--- title: "Navigating your organisation chart" description: "Explore organisation draws every circle and role in your organisation on one canvas. Switch between three views, zoom and pan, and open any circle or role from the chart." category: structure-governance section: chart-and-circles type: Tutorial lastUpdated: 2026-08-26 locale: en canonical: https://support.talkspirit.com/en/structure-governance/how-to-navigate-your-chart --- # Navigating your organisation chart ## Navigating your organisation chart Your organisation chart is on **Explore organisation**, the first entry under **My organisation** in the Structure panel. It draws every circle and every role in your organisation on a single canvas, and you can open any of them from there without leaving the page. One note on wording. Your organisation can rename circle, role, sub-circle, parent circle, purpose, domain, accountability and policy under Administration > Terminology, so if your organisation calls a circle a squad, read "squad" throughout. The defaults are used here. ## What is on the page? The chart fills the canvas, and four things sit around it: - **Top left**: the view buttons. - **Top right**: **Filter**, **Highlight** and a search box. - **Bottom left**: the name and purpose of the circle or role you are on, above a breadcrumb showing where it sits in the organisation. - **Bottom right**: the navigation lock, **Fit to view**, zoom, and a minimap. The rest of the Structure panel is worth knowing, because the chart is not the only way in. Under **My organisation** you also get the **Circles & roles directory**, which lists the same tree as a searchable table, plus **Proposals**, **Working agreements** and **Timetravel**. Below that, **My circles & roles** is a shortcut tree of the circles you belong to. ## How do I switch views? Three views show the same structure in different shapes. Click a button at the top left to switch. Your choice is remembered in your browser, so the page reopens on the view you used last. - **Circles & roles** draws the organisation as nested bubbles: circles inside circles, with roles as solid discs inside them. It is the shape most people mean by "the chart", and it is the one the sections below describe unless stated otherwise. - **Hierarchy** draws a classic top-down chart of cards, one card per circle or role. - **Network** lays circles and roles out as a network of connections. An administrator decides which views exist and which one members see first, so you may find fewer than three buttons. ![The Explore organisation page in the Hierarchy view, showing the organisation as a tree of circle cards, with the view buttons outlined at the top left and the expand, collapse, layout and zoom controls outlined at the bottom right](/images/structure-governance/how-to-navigate-your-chart/01-hierarchy-view-and-controls.png) The Hierarchy view opens partly folded. Use the small **+** and **-** on a card to open or close that branch, **Expand all** and **Collapse all** to do the whole tree at once, and the button beside them to switch between a vertical and a horizontal tree. ## How do I move around? In **Circles & roles**, the canvas behaves like a map: - **Drag** it to pan, and **scroll** to zoom. - Use **Zoom in**, **Zoom out** and **Fit to view** in the bottom-right corner. Fit to view returns you to the whole organisation. - Drag inside the **minimap** to jump elsewhere. The round button on its corner hides it, and a map button then appears in the rail to bring it back. - **Lock navigation** freezes the canvas, so a stray scroll cannot move it while you read. ![The chart navigation controls in the bottom-right corner: a padlock for navigation lock, a fit-to-view button, a plus and minus zoom pill, and the minimap showing the whole organisation as small discs](/images/structure-governance/how-to-navigate-your-chart/02-navigation-controls-and-minimap.png) With the chart itself focused, the arrow keys pan, `+` and `-` zoom, `0` fits the whole organisation back in view, and `Tab` steps through the nodes circle by circle. `Ctrl+Shift+G` (`Cmd+Shift+G` on a Mac) jumps to the search box. Talkspirit remembers where you left the chart in your browser, so returning to **Explore organisation** puts you back where you were rather than at the top. There is one thing the chart does not do: you cannot cut it down to a single branch. Zooming changes what you are looking at, not what the page holds, and the breadcrumb at the bottom left moves the camera rather than re-rooting the tree. ## What can I open from a node? Circles and roles reveal more detail as you zoom. A circle carries its name, and once it is large enough you see the roles and sub-circles inside it. A role carries its name and, below it, small stacked avatars of the people who fill it. A circle that has shrunk too small to read is drawn as a single filled disc, and it opens up again as you zoom in. Click a circle or a role. The chart centres on it and its details open in a panel beside the canvas: purpose, domains, accountabilities, policies, then a **Composition** tab listing the roles inside it, who holds each one, and its sub-circles. A role nobody holds reads **Vacant**, and a role that your organisation has set as a main role carries a **Core** chip. ![The Services circle open as a side panel, showing its purpose, empty Domains and Accountabilities, a Policies section, and a Composition tab listing three roles with their holders and one sub-circle](/images/structure-governance/how-to-navigate-your-chart/03-circle-panel-from-chart.png) From the panel header you can widen it to the full page, and once a circle or role is open the address in your browser points at it. Copy that link and a colleague lands on the same circle. ## How do I narrow down what I am looking at? Three controls sit at the top right, and two of them have their own article: - The **search** box dims every role that does not match what you type and leaves the matches in colour. It matches the names of circles and roles, and the names of the people who fill them. See [Using the chart search in Talkspirit](/structure-governance/how-to-use-the-chart-search). - **Filter** offers quick filters such as **My roles** and **My circles**, and, under **All filters**, filters on a member, a role, a circle, activity or full time equivalent. - **Highlight** lists the saved views your organisation has built, so one click can colour whole categories of role at once. Nothing is highlighted until you pick a view, and if nobody has made one yet the list reads **No views**. See [Managing chart custom views](/structure-governance/how-to-manage-chart-custom-views). ## Who can see the chart, and is anything hidden? Everyone who can open the Structure module sees the whole chart. There is nothing to buy for this: the chart, its three views and all of the navigation above come with Structure itself, and the Holacracy add-on changes nothing here. **A private circle is still on the chart.** Circle privacy restricts a circle's operations and its documents, not its existence, so a member who is not in the circle still sees the circle, its position and its roles. What they lose is access to its meeting reports, projects, goals, checklists and metrics, and to its attachments and working agreements. See [Setting my circle to private](/structure-governance/how-do-i-set-my-circle-private). Two things an administrator sets for everyone, from **Structure settings > Visualisation**: which views are enabled and which is the default, and whether member avatars are drawn on chart nodes at all. Administrators may also see an **Architect mode** button beside the page title. That is a separate way of working, for editing the structure directly instead of through a proposal, and it is covered in [Adding a role or a circle](/structure-governance/how-to-add-a-role-or-a-circle). ## What's Next? - [Managing chart custom views](/structure-governance/how-to-manage-chart-custom-views) - [Using the chart search in Talkspirit](/structure-governance/how-to-use-the-chart-search) - [Managing chart settings in Talkspirit](/structure-governance/managing-chart-settings) - [Circles in Talkspirit](/structure-governance/circle-overview) - [Roles in Talkspirit](/structure-governance/role-overview)