Organisations rarely break all at once. The structure that worked well at 40 people starts to creak at 120. The operating model that made sense when the founders ran everything directly becomes a bottleneck when there are four layers of management. The symptoms appear gradually, and they're often misread.
The