is one of the recurring realities of leading in a matrix. The organisation chart is useful, but it is an incomplete map of how the organisation actually moves. It tells us something about reporting relationships and formal accountabilities, but much less about trust, credibility, access, expertise, informal influence, or who can bring the right people together when something gets stuck.

I already use an influence map with leaders to make some of this visible. That map is primarily relational. It asks who you know, who influences whom, where relationships are strong or weak, and how influence moves through a network rather than simply up and down reporting lines. There is another question worth asking alongside it, particularly when the work is politically sensitive, cross-functional or genuinely uncertain: where does effective power actually sit around this particular issue?

I have been exploring a form of power mapping influenced by the work of Samo Burja and, particularly, Tasshin Fogleman’s attempt to turn some of Burja’s thinking into something that can be mapped. I would not lift that method wholesale into leadership work. Some of its language comes from competitive strategy and feels unnecessarily stark inside an organisation. What I do find useful is the distinction it forces us to make between someone’s position, their actual ability to affect a situation, and their capacity to do something different when the established route stops working. For leaders who spend much of their time working laterally, that distinction is worth exploring.

The job title is only a clue

Stakeholder mapping normally starts with some version of power. The familiar power-interest grid asks us to decide who has high or low power and high or low interest, then vary our engagement accordingly. It has lasted because it is simple and frequently useful. When a project has twenty stakeholders and you need to work out where to spend your attention, four boxes are considerably better than no thinking at all. The difficulty is what we mean by power. It is very easy to substitute seniority. The Chief Operating Officer has high power. The technical specialist has low power. The country manager has more power than the project manager. Before long, the boxes are being filled in largely by looking at the organisation chart. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it badly misreads the situation.

Imagine that you are trying to change the way a complex customer solution is sold and delivered across several countries. The regional sales leader may be senior and visibly supportive, but the proposal will only work if a relatively small group of solution architects change the way they engage early in the sales process. One particularly experienced architect is not their manager but is the person the others regard as technically credible. If she thinks the proposal is nonsense, the formal sponsorship at the top may achieve surprisingly little. On this issue, she has power. Not unlimited power and not organisational power in some abstract sense, but the capacity to materially affect this particular outcome. That qualification matters. One of the more useful ideas in Burja’s writing is that power is relative to a landscape. Someone does not simply possess a fixed amount of it like a number on a badge. Their ability to make things happen changes according to what is happening, who else is involved and what resources matter. The same Finance Director who can stop a multimillion-euro investment almost instantly may have virtually no ability to determine whether twenty engineers adopt a particular working practice next Tuesday. So before mapping anybody, I would start with a much narrower sentence. Instead of asking about “stakeholders for the transformation”, define the thing you are actually trying to make happen. “Improve collaboration” is too broad. “Get Sales and Engineering involved together before the final bid design” is much better. “Secure agreement from the three country businesses to run the new process for ninety days” gives us something we can actually map. Once the landscape changes, the power map may change with it.

Ask what people can actually cause to happen

I find it useful to forget job grade temporarily and ask what each person could actually cause to happen around the issue. Who can say yes? Who can effectively say no, even if their formal role suggests they cannot? Who can make implementation dramatically easier? Who can slow something without visibly opposing it? Whose support would cause several other people to reconsider? Who has information that everybody else needs? Who can bring people into the same room? Who can remove a constraint, and who can create one?

Formal decision rights tell us who is authorised to decide, but not necessarily who can make the decision hold. This normally produces a much more interesting conversation than simply asking who the senior stakeholders are.

You can then place people very loosely into four relative power classes: High, Mid, Low and Out. High, Mid and Low describe someone’s effective power within the scope you have defined. Out describes an actor who sits outside that scope but can still affect it, such as a regulator, supplier, customer or parent-company board. Out does not mean disengaged or unimportant. An outside actor may have considerable power over what happens inside the system.

I would resist making these placements more precise than they deserve to be. The value comes from the conversation about why someone belongs where they do, not from deciding that Michelle is a 7.3 and Raj is a 6.8. The same person may also move between High, Mid and Low when the issue or scope changes.

It also helps to distinguish effective power from visibility. Someone can be extremely visible and surprisingly weak. Somebody else may rarely appear in senior meetings yet be involved in almost every conversation that matters before those meetings take place. This is one reason I like mapping these things on paper with leaders. The moment someone says, “Actually, everyone checks with her before they decide”, we have usually found something more useful than another box on the organisation chart.

