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The Triangle We Didn’t Invent

I’ve sat in a hundred meetings where someone gets up and draws a triangle on the whiteboard. Strategy goes at the top, tactics in the middle, operational work at the base — or else why, how, and what, depending on who’s holding the pen. The triangle gets drawn, everyone nods, and the conversation moves on. Nobody asks where the triangle came from. It’s in the room like a piece of furniture: so familiar that you no longer see it.

I did the same for years. I drew the triangle because everyone else drew it, and because it seemed to describe something real — that the same thing looks different depending on whom you ask and at which level the conversation is held. The chief executive talks about direction, the team lead about prioritising, the specialist about tasks. The triangle gave that a shape. Only much later did I stop to ask myself the one question nobody in the meeting ever asked: who actually invented the organisational pyramid?

A picture isn’t a structure — it’s a sediment

The answer surprised me. The triangle is not the natural form of organisations, something that has always existed and that we merely draw into view. It is an invention — and a fairly recent one at that, roughly the age of the photocopier. And it isn’t even one invention but three. The picture you draw almost as a reflex is assembled from three sources alien to one another, none of which knew the others existed.

The best known of them is the American Robert Anthony, who in 1965 published a book at Harvard, Planning and Control Systems. It’s worth remembering the world it was written for. The post-war American corporation had swollen to an enormous size, and its managers were drowning in information they had no way of processing in time. Anthony’s question was a practical one: how do you steer a machine this large, when no single person can know everything happening inside it? His answer was to divide management into three: strategic planning (what the organisation is aiming for and with what resources), management control (how resources are acquired and used efficiently), and operational control (how individual tasks get done).

Anthony himself saw that these three came from different traditions: the roots of strategic planning were in economics, those of management control in social psychology, those of operational control in efficiency thinking and the measurement of work. He gathered three different traditions into a single framework — and he did it deliberately. There is a straight line from this to that strategic–tactical–operational staircase you draw in the meeting. Anthony gave it a structure, and the literature of financial management carried it forward for decades.

The second line is much later and comes from an entirely different direction. In 2009 Simon Sinek gave a TED talk and published a book, Start With Why, in which he set out the “golden circle”: why, how, what. Sinek’s point was not about levels of management but about the idea that effective leaders and companies start from purpose — why we exist — rather than from the product. His distillation was that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. It struck a nerve. The talk has been watched tens of millions of times, one of the most-viewed in TED’s history, and the book has sold millions of copies. It put a name to something many leaders had sensed but couldn’t quite say: that doing and efficiency alone are not enough if nobody knows why. And from there why–how–what seeped into the common property of management language — for many, fused into the same triangle as Anthony’s levels, as though they had always belonged together. Even though there is nearly half a century between them, and no connection at all.

The third line comes from a science that has nothing to do with management. Sociologists and economists have long structured phenomena across three levels: micro, meso, and macro. A single transaction is the micro level, the firm that makes it is the meso level, and the market in which all firms operate is the macro level. Micro is the individual and the interaction, meso is the group and the organisation, macro is structures and institutions. In evolutionary economics this crystallised into a framework of its own in the early 2000s. When the scale wandered into management language, its peak got a new name: macro became “meta” — the level of meaning and purpose. META, MESO, MICRO. The same staircase, different labels.

Three traditions, three different decades, three entirely different starting points. And yet we draw them as a single triangle, as though they were three names for one idea.

The man who was misread

And here comes the part that really stopped me. Let’s go back to Anthony, because there is something in his book that the pyramid doesn’t tell you.

Anthony did not draw a hierarchy. He did not speak of top management, middle management, and the rank and file. He described three processes — three different kinds of activity that take place in an organisation — not three layers into which people are sorted. And he said outright that the same person does all of them. The head of a shipping line, he wrote, practises both strategic planning and management control: one and the same person moves between two kinds of work, not on two different rungs.

Think of it from your own day. The same entrepreneur can, in a single morning, decide which way the whole firm is heading next year, reorganise the team’s work, and then fix one customer’s botched order on top of that. Strategic, tactical, and operational — all three, inside one head, within a couple of hours. He didn’t climb or descend any staircase. He changed the kind of work, the way you’d change the tool in your hand. This is exactly what Anthony meant. The levels were not people. They were kinds of work that cut through the organisation from top to bottom.

