The Ground Knows Where You Want to Go

POSTED ON June 20, 2025

by Matt Miner

If you've ever walked across a park and noticed a dirt trail cutting diagonally across a manicured lawn, you've seen what urban planners call a desire path. It's the evidence of collective human intuition. Where people actually want to go, not where they’re told to go.

At Entalas, we believe that same principle applies to organizations. Whether in onboarding, knowledge management, or decision making, employees create their own “paths” every day. Who they ask for help, where they dig for documents, which Slack channels become active, and which tools quietly fall out of use. These desire paths are precious. But most companies aren't tracking them. That’s a missed opportunity.

The Hidden Architecture of Work

Corporate systems are often designed top-down: policies, documentation repositories, org charts. But in reality, the real knowledge flows at the ground-level; organic, lateral, and emergent. The onboarding doc says “ask your manager,” but new hires turn to the teammate who explains things without jargon. The project tracker lives in a prescribed tool, but teams drift back to the Notion page or Slack channel someone quietly updated with the real status.

These organic routes aren’t inefficiencies. They’re intelligence.

The Problem? They're invisible.

Desire paths in organizations aren’t physical. They live in chat threads, meeting notes, whispered Slack messages, and tool usage patterns. They’re scattered. They're ephemeral. And worse, companies don’t have mechanisms in place to learn from them - let alone amplify them for others.

The result? Every new hire hacks their own route through the jungle. Every project re-invents basic workflows. Institutional knowledge stays trapped in the heads of “go-to people” whose role as informal guide is invisible on any org chart.

It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way

At Entalas, we’re building Wayfinder - a platform that gently surfaces these invisible trails. Not by surveillance or invasive tracking, but by pattern recognition and trust. Positive feedback loops that spotlight the way things work rather than the way they’re documented.

Imagine if your team could see:

• Which onboarding links are actually clicked? Or which ones are out of date and need to be culled?

• Which internal docs are most shared by peers?

• Who gets asked the same question three times a week (and maybe should get credit for being the unofficial guru)?

• When a service has an interruption, what are the right links to the right dashboards and logs?

Privacy Isn’t an Obstacle - It’s a Design Principle

We don’t want to monitor employees. We want to listen to the shape of their movement, and reflect it back in ways that help everyone. Wayfinder works when you want it to, and it ignores everything else.

The Future is User-Shaped

Desire paths reveal something radical: employees are already designing your company's organizational system. The only question is whether you’re listening.

At Entalas, we’re building tools to make those patterns visible. Not with dashboards cluttered by metrics that don’t matter, but with elegant maps of emergent behavior. Give everyone the opportunity to walk more confidently in well-worn shoes.