Scaling Organisations: Specialisation, Handoffs and the Senior School System
A move to senior school reveals how specialisation, hand-offs and local targets shape organisational complexity and the experience of people within it.
6 min read →By Richard Faint · 4 September 2026 · 3 min read
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TL;DR
My daughter has started senior school, and it reminded me that the people who know least about an organisation are often the people who most need it to work well. Experienced people stop seeing complexity because they have learned the shortcuts, language and unwritten rules. New starters have not. Their confusion is therefore not just an onboarding problem, it is useful evidence about the system itself.
My daughter started senior school this week.
As an adult school looks straightforward, to an eleven-year-old on her first day, it is a complete unknown. Where do you go when the bell rings? Which staircase gets you to science? What happens if you are late? Who do you ask if you get lost?
For my generation, secondary school was explained by Grange Hill. If you went to school in Hartlepool in the 1990s, Grange Hill was not an exaggeration - it was a documentary; most of what happened in Grange Hill happened at my school sooner or later. We had our own versions of both Imelda and Gripper and we really did have a Ziggy (named after the Grange Hill character due to his similar looks and obsession with football). The programme understood that the unwritten rules are perhaps more important than the official ones. The first year of school is more about learning the system this includes the official and unofficial hierarchies and the unwritten rules.
Tacit Knowledge: The Organisational Complexity New Starters Face
Every organisation accumulates knowledge, some of it codified, but much of it is habit, conventions and shared understanding. People learn which meetings matter, what the acronyms mean, where information is hidden and which parts of the official process bear no resemblance to reality. Over time, that knowledge becomes invisible. The experienced person no longer sees the complexity because they have adapted to it.
Illustrative instruction: “Send this through the usual approval route.”
Experienced colleague
- Recognises the shorthand
Knows the acronyms, exceptions and unofficial route.
- Fills in the missing steps
Uses learned relationships and tacit knowledge.
- Gets the task done
The instruction appears adequate.
New starter
- Reads the same words
Cannot see the knowledge the instruction assumes.
- Has to ask or guess
Which system? Which person? What happens next?
- Waits or takes a wrong turn
The missing information becomes visible.
Use the newcomer’s questions to improve the system: make the route, owner and exceptions explicit instead of expecting everyone to learn hidden rules.
Using New Starter and User Onboarding as Discovery Evidence
The same problem appears in companies and products. A new employee is given an organisation chart, some systems and a pile of acronyms, a new user is presented with a UI. When either becomes confused, the instinctive reaction can be: Why don’t they understand this? The better question is: Why did we expect them to understand this?
Complexity cannot always be removed, sometimes it is inevitable. A useful question is who is being asked to carry that complexity. Poor systems push it towards the least experienced person; good ones absorb as much of it as possible. That makes newcomers particularly valuable because they see things experienced people have stopped noticing. If somebody can only operate effectively after learning a large collection of unwritten rules, the organisation may be functioning despite its design rather than because of it.
My daughter will learn quickly. In a few weeks, the corridors will be familiar, and the unwritten rules obvious. Humans adapt to systems but once we have adapted, we forget adaptation was ever required.
Somewhere behind us, another new starter is standing in a corridor with a timetable, trying to work out where they are supposed to go…we need to make that journey easier
Try it interactively. Play Corridor B — A Grange Hill Adventure — explore how a newcomer learns a system through its clues, conventions and unwritten rules.