Read that again. The man regarded as the father of the management pyramid wrote in his book that the line between the levels is not sharp but a continuum, and that he separates them only because it is the clearest way to explain the difference. He effectively warned the reader against taking the division too literally.

We didn’t listen. Somewhere between Anthony and the present day, processes became layers, layers became people, and people became a hierarchy of status. “Strategic” came to mean important and high up, “operational” routine and low down. The triangle, which for Anthony described what is done in an organisation, turned into a picture of who is above whom. That was not Anthony’s idea. It was a misreading — and the misreading set into an org chart.

And it didn’t stop at a chart. Once the levels became people, everything else was built on top of them. Pay was tiered by level. A career path meant climbing from one level to the next. Whose voice carried weight in a meeting was determined by how high up the triangle they sat. The title told the level, the level told the worth. Little by little the picture became so much more than a thinking aid: it became a map of power, responsibility, and esteem. And that is exactly why the triangle is so hard to give up — it is no longer just a drawing on the board, but the way many organisations divide money, power, and respect. But that is a story I’ll return to at the end of the series. Let’s keep it in mind for now.

One word, two family trees

One more proof that the triangle is assembled rather than discovered. Many assume that business borrowed its levels from the army — strategy and tactics sound like military language. But look more closely and you’ll notice the words are crossed. In military doctrine the operational level sits above the tactical: it is the level of the campaign, which links individual battles to the aims of strategy. In business, operational is at the base, the everyday work, below the tactical. The same word points in two opposite directions. The reason is simple: they come from different family trees. The military operational level was developed as a concept of its own in the early twentieth century, while business’s “operational” descends from the supervision of the factory floor, where from the start it has meant the lowest and most everyday level. Two different stories that happened to use the same word.

But doesn’t it work anyway?

Here it’s only fair to stop and defend the triangle. Someone might say: so what? Even if the picture is assembled from three sources and even if Anthony has been misread — it works. Strategic, tactical, and operational are a common language everyone understands without explanation. The very fact that the triangle is imprecise and elastic is what makes it usable: you can draw it for any organisation in any country, and everyone nods. A shared, slightly loose language is often more useful than a precise language nobody shares.

And there is genuine truth in that triangle. The same thing really does look different depending on whether you ask the chief executive or the specialist — and the differences are not mere status, but genuinely different questions. Direction and meaning are a different matter from prioritising, and prioritising is a different matter from doing a single task. The triangle catches hold of something real here. Admitting it makes the whole case stronger. I’m not arguing that the triangle should be thrown in the bin. It doesn’t have to be correct to be useful. But there is a difference between a useful tool and the structure of the world — and that difference is the very heart of this whole series.

What is built can be rebuilt

Because once you understand that the triangle is built rather than discovered, something changes. If the pyramid were the gravity of organisations, there’d be nothing to be done about it — you might as well complain about the pull of the earth. But you can do to an invention what you can do to any invention: ask what problem it was an answer to, and whether that problem still exists.

Anthony’s triangle was an answer to a world in which information moved slowly and expensively. When no single person could know everything in time, it made sense to gather information at the top and give decision-making power to where the whole picture was. The layers were a way of managing the scarcity of information. But what if that very scarcity is disappearing?

And that is exactly what AI is now doing. It doesn’t break the triangle directly — nobody wipes it off the board. It quietly dismantles the conditions the triangle was once drawn for: the slowness, the cost, and the scarcity of information. When information moves in an instant and almost for free, the question of layers becomes a different question. But before we talk about dismantling, it’s fair to understand why the triangle worked in the first place. It wasn’t born of stupidity. It was, in its time, the right answer to the right problem — and that is exactly why it deserves to be taken seriously before we consider taking it apart. That’s what I’ll dig into in the next part.

Lenni Laukkanen helps leadership teams turn AI into a competitive advantage through people. Invite me to speak at your event or to spar with your leadership team — I reply within a working day.

Next part: The Right Answer — to the Wrong Century: why the pyramid worked, and on which single assumption it rested.

Sources

Durable theory

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