Who can do something new when the script stops working?

This is the part of Burja’s work that initially sounds the least suitable for leadership development but, once the terminology is removed, may be the most interesting. He distinguishes between what he calls live players and dead players. A live player is capable of doing something they have not previously done, while a dead player essentially follows an existing script.

I am not planning to start describing executives as dead players. What sits underneath the terminology, however, is a useful question: when the normal route stops working, who is capable of creating another one?

Consider two leaders with similar amounts of formal power. A difficult issue appears that does not fit the normal governance process. The first says, “This needs to go through the steering group. The next meeting is on the 18th.” The second says, “The steering group is too late. Let me speak to Operations and Finance this afternoon and see whether there is another way of doing it.”

Neither response is automatically better. Most organisations would collapse if everybody invented a new process whenever they encountered something inconvenient. Routine is valuable precisely because we do not have to work everything out again from first principles. The interesting question is what happens when the existing script no longer fits the situation.

In the original mapping language, this horizontal dimension is called vitality, running from dead to live. For organisational work, I would translate that into a continuum from more scripted to more adaptive. Someone towards the scripted end tends to operate through known roles, routines, precedent and established authority. Someone towards the adaptive end has demonstrated an ability to form a new coalition, connect people who do not normally work together, reinterpret the issue, create an alternative route or test something that has not been tried before.

This is not a personality type and it is certainly not a permanent judgement on the person. A leader may be highly adaptive in the commercial world they know deeply and very scripted when dealing with an unfamiliar regulatory question. Someone else may look rigid because they are operating inside a constraint that nobody mapping them understands. That is one reason to treat all of this as provisional rather than diagnostic.

Still, combining these two dimensions starts producing a different sort of map. Who has high effective power and high adaptive capacity? Who has considerable effective power but is largely tied to existing processes? Who has very little current power but an unusual ability to create new possibilities? And perhaps most interestingly, who could connect those people?

Why this matters more in complexity

If everything is predictable, much of this matters less. You know what needs doing, the authority structure is clear, somebody makes a decision, the process runs, and people carry out the work. The more interesting situations are the ones where the answer is not already known.

A customer changes direction halfway through a complex project. A regulatory change collides with a commercial priority. Three functions agree that something needs to change but disagree over what the problem actually is. A global model that worked in five countries hits a sixth where the conditions are different. A transformation programme discovers that the behaviour holding things in place is not located in any one team. Now the organisation has to adapt.

This is where complexity thinking starts to matter. Complexity Leadership Theory, for example, draws attention away from leadership being only the actions of formally designated leaders and towards the interactions through which adaptation, learning and new responses emerge across a system. That can sound abstract until you watch it happen. Someone spots something. Someone else connects it to a problem in another part of the business. Two people who have never previously worked together start talking. A third person gives them permission, access or protection. A small experiment works well enough to attract attention, and a practice starts spreading.

Nobody can point to the moment the senior leader “made the change happen”, because the change emerged through a set of interactions. Formal leadership may still have been essential. Perhaps somebody funded the experiment or protected the people trying it. But it is not the whole explanation.

A map of effective power should therefore show more than who has authority. It should help us notice where adaptive capacity already exists and where it could be supported.

Do not forget the relationships between people

There is an obvious problem with mapping people as separate dots: people influence one another. This is where the idea reconnects with the influence mapping I already use. Timothy Rowley’s work on stakeholder networks made this point nearly thirty years ago. Much stakeholder thinking had treated relationships as separate pairs: the organisation and Stakeholder A, the organisation and Stakeholder B, the organisation and Stakeholder C. Rowley’s argument was that those stakeholders are also connected to each other, and those relationships change what influence any one of them has. This becomes impossible to ignore in a matrix.

If you need the support of the regional Operations Director, it matters that you know what she thinks. It may matter just as much that she trusts the judgement of the country Operations Manager who used to work for her. Perhaps you barely know that person. Perhaps the person you are trying hardest to influence already has a strong relationship with somebody who understands your proposal and is considered credible. Or perhaps the opposite is true: you have been carefully briefing someone who appears powerful, without realising that the rest of the network stopped listening to them eighteen months ago. An organisation chart does not tell you this, and a power-interest grid usually does not either. Relationships do.

Watch for the bridges

One feature I would pay particular attention to is the person connecting parts of the organisation that otherwise have little contact. Network researchers sometimes describe this in terms of brokerage or boundary spanning. The language varies, but the underlying phenomenon is familiar.

