In nearly every major strategic model— McKinsey & Company 7S, Weisbord’s Six-Box Model, Burke-Litwin, the Star Model, and Leavitt’s Diamond—structure is treated as a foundational element. And for good reason. The way a company is organized affects everything including accountability, operational effectiveness, speed, innovation and culture.
Yet in today’s corporate landscape, organizational design has become a lost discipline. It’s too often treated as an afterthought, a reactive exercise leveraged only for cost cutting, or worse—a performative box-check before announcing the next reorg.
When companies treat organization structure like a variable instead of a foundation, they invite instability. Teams can’t focus. Decision rights blur. Priorities drift. Repeated restructuring sends a message: nothing is settled. If your structure keeps shifting in response to trends or personalities, your company isn’t evolving—it’s eroding.
Organization design must be adaptive, but it can’t be arbitrary. When structure becomes fluid while strategy demands stability, execution falls apart.
Designing around star performers, specific personnel situations, legacy leaders, or whatever is disproportionately trending this year (CX, AI, ESG, Metaverse) may buy temporary gratification, but it won’t build long-term clarity or capability. When companies reorganize to accommodate personalities or hot topics, they often hardwire confusion into the system. It becomes unclear who owns what, who decides, and how success is measured.
Structure should serve strategy, not individuals or trends.
Let’s be honest: many reorgs are budget exercises disguised as strategy. Roles are collapsed, layers removed, and headcount reduced—but rarely is the underlying structure redesigned with intention. That’s not design. That’s just downsizing.
Cutting cost without designing for capability leads to brittle organizations. And once markets rebound, those same companies find themselves scrambling to rebuild what they dismantled.
Far too many companies redesign their organizations with little more than gut feel and PowerPoint. There’s rarely a consistent logic applied—no guiding criteria (less indiscriminate spans and layers mandates), no cross-departmental modeling, no stress testing of decision rights. Structural design should be just as rigorous as financial modeling, product roadmapping, or customer segmentation.
If we want performance, speed, operational effectiveness, and cultural clarity, we must restore organizational design to its rightful place: as a deliberate, strategic discipline. That means:
If we don’t reclaim the art and science of org design, we’ll keep wondering why our strategies don’t stick, our transformations stall, and our employees are burned out and confused.
The answer isn’t hidden. It’s the structure. It always has been.
