This Underground Network of Engineers Has Saved You--Often

The Informal Network of Engineers in Your Company Act Like Mycelium

Beneath the surface of a thriving forest lies an extraordinary hidden system: mycelium. These vast underground fungal networks quietly connect trees, sharing nutrients, water, and even warning signals about environmental threats. Healthy forests rely on these unseen connections to stabilize the ecosystem, help trees grow stronger, and collectively protect the entire forest from harm.

When left alone, and led by your senior technologists, your engineers will typically erect a similar network of communication that spans across teams and projects.

Major projects and key initiatives (your “trees”) typically get the most attention and are highly visible in your organization. However, beneath the surface, a quieter network of engineers is busy connecting teams, sharing critical information, spotting and resolving potential issues even before they are detected by the broader organization. Like mycelium, these informal networks are usually hard to spot unless you’re looking for them—but they’re vital to your organization’s health, agility, and resilience.

What Happens When You Destroy What You Didn’t Know You Needed

Despite the intention to improve efficiency and communication, I frequently see well-meaning programs backfire by inadvertently destroying these informal “mycelium” networks. A common hazard are programs designed to standardize or formalize process, tools, and/or reporting. Another “extinction-level-event” for these networks are departmental re-orgs.

All too often, we lose this important organizational immune system as collateral damage to these type of initiatives and the result is the opposite of what we were trying to accomplish in the first place:

• More silos and the rise of an us-vs.-them culture
• Longer, and more frequent project delays
• The organization becomes less intelligent overall, and is worse at solving problems and adapting to new circumstances

It’s easy to see that when we are unaware of critical elements of a system and their function, taking actions that damage—rather than enhance—the system as a whole is unavoidable. When we do stumble into these traps, the result is a lot of wasted time and energy trying to figure out what went wrong and why everything feels so much harder now than it did a year ago. The solution? Usually another initiative designed to fix things, often led by someone new to the organization (an outside consultant or a new leader). But what is still missing is a deep understanding of the problem and the required conditions for the symptoms to subside. Anyone want to take a bet on how likely that project is to succeed on its intended outcomes?

All of this needn’t mean that you must shy away from re-orgs or programs to define and enforce standards. These are unavoidable in our industry. The good news is, even a little bit more attentiveness on the impact of changes on culture and informal communication will make a big difference.

In this article, we’ll explore how and why these informal networks show up, why they’re often best left informal rather than formalized, and how you can help cultivate them to ensure they thrive and are able to survive necessary organizational changes.

Why Engineers Go Underground

Engineers are just as varied and different from one another as any other role. But it’s probably accurate to say that most engineers are natural problem-solvers, and they often build informal networks as a way to share solutions, tips, and best practices. These networks become essential because formal documentation is often sparse, outdated, or overly generic, leaving a gap that engineers fill through peer communication.

Another major reason these informal networks exist is because top-down business communication often misses nuance or practical detail. In many cases a project or idea is flawed from the start, but the technical limitations are not known by those getting things kicked off. If you work in an organization where engineers are consulted about feasibility before everyone gets excited about a new idea, then you should count yourself among the lucky few.

On the other hand, it is usually the destiny of many engineering teams, tech leads, and managers to “throw a wet blanket” on the project by pointing out all the reasons why it’ll never succeed if things remain as they are today. After a while though, these folks learn they need to pick their battles and they can’t just openly oppose everything that leadership get excited about.

That’s when it’s important that engineering teams can communicate offline and in venues where it’s safe to not have the answer or a recommended solution already ready. For many, figuring out how to “build the landing gear while flying the plane” is a full-time job. And it is a job often done behind the scenes and requires collaboration and open communication between teams to be successful.

Don't Dig Up the RootsWhen Forcing Transparency Backfires

You might be inclined to tell your teams:

“You need to flag the type of risks and issues that pose an existential threat to the project!”

If, on your teams, you can successfully cultivate this kind of transparent, direct, and accountable culture of communication, that’s great!

Meanwhile, if you’re still reading, then you know it’s not that easy. Demanding open communication and accountability from a team who aren’t already generating it can be like peeling open the petals of a flower before it’s matured sufficiently—It tends not to produce the result you want.