Imagine a regional leader who spent five years in Manufacturing, moved into Commercial and now works in Strategy. She understands the language, pressures and personalities in all three places. She knows who to call. More importantly, people on several sides trust her enough to take the call.

Her formal position might not make her the most powerful person in any of those groups. Her network position may make her extraordinarily useful when something needs to move across them. Matrix organisations are full of people like this, although they are not always recognised or rewarded for it.

If you want to develop this capacity deliberately, it helps to think about how you build a powerful internal network, not simply accumulate contacts.

I would actually go further. Sometimes the bridge matters more than either end. If two powerful functions are badly disconnected, adding more authority to either side may achieve very little. Improving the relationship between them, or involving somebody who can credibly span the boundary, may change the situation far more.

This is where lateral leadership starts becoming something more interesting than “influencing people who don’t report to you”. You are working with the architecture of relationships around the issue.

Influence without authority is not influence without power

Influence without authority is not the absence of power. It involves recognising and mobilising forms of power that do not come from hierarchy. The phrase can otherwise make lateral leadership sound as though you have no power at all and must somehow compensate by being exceptionally persuasive. Most people in matrix roles have more power available to them than that. It is simply not all hierarchical.

You may have expertise somebody needs. You may know the customer better than anybody else in the room. You may control access to information. You may have a reputation that makes your judgement credible. You may have a relationship with somebody others cannot easily reach. You may be able to convene people across functions. You may have a senior sponsor willing to put their weight behind something. You may have no authority over another team but have something that team genuinely needs from yours.

All of these alter what you can make happen. Some of that power is yours directly. Some of it is borrowed through relationships.

That gives me a rather different coaching question from “How can you be more influential?” I would ask instead: what resources of power already exist in this situation, and which can you legitimately mobilise?

That word legitimately matters. There is an unattractive version of power mapping in which colleagues become pieces on a board: identify the powerful ones, recruit allies, bypass opponents and manoeuvre your proposal into place. Organisations certainly contain politics, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. But most matrix leadership takes place inside ongoing relationships. You will probably need these people again next month. They may need you. People remember how they were treated, and trust accumulated over five years can be spent remarkably quickly.

The purpose of the map is not to become better at manipulating colleagues. It is to see the landscape you are already part of more clearly.

Alignment is more useful than supporters and blockers

Stakeholder maps frequently classify people according to whether they support the change. Again, useful up to a point. The problem is that people’s positions are normally more complicated. A country leader may strongly agree that customer response times need to improve and strongly disagree that the answer is centralisation. A functional leader may support the overall transformation but oppose one workstream because they think the implementation risk is being ignored. A technical expert may look resistant to the project while actually being deeply committed to the intended outcome and unconvinced by the proposed route.

Calling any of these people a “blocker” throws away useful information. I prefer asking two questions:

• What are we aligned around?
• Where does that alignment stop?

This leaves room for partial agreement. It also changes the task. Instead of trying to convert somebody from red to green, you can look for enough shared ground to take the next useful step. Sometimes that is all you need.

A practical way to build the map

I would build this on top of a specific issue, not as a map of the organisation. Take a piece of paper and write the challenge at the top. For example: Get agreement to test the new account-planning process in Germany and France during Q1.

1. Identify who can materially change what happens

Include the obvious senior stakeholders, but keep going. Who has expertise? Who will have to make it work? Who do others listen to? Who controls something necessary? Who can quietly slow the work? Who connects groups that otherwise struggle to collaborate? Include people outside the formal project if they could materially affect the outcome.

2. Place people according to effective power

Place them roughly as high, medium or low in relation to this particular outcome. You may also want an “outside” category for somebody who is not currently part of the field but could enter it. Do not use job grade as your shortcut. Write down the evidence or reasoning behind each placement so that an assumption does not quietly turn into a fact.

3. Add the scripted-to-adaptive dimension

You are not diagnosing personality. You are asking what you have actually seen. When this person encounters something unexpected, do they mostly revert to established rules and routines, or have they demonstrated that they can create another route? Someone may sit in a different place on this dimension when the issue changes, so keep the judgement local and provisional.

4. Draw the relationships

Who influences whom? Who trusts whom? Who depends on whom? Where does information move? Who acts as a bridge? Where is there almost no relationship despite considerable interdependence? If you already use an influence map, this section will feel familiar. The difference is that the purpose here is not simply to understand your network. It is to see how relationships alter the effective power and adaptive capacity available around this issue.

