Before You Redesign Your Organisation, Be Clear About the Problem You’re Trying to Solve
When organisations decide they need to redesign, the conversation often moves quickly to structure: reporting lines, layers, leadership roles, and whether functions should be centralised or decentralised.
These are important considerations. But they are not always the right place to start.
The more important question is:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Good organisation design starts with understanding what is getting in the way of performance and shaping the organisation around what it needs to achieve, rather than focusing on producing a cleaner organisational chart.
Start With the Problem, Not the Boxes
An organisational structure is visible. The underlying causes of poor performance are often less so.
A team may appear too large because accountability is unclear. A leadership role may look overloaded because too many decisions are being escalated. Two functions may seem to overlap because decision rights and handovers have never been clearly defined.
Changing the organisational chart may alter the structure without addressing the underlying issues affecting how the organisation operates.
This is why diagnosis matters.
TMS recently supported a Federal Government Agency through a significant organisational realignment. Rather than starting with the organisational chart, the work began with structured diagnostics to build a shared picture of organisational strengths and constraints, external and system pressures, delivery challenges and capability gaps.
This evidence gave leaders a clearer view of what was getting in the way of performance before decisions were made about what needed to change.
What is the Organisation Telling You?
Before redesign begins, leaders need to understand where friction is occurring and what is causing it. Some of the most common signals include:
1. Duplicated Functions
Duplication often emerges gradually.
Different business areas can build similar capabilities because they do not trust a central function to meet their needs, or because responsibilities between teams have become blurred.
The result can be additional cost, inconsistent processes and uncertainty about who owns what.
In our experience, duplication is often a symptom of a deeper design issue: unclear decision rights, poorly defined responsibilities or uncertainty about how corporate functions and business units are expected to work together.
The key design questions are:
- What each function is there to do?
- Where accountability should sit
- How services should be delivered across the organisation,
rather than simply whether two teams should be combined.
2. Unclear Accountability
When accountability is unclear, work slows down.
Decisions are revisited. More people are drawn into meetings. Issues are escalated because nobody is confident about who has authority to act.
This is often experienced as a structural problem, but changing reporting lines alone may not resolve it.
Effective operating model design needs to clarify not just where roles sit, but how decisions are made, who owns outcomes and where responsibilities begin and end.
Clarity should reduce the need for people to navigate the organisation through relationships and workarounds.
3. Leadership Bottlenecks
In some organisations, too much decision-making travels upwards.
Senior leaders become involved in issues that should be resolved lower in the organisation, while teams wait for approval before moving forward.
The immediate response can be to add another management layer.
But the better diagnostic question is why decisions are being escalated in the first place.
Is authority unclear? Are leaders reluctant to delegate? Are there too many approval points? Do people understand where decisions should sit?
A new layer will not resolve those issues if the underlying cause remains.
4. Too Many Layers
Layers are sometimes treated as a problem in and of themselves. This is not always the case.
The issue can be whether each layer adds value.
Too many layers can slow communication, increase approval points and create distance between decisions and the people closest to the work. Too few can leave leaders with spans of control that make effective leadership difficult.
The goal is to establish the right level of leadership for the complexity of the work.
5. Poor Interfaces Between Teams
Some of the greatest organisational friction occurs between functions rather than within them.
Finance and operations. Strategy and delivery. Corporate functions and business units.
Each function can be working effectively in isolation while the organisation still struggles to deliver across boundaries.
Great organisation design therefore pays close attention to interfaces: where work passes between teams, where decisions are shared and where accountability can become blurred.
These handover points often tell leaders more than the organisational chart does.
6. Capability Gaps
Sometimes the structure is broadly right, but the organisation does not yet have the capability required to make it work.
A new operating model may ask leaders to work across functions, make decisions closer to customers or services, use data differently or take greater accountability.
If the required capability is missing, changing the structure will not create it.
Organisation design needs to consider roles, capability and leadership together.
Structure Should Follow the Work
An effective organisational structure should make it easier for people to deliver the organisation’s priorities.
That means structure needs to be considered alongside decision rights, accountabilities, workflows, governance, capability and ways of working.
An operating model describes how the organisation needs to work in order to deliver its strategy. Structure is one part of that model, not the whole of it.
TMS Consulting takes this broader view of organisational design. Our work with complex organisations consistently shows that structure, reporting lines, decision rights and ways of working can either support delivery or create friction, depending on how clearly they are designed and how effectively they work together.
Diagnose Before You Design
The strongest organisation redesigns begin with evidence about duplication, decision delays, unclear accountability, leadership bottlenecks, poor interfaces and future capability needs.
The task is to understand what is driving those issues before deciding what needs to change.
Only then should leaders start considering changes to structure.
For organisation design consultants, the value lies in helping leaders understand the issues beneath the organisational chart and design an organisation that is better able to deliver.
At TMS Consulting, we work with organisations to examine structure in the context of strategy, operating model, accountability, capability and ways of working.
The goal of organisation design is to help the organisation work better, with structural changes serving that purpose.
Contact TMS Consulting to talk through what’s really driving friction in your organisation before you redesign it.