Company Structure: Nerves.

The average 10-strong workforce has >50 years' tenure experience between them at their company. Compare that with the average consultant, who is in and out in three months.

Collectively, it's even more impressive: employees form an enormous distributed database of nodes and connections that are reinforced or undermined daily by their experiences of the production process, client feedback, conversations with colleagues and general knowledge.

The trouble is, barely a fraction of this knowledge makes it back to senior management. All of that information about the stability of company structures, the efficiency of processes and opportunities for improvement is locked away and hardly ever accessed.

Sometimes, the trouble is how that data is stored: in the shy and retiring, jaded, tired or distracted. Sometimes it's how the data is presented: in monosyllabic sentences, in secret or in jest. Either way, it's wasted and, to use a truly 'corporate' analogy, how would a body function without every part having a hotline to the brain?

This is how many companies (mal)function and consultants are often drafted as a temporary 'nervous system' to relay communication between the factory floor and senior management.

So if you're wondering why your company is struggling or how to improve performance, the place to start is to install that hotline to senior management for every member of every department. HR can help to coax and translate messages along this channel, and the volume of each signal can be tempered accordingly, but the important point is that pain in the body is prioritised: it's listened to regardless of where it comes from and, in the same way, every employee has important messages to inform strategy at senior levels.