I think every organization above a certain size necessarily ends up with informal (or sometimes formal) groups of "adults in the room" that handle important things in good faith, as a coordinated team. It's inherently discriminatory against a certain type of employee (one who would rather metagame the organization itself rather than address the market/customers/ops) but quite necessary.
One of the best things you can do when you join a new organisation is figure out who those people are.
They often know where the bodies are buried (or that obscure document stored on a documentation system from two generations ago that was deprecated but never removed "just in case" that describes exactly the system you are currently looking at wondering "wtf").
In an idealised world it wouldn't happen but I've never managed to work anywhere close to that.
I've heard a strategy to start with asking "who do you respect the most in this org?" or "who is the most knowledgeable person in the org?". Keep repeating that across every 1:1 and you may eventually build an influence graph.
> one who would rather metagame the organization itself rather than address the market/customers/ops
Saved for future reference. My company has an exploding number of metagamers with an ever shrinking number of "adults in the room". It's stagnating hard.
Typically, this is a problem of success. Success attracts metagamers, which leads to less success, so they leave. Repeat until insolvency/heat death of the universe.
jwz once put it when talking about netscape: people who want to go to work for a successful company instead of people who want to go to work for a company and make it successful.
Problem is (as it seems the case in the author's case) when this group (I really loathe the term "adults in the room", by exclusion the rest of people are children or to be treated as such) has people with power that are "well actually" people just there to pontificate from their inflated egos without letting others do their jobs.
