Strategy documents tend to be written as if the organisation that will implement them is a neutral instrument. It is not. Every organisation has a structure that was designed for a previous version of its strategy, and that structure shapes what is easy, what is hard, and what is effectively impossible. When the structure and the strategy are misaligned, the strategy loses.
The most common signs of structural misalignment ¶
Decisions that should be straightforward require sign-off from three levels of management. Teams that need to collaborate closely sit in different reporting lines with different incentives. Information that the leadership team needs to make good decisions is held by people who have no mechanism to surface it. These are not management failures. They are structural ones, and they require structural solutions.
Why reorganisations usually fail ¶
Most reorganisations are designed around the org chart rather than around decision rights and information flows. Moving boxes on a chart is easy. Changing who decides what, and who knows what, is harder. Reorganisations that focus on the former without addressing the latter tend to produce a new chart with the same old friction.
Mapping decision rights before redesigning structure ¶
The most useful starting point for an organisational design engagement is not the org chart. It is a map of where decisions actually get made, as opposed to where they are supposed to get made. In most organisations, these two maps look quite different. The gap between them is where the friction lives.
What a redesign process involves ¶
A structured organisational design engagement typically runs eight to twelve weeks. It begins with interviews across levels of the organisation, moves to a mapping phase, and then to a redesign proposal that is tested against the organisation's actual strategic priorities. Implementation support is available but is scoped separately, because the design work and the implementation work require different things from the client.
The question of disruption ¶
Every redesign involves disruption. The question is not whether to disrupt but how much and where. A good organisational design process identifies the parts of the structure that are working and protects them, while addressing the parts that are not. Wholesale reorganisation is rarely necessary and often counterproductive. Targeted changes to decision rights and reporting lines can produce significant improvements with much less disruption than a full restructure.
If your organisation is growing faster than its structure can support, or if a strategy that looked sound on paper is not translating into results, selected past work includes examples of organisational design engagements. A first conversation is always free.