If you’re going through a reorg, are about to start a new job, or you just feel like you can’t make sense of the opaque political dynamics in your workplace, this blog post is for you. It’s a tactical guide to literally reading the room.

Reframe the problem

As a content designer, you have no doubt faced stalled projects, reversed decisions, and an assortment of battles to pick with conflicting priorities and uncertain win conditions. Often we shrug and chalk this up to a “culture issue” or ”broken process” or “people problem” — whatever that means. 

I posit that in order to maximize our impact, we must understand these patterns. We must observe and document them. To do that, we can frame it as an information problem.

You’re familiar with “gathering requirements.” This is virtually the same thing: gathering context. It will help you understand and navigate the organization you’re actually in, rather than the one advertised in the company’s mission statement or org chart.

You already audit content systems with a supernatural ability to absorb and manage a ton of information. Let’s apply those same skills to your workplace.

Quick note: I use “audit” loosely here. For our purposes, let’s treat both an inventory (collecting and categorizing information) and an audit (evaluating it against a rubric) as two parts of one process.

Product content vs. organizational information

Before we dive in, let’s break down the difference between product content and organizational information.

Product content is a content designer’s bread and butter:

• Designed for specific types of users
• Has clear goals (ideally)
• Tested and iterated (in theory)
• Intended to be found

Organizational information is every user’s nightmare:

• Accumulates organically and haphazardly, across myriad platforms
• Not always clear who it’s intended for
• Authored, but not necessarily “owned“
• Rarely reviewed or updated, if at all
• Includes ephemeral norms or behaviors that can be hard to isolate and identify — in other words, “what goes unsaid”

The goal of a workplace audit

The goal is simple: to help you navigate organizational information more effectively and pick the right places to devote your attention and effort.

Since this audit is intended for an audience of one (you!), your findings will feel subjective. The upside to this is you won’t need to justify your insights to anyone else. You’re free to make conclusions based on what you find useful. Treat it as an exercise in trusting your own judgment.

My hope is that this audit will help you:

• Make sense of the chaos. You walk into meetings, read project docs, and scroll through Slack every day anyway. That’s a lot of free-floating data that could be turned into actionable insights.
• Articulate what feels unspoken. Mapping what was once amorphous or ambiguous has been therapeutic for me; perhaps it will be for you, too.
• Learn the real rules. With an audit in hand, you can confidently compare what the org chart says to what actually happens, and catch disparities between official communications and reality. 

Let’s see what juicy intel you can squeeze from your organization with some subtle sleuthing.

When to use this guide

I recommend spending time on this when you’re starting a new job, navigating a reorg, or before you launch a big initiative. It’s also useful when a new leader arrives, after a project where the reality didn’t match the plan, or whenever you feel confused in a way you can’t explain — so pretty much any day of the week ending in “y.”

Understanding the three layers of organizational information

Think of organizational information as living on three wavelengths, in order from loudest to quietest:

1. Official comms, or what management tells you

This is the organization’s official, cultivated documentation. It’s how it presents itself to the world. 

Official comms includes public-facing content like the company website, job posts, press releases, and transparency reports*. It’s also internal content intended for employees: org charts, internal wikis, onboarding guides, handbooks, all‑hands decks and recordings, and email or chat announcements from your comms, HR, or leadership teams.

Qualities to look for:

• Findability: Can you locate it without asking? Can you access it, or is it locked behind permissions?
• Freshness: When was it last updated? Does it match current reality?
• Completeness: What’s highlighted and included? What’s overlooked and left out?
• Trust signals: Is it factual or fluff? Does it refer back to historical data? Is it unbiased, or is it intended to benefit the interest of a specific party?

What an audit may reveal: The organization’s curated image versus your lived experience.

*Hat tip to Erica Jorgensen’s “MBA in a Day” workshop, which helps you decode the jargon and creative spin companies put on their financial reports and figure out how they actually make money.

2. Operational content, or what the work itself tells you 

This is the byproduct of the day-to-day life of the rank and file employees. It’s the documentation and communication between coworkers, and it’s the work product itself: team wikis, process guides, product specs, design files, code repos, Google Drive files, retrospectives, team-level meeting notes and recordings, task trackers, chat logs, and shared calendars.

Key information paths to look for:

• Decision trails: Where are decisions documented? (Hint: often nowhere!)
• Collaboration patterns: Where do discussions take place? Who has access or edit permissions? Who contributes? Who leads? Who disagrees?
• Information decay: What’s maintained? What’s abandoned, forgotten, or discarded?
• Discovery vs. delivery: Where do explorations live? Where do final specs live? Is there a connection between them?

What an audit may reveal: How work actually gets done versus what the org chart or process docs say.

3. Ambient content, or what people’s actions tell you

If the first two layers are everything that’s written down, this is everything that people do. Commonly known as culture ”tells” or “smells,” it’s a collection of behavioral trends and cultural norms.

Note that it can also include patterns you recognize across the first two layers, like the attendees in a meeting invite, the author of meeting notes, the author of the tasks in a tracking system, the timestamps of chat messages, and so on.

Patterns to look for:

• Participation: Who’s present but silent? Whose comments get engagement?
• Gravitational pull: Which meetings, channels, or docs draw people naturally? Which are skipped or see little engagement?
• Timing: When do important conversations and decisions actually happen? (Late at night? After specific meetings?)
• Exclusion signals: Who’s consistently missing from relevant conversations? Whose decisions are considered final, and whose are relitigated?

