I have watched a fair number of reorganisations up close, and I have come to think most of them are answering a question nobody asked, while a question everybody could name goes unanswered for another two quarters.
The tell is consistent. Ask what problem the new structure solves and you get a description of the new structure. Ask what will be true in a year that is not true now, and the answers turn into adjectives — closer to the customer, more accountable, less siloed. Ask which specific decision was blocked by the old chart and is now unblocked, and the room usually cannot produce one.
The unmade decision has a name, and everyone knows it
Underneath almost every reorg I have seen there is a concrete choice sitting untouched. A product line that should be shut down. An executive who is not up to the role. Two teams doing the same work where one should be told to stop. A market the company entered badly and should leave.
These are all decisions with a name attached, and that is exactly what makes them hard. Shutting the product means telling the person who built it. Removing the executive means admitting the hire was wrong, usually to the person who made it. So instead the boxes move, the product ends up reporting somewhere new, the executive receives a differently-shaped remit, and the organisation buys two quarters in which nobody has to say anything unkind out loud.
The cost of that purchase is high and it is paid by people who had no part in the decision. Everyone spends a month working out who they report to, relationships that took years are severed, and institutional knowledge walks out because someone senior did not fancy their new manager. Meanwhile the actual work slows to roughly half speed, and the slowdown is attributed to transition rather than to the thing that caused it.
There is a version of this I have no quarrel with. Structures genuinely do go stale — a company that tripled in size on a chart drawn for its old shape has a real problem, and so does one where the span of control was stretched past what any manager can hold. Those reorgs are recognisable because they are narrow, they name the constraint, and they are usually smaller than the ones announced with a deck.
The pattern I distrust is the sweeping one, announced with new language, that reaches every part of the business including the parts that were working. That is not a structural fix. It is the pilot that succeeded and will never ship in another costume — motion produced in place of a decision, and legible as progress to anyone reading the summary rather than watching the work.
So the question I would put to any executive about to announce one is short. Name the decision you are not making. If you can name it, make it, and you may well find the structure is fine. If you genuinely cannot name one, the reorg may be the real thing — and in twenty years I have not often found that to be the case.
Topics opinionmanagementleadership