When decisions are even a little bit political, rather than purely rational, it might not be obvious to your engineers how raising a risk does anything but invite unwanted attention, opposition, and scrutiny. Transparency is vital, but forcing visibility through top-down mandates usually destroys trust rather than building it.

You tell them:

“I want to know where I can help you, and when I should intervene. That’s why you need to tell me everything you are working on and how it’s going.”

They hear:

“Great… my boss doesn’t trust me. And now all our dirty laundry is going to get aired out without proper context. I’ll be stuck in endless meetings explaining what the breakdowns are, why they are happening, and why they aren’t necessarily a problem—assuming I could just get back to work, rather than talking about the work.”

Transparency efforts often feel less like genuine support and more like surveillance—exactly what engineers seek to avoid. This may help explain why you may be feeling pushback on your standardization and reporting initiatives.

All hope is not lost though. It is possible to create an transparent culture of collaboration and responsibility. But you will want that to be a long-term goal, rather than something you expect will happen tomorrow, merely because you said so. If you’ve ever tried to put a new habit in place, you’ll know that it takes time and it gets dicey when you rely on willpower alone. Just like that, asking people to do the hard thing unrelentingly probably isn’t a sustainable way to create the culture you want, even if—technically speaking—it is their job to do so.

In the mean time, it might be a good idea to cultivate the informal network of communication while you work on elevating the formal communication and maturity of your team.

How to Cultivate and Strengthen Your Mycelium Network

Whether you’ve acknowledged the benefit of these offline networks and informal communities of practice—or not—but you can see the futility of trying to convert all of it into a formalized process, you may be wondering:

“What can I do to make things better in my org?”

Here are some practical steps for supporting these networks:

(1) Allow for, and create, informal spaces

• Encourage team members to go out to lunch with folks they don’t know well.
• Create a summit and fly people in (and don’t completely fill their calendar with work stuff.)
• Whoever is in charge of conducting retrospectivesask if they would be willing to switch up the format and do something a bit more fun and creative to break up the monotony.
• Generally, encourage and create space for your team to get to know each other and build report without your needing to be there. There are many ways this could look and there isn’t a right way to go about it.

(2) Support cross-functional collaboration

Encourage—but don't micromanage—communities of practice where people exchange knowledge organically. This could also take the form of a book club, bug-bash, or developer show-and-tell session. Keep in mind, once these become overly formal a large part of their value is lost.

(3) Protect safe channels

Teams need safe spaces (like private Slack channels) to ask sensitive questions without fearing judgment or alarm. Slack channels with more than 10 people aren’t safe, psychologically, so encourage teams to keep their team channel just that: a place for the team to communicate with each other. There may be benefits to inviting the team’s boss and a bunch of stakeholders to the team channel, but the trade-off is you create friction on the informal network of communication.

(4) Clarify the WHY

In order for your mycelium network to work for you, they need to be able to think like you when you’re not around. To achieve this, whenever you communicate what we’re doing, ensure that why we’re doing it is communicated as well. It’s probably impossible to over-communicate the why of programs, projects, and pivots. Try to share your authentic view of the situation in a way that’s empowering.

Rather than tell people you think an upcoming change is awesome when in fact you disagree with the change—tell them what you disagree with, but tell them why you are choosing to align anyway. Consistently communicate your organization’s purpose and strategic goals. When people understand the broader context clearly, informal networks naturally align with company strategy rather than resisting it.

Ultimately, the most powerful way to engage with these informal networks is to acknowledge, respect, and cultivate them—not control them. By thoughtfully supporting these hidden systems, you strengthen your organization's health, agility, and long-term resilience.

Conclusion: Embrace the Invisible to Strengthen the Visible

Your organization’s most valuable support system might be hidden in plain sight—quietly connecting, stabilizing, and protecting your team's efforts. Instead of pushing for more visibility at any cost, recognize the importance of these informal engineer networks. By creating environments where they can thrive without fear and building pathways for thoughtful communication, you can transform hidden networks into resilient, transparent systems—without losing the magic that makes them work.

The end-game is to create a culture where the signal from these networks naturally rises to the surface when it matters most. Cultivate trust, and you’ll ensure that your organization’s foundation remains strong, flexible, and ready for whatever comes next.