What an audit may reveal: Informal power structures that matter more than formal ones.

Documenting your findings

Now that we have a sense of what information we’re looking for, it’s important to save your observations by using an underrated skill: writing things down!

Safety tips before you start

While employers reserve the right to track their employees’ activity, they tend not to be fond of reciprocation. Before you start, a few recommendations from a fellow content designer (not a lawyer!):

• Use a non-work machine. Keep it separate to keep it secure.
• Respect boundaries: only access information available through your normal work. Never request access to private documents or conversations. If you stumble across sensitive information, try to work around it; consult your favorite attorney before making a separate record of it.
• Assume everything you do is visible. Browse in a way you could explain to your manager, your CEO, or your legal department (seriously). If someone asks, you have genuine rationale: you learn better with fuller context, and having more information helps you do your job.
• Be discreet. This audit may not be Fight Club, but the same rules apply. You might be eager to share your learnings with colleagues, but don’t let your desire to educate or empower invite undue attention. Your insights are for your eyes and ears only. Quietly act on them; don’t advertise.

Decide on your goals, scope, and format

Practice good maintenance hygiene, and ask yourself how much detail you need for it to be useful. Think about what format will allow you to be nimble. And, of course, consider time-boxing it so you don’t spend hours going down a rabbit hole.

Your aim is to capture the state of the organization’s content in a way that is…

• Targeted and goal‑oriented. Start with a few problem statements. Why are you doing this audit? What are you seeking to understand? What do you hope your findings will empower you to do?
• Timely. Move quickly enough to record information before it’s overwritten, removed, or rendered obsolete.
• Complete in scope. Familiarize yourself with the system well enough to know where to look. Try to turn over every stone you can in the time you’ve allotted yourself.
• Sourced: Record where the information lives, who authored it and when, and how you discovered it.
• Organized: Choose the format that will be easiest for you to manage. Remember, you’re not sharing it with anyone, so it just has to make sense to you. This can be a document with tabs, a spreadsheet, a database (Airtable, Notion, JSON, any schema you prefer), or even a paper journal.

Use a basic audit framework: Layer → Findings → Strategy

Practice recognizing what layer of information you’re looking at and what you’re evaluating it for. To review:

• Official comms: Gaps between the official story and your reality
• Operational content: Where the real work lives and where decisions are made
• Ambient content: Informal structures and power centers

For each observation, note your findings. Mark whether it’s a one‑time incident or a recurring pattern and whether it seems specific to a certain role, team, or level. Think about team health, siloing, or the gap between someone’s official title and their actual authority. 

Next, ask yourself: how might this affect my work? Your findings will then inform your strategy. You might be surprised at how quickly you’ll likely be able to use the intel you collect. Some examples:

• Official layer: If a wiki is meticulously maintained but nobody uses it, the problem isn’t the information itself but discoverability, perceived value, or trustworthiness. Ask around to find which it is and what the real source of truth is.
• Operational layer: If you see a stakeholder’s name on docs, but their comments are never addressed, try to figure out why. Note the names you find who seem to have real influence, or if the conversation is happening elsewhere.
• Ambient layer: If a decision‑maker only engages with certain types of information during presentations, you’ll need to frame your recommendations around that.

A few easy wins, learned the hard way

You’ll be amazed what you can pick up from observing with a critical eye and long memory. A few examples:

• Official comms are notorious for historical revisionism. The most effective hack: a simple screenshot.
• Don’t default to seeking or actioning feedback by title alone. You’d be surprised what you can learn about high‑level leaders in chat logs and resolved comments.

• You can potentially recognize the signs of an impending reorg by monitoring calendar blocks. If you see several long, manager-only meetings, back up your files just in case.

A few caveats and a note on self-care

Documents and chat logs can’t always tell us exactly what decisions were made, and they rarely tell us what people actually think. It only shows what they put in writing. Even if your instincts are on point, you can’t predict how people will react to new situations or when priorities will shift unexpectedly. You can’t tell the future, and you’ll often miss things because you didn’t know what to look for. 

And that’s okay! You can only do your best with what you know. What you can do is take in more information — it’s always better to have more information than you had before. Don’t set out to solve any problem but your own sense of clarity.

Grow knowledge, build power

Our jobs demand that we’re comfortable with ambiguity, and we oblige. But some things ought not to be ambiguous, like the social norms of your company Slack, how your benefits work, how promotions tend to play out, or who gets a say in the direction of the business. Sometimes dysfunctional dynamics are obvious, like whose name is left off of a slide. Other times, they’re harder to name. It’s tough to engage with what you can’t fully describe.

I propose a radical idea: you deserve to understand all of these things, even if they are not explicitly spelled out for you. Even if these things are inconsistent (i.e., they vary by team), that itself is information you ought to be armed with so you don’t go running off into unwinnable battles or hitting dead ends. You deserve to have as much information as you need to be set up for success.

Alas, the organization you have is the one you’ve got, and it likely was not designed to help you succeed. Its information flows are the raw material you have to work with, and they are often broken, hidden, contradictory, or even working at cross-purposes with you. But luckily, you already have the skills to seek them out, collect them, and analyze them for yourself.

I hope these methods will arm you with a structured way to navigate yet another complex system. You know more than you think, and you can make that knowledge work for you.

Download the workbook

Going it alone would be a lot of work, so I’ve prepared a workbook to get you started! It includes sample exercises so you can put these ideas into practice immediately, if you’re that particular kind of homework-loving nerd. Happy auditing!

Get the workbook