Understanding Informal Power Structures in Large Organizations
Most people think organizational charts tell you how things actually get done. They don't. The real structure runs underneath, usually invisible until something breaks. The framework I'm going to describe maps onto what fans of certain anime call Upper Moons - a tiered system where a handful of deeply connected people dictate strategy, control information flow, and decide what initiatives live or die. It's not a conspiracy. It's just how human groups self-organize at scale.The Hidden Hierarchy How Upper Moons Dictate Power And Strategy Within Complex Organizations
The core concept is straightforward. In any organization over roughly five hundred people, formal reporting lines create too much noise. Information gets filtered, decisions slow down, and someone needs to cut through the paralysis. A small group of senior figures naturally rises to fill that gap. They're not necessarily the titled executives. Sometimes they are. Often they aren't. What matters is that they share three things: deep institutional memory, wide cross-functional relationships, and a track record of shipping things that matter. I've watched this play out across three companies now. The pattern never changes. Here's what actually happens in practice.
How the System Actually Works
Let's skip the theory and talk about the mechanics. The Upper Moon tier - meaning the top three or four informally recognized influencers - controls strategy through three levers: access, framing, and blocking. Access is the easiest to see. These people get invited to the conversations where real decisions happen. The all-hands meetings and the documented committee meetings are theater. The actual strategy gets shaped in hallway conversations, Slack DMs, and those lunch groups that never appear on any org chart. If you're not in those loops, you're working from outdated assumptions about where the company is headed. Framing is where it gets interesting. Whatever problem the Upper Moon tier decides to focus on becomes the problem everyone else solves. This isn't malicious. It's efficient. When you have fifty projects competing for attention and three people who can actually unblock them, those three people will naturally steer resources toward whatever they think matters most. I once spent four months on a project that seemed strategically vital to our division. It died overnight when one of the Upper Moon figures publicly questioned whether we were solving the right problem. We were solving the problem she assigned us. She had quietly shifted her attention elsewhere.
Blocking is the nuclear option. Any member of this inner tier can kill an initiative with a single email or a well-timed question in a leadership meeting. They don't need a vote. They don't need justification. Their informal authority gives them cover to say no to anything, and everyone downstream interprets that as a signal to move on.
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Identifying Your Organization's Upper Moons
This is where most people fail. You can't find these people by looking at titles. I learned this the hard way during a restructuring at a mid-size SaaS company. We had a VP of Platform who sat at the top of every organizational chart and appeared on every slide deck. Meanwhile, there was a senior director of engineering nobody outside the tech org had ever heard of. This director had been at the company seven years, knew every system, every relationship, and every failed initiative. When she whispered that something was a bad idea, the VP of Platform would politely change course in the next meeting. To identify your own Upper Moons, track three signals over a two-week period. First, watch who people defer to in meetings. Not who speaks the loudest. Who do people pause and look at before answering? Second, map decision velocity. Which initiatives move fast and which stall? Fast-moving ones usually have an Upper Moon sponsor. Stalled ones usually lack one, or worse, have one actively opposed. The third signal is the hardest to notice objectively. Watch who gets pulled into conversations about things outside their formal scope. If your product manager is routinely looped into infrastructure planning, or your senior engineer is giving input on go-to-market strategy, those cross-boundary invitations reveal the actual influence network. The people receiving those invitations regularly are your Upper Moons.
Working Within This System
Once you've mapped the hierarchy, you have choices. Most people never make them consciously. They either comply blindly, rebel pointlessly, or figure out a middle path. The middle path is what I recommend, though it requires honest self-assessment. If you're trying to advance an initiative, find the Upper Moon whose interests align with yours and bring them in early. Not late. Early enough that they feel ownership over the direction, not just the outcome. I spent years doing this wrong. I'd build something completely, present it to leadership, and wonder why it got six months of feedback and then silence. The problem wasn't the quality of my work. It was that I'd skipped the people who actually decide what quality means at that level. There's a specific edge case I run into constantly. You identify the right Upper Moon sponsor, you align early, everything looks good. Then between your alignment meeting and the actual execution, something shifts. A reorg. A budget cycle. A personality conflict you couldn't have predicted. I hit this exact scenario last year with a cross-functional integration project. My sponsor had moved to a different division three weeks after our alignment session. The new division head had zero interest in the initiative and actively viewed it as competition for headcount. I lost four months of work because I hadn't built redundancy into my sponsorship layer.
The workaround I developed and now use consistently is dual-sponsorship. Not two sponsors at the same level - that creates confusion and conflicting directives. One primary sponsor who has the authority to unblock resources, and one secondary sponsor in a adjacent division who benefits if the project succeeds. When my primary sponsor left that year, my secondary sponsor stepped in and kept the project alive for six weeks while I found a new primary. That window made the difference between cancellation and completion.
Common Pitfalls
Beginners tend to over-index on one of two mistakes. The first is treating the Upper Moon hierarchy as something to be defeated. You can't defeat it. It exists independently of your preferences. Fighting it directly wastes political capital you'll need for actual work. The second mistake is complete passive acceptance - assuming the hierarchy is immutable and therefore not worth mapping. This leaves you perpetually surprised by why your initiatives fail. There's also a nuance most guides miss. The Upper Moon tier isn't static. Membership rotates based on demonstrated results and shifting power centers. I've seen people ascend from mid-level management to de facto Upper Moon status within eighteen months because they consistently delivered on high-visibility projects. I've also seen long-tenured members lose influence overnight when a new executive arrived with a different strategic priority. The hierarchy adapts faster than org charts do. Another thing nobody warns you about: the psychological tax of operating inside this system. You spend a constant low-grade amount of mental energy reading rooms, tracking alliances, and calibrating your language to match the priorities of whichever Upper Moon currently matters. It's exhausting. It's also unavoidable if you want to accomplish anything beyond keeping your head down and doing your defined job.
When the Model Breaks Down
This framework works best in organizations between five hundred and ten thousand people with at least three years of stable operation. Below five hundred, everyone knows everyone and the informal hierarchy is too small to map meaningfully. Above ten thousand, the hierarchy fragments into multiple competing factions that may openly contradict each other, which creates a different problem entirely - you're no longer dealing with one hidden hierarchy but several overlapping ones that require separate mapping exercises. The model also assumes a baseline of organizational competence. If your company is in active crisis mode - merger integration, severe financial distress, leadership purge - the formal hierarchy briefly reasserts itself and the informal one goes dormant or goes underground. During those periods, trying to navigate by Upper Moon influence is pointless. The formal chain of command temporarily becomes the only reliable signal. If your organization fits neither condition, or if the culture is so toxic that even informal influence networks can't function productively, the practical recommendation is straightforward. Document everything. Keep your scope narrow and defensible. Minimize dependency on strategic bets that require Upper Moon sponsorship. And start looking elsewhere. No hierarchy framework is worth your mental health if the underlying organization is actively hostile to competent work.
