Organisation design that makes the whole organisation work as one

Who we usually work with

• Owners and managing directors of growing businesses whose structure grew up around the founders and first hires, and now creaks under a larger team.
• Chief executives and chief operating officers of larger organisations, including regulated sectors, facing a new strategy, a merger, expansion or sustained cost pressure.
• Heads of people and HR directors asked to restructure, who want the change grounded in how work actually gets done, not just a new chart.

When the structure starts to hold you back

The signs differ with size, but the cause is usually the same: the structure was designed for a different organisation from the one you now run.

In a growing business

• Most decisions still route through one or two people.
• Roles have blurred, and good people are quietly doing three jobs.
• You keep hiring to fix problems that are really design problems.

In a larger organisation

• Duplicated teams after growth or an acquisition, each with its own way of working.
• Decisions that bounce between committees and come back unchanged.
• Cross-functional processes that stop and start because each department works at a different speed.
• Restructures every few years that change the chart but not the work.

What the work covers

• Current-state review of structure, layers, spans of control, roles and how decisions are really made.
• Operating model design: how capabilities, functions, locations and partners fit together to deliver the strategy.
• Role design and accountabilities, so nothing important falls between two roles.
• Decision rights: who proposes, who decides, who must be consulted.
• Hand-offs between teams and between actors: people, automation and AI increasingly share the same process, and each hand-off is a design choice.
• Fractional leadership where you need senior capability to see the change through.

How we approach it

We treat your organisation as a system of levers. Structure is one; so are roles, decision rights, reward, leadership, culture and climate, and the technology people use. What matters is the configuration: a well-designed structure can be undone by decision rights that pull the other way, so we look at the levers together.

We start with the work, not the boxes. Most of the time lost in organisations sits in the joins between functions, where nobody owns the question of how the work should be done.

There is no perfect structure, only a performance envelope in which the organisation performs sustainably. We design for that range and build in the means to recalibrate, so the next restructure is an adjustment rather than an upheaval.

Our advisory work usually starts with an organisation maturity audit against our Organisation Maturity Model. Organisation and job design, governance design and culture sit in its domain called enable organisational effectiveness.

Where technology comes in

Operating models now include more than people. Once the work is designed, our Technology practice can automate the steps where automation is the right actor. You can use the organisation design work entirely on its own; the technology is there when the design calls for it.