5. Mark alignment carefully

Avoid reducing people to supporters and blockers. Note what each person appears to support, what they are concerned about, where interests overlap and where the limits of that alignment may lie. Where you are uncertain, say so. “I think she supports the outcome but not the proposed route” is a more useful hypothesis than a confident green dot.

6. Add your confidence in the map

Some placements will be based on direct experience. Others will be based on reputation, inference or something another person has told you. Marking confidence as high, medium or low is a simple way of preventing speculation from acquiring false authority. It also shows where the next useful action may simply be to learn more.

From mapping to movement

The purpose of the exercise is not to produce an impressive diagram. It is to see whether the map suggests a useful next move.

You might connect two people who are currently working separately, amplify someone whose useful insight is not reaching the right part of the organisation, or borrow credibility and access from a legitimate sponsor. You might convene several actors who cannot shift the issue independently, reframe the problem around an outcome that creates more alignment, or run a small probe to test whether one of your assumptions is true.

Sometimes the best move is to watch. If the map is based on weak evidence or the relationships are moving quickly, premature action may do more harm than good. Notice who speaks to whom after the meeting, which objection changes other people’s positions, whose support creates momentum and where apparent agreement repeatedly fails to become action.

A useful move does not need to solve the whole situation. It needs to change what becomes possible next.

Do not confuse the map with the territory

There is a danger in any method that turns organisational life into a diagram. The map looks orderly. The lines are visible. The people have positions. It becomes easy to believe that you have discovered how the organisation really works. You have not. You have created a temporary representation of your current hypotheses.

Another person may draw a different map because they have different relationships, information and experiences. Your own position in the system affects what you can see. Some influence is deliberately concealed. Some of the people you have mapped may behave differently tomorrow. Your intervention changes the landscape you are trying to understand. This is why I would use the map iteratively: Map, act, notice, update.

Have a conversation. Make a connection. Try something small. Notice what happens. Then revise the map. The surprising response is not an inconvenience that invalidates the exercise. It is new information about the system.

Power is already present

People sometimes resist the language of power because it feels political or manipulative. I understand the discomfort, but avoiding the word does not make power disappear. Decisions are still shaped somewhere. Some voices still carry further than others. Some people can create movement, while others struggle to be heard. Relationships still open and close possibilities.

The more useful question is not whether power should exist. It is whether we can see the forms it takes, understand how they affect the work, and use what is available responsibly.

In a matrix organisation, formal authority is only one part of that picture. Expertise, trust, reputation, access, information, convening ability and network position all affect what becomes possible. Someone who appears relatively powerless on the organisation chart may have substantial agency around a particular issue. Someone with an impressive title may discover that their authority does not travel as far as they assumed.

Mapping those realities will not remove the politics, uncertainty or interdependence of matrix work. It can help you approach them with fewer illusions. And sometimes seeing where power actually sits is enough to reveal a move that the organisation chart would never have shown you.

Additional reading

• How do decisions get made in a matrix organisation? — Explores the gap between formal decision rights and the practical power required to make a decision hold.
• How do I build a powerful internal network? — Looks more closely at connectors, brokers, boundary spanners and the relationships through which work moves across an organisation.
• Relational systems navigation — Develops the complexity perspective behind reading and working with relationships as a system rather than as isolated stakeholder connections.
• Adaptive experimentation — Explains how small, contained experiments can test assumptions and reveal how a complex organisational system responds.

Sources

• Burja, S. (2019) Great Founder Theory, version 1.43. Available at: https://www.samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Great-Founder-Theory-v-1.43.pdf (Accessed: 29 September 2026).
• Burja, S. (2018) ‘Empire Theory, Part I: Competitive Landscape’. Available at: https://www.samoburja.com/empire-theory-part-i-competitive-landscape/ (Accessed: 29 September 2026).
• Fogleman, T. (2019) ‘Foundations of Burja Mapping’. Available at: https://tasshin.com/blog/foundations-of-burja-mapping/ (Accessed: 29 September 2026).
• Rowley, T.J. (1997) ‘Moving beyond dyadic ties: A network theory of stakeholder influences’, Academy of Management Review, 22(4), pp. 887–910. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1997.9711022107.
• Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R. and McKelvey, B. (2007) ‘Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era’, The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), pp. 298–318. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002.
• Burt, R.S. (2005) Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199249145.001.0001.

The images are AI-generated and were trained on my hand-drawn images. I may update it to mine when I have time.