Excessively hierarchical organization of information

See Martin Hardee Tufte story: AnswerBook for an account of the problem.

Excessively hierarchical organization of information is sometimes explained by Conway’s Law: “Any organization which designs a system . . . will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” So user guides represent Conway’s Law squared, a system for understanding a system; a PP user’s guide, the Law cubed.

I should have referenced Conway’s Law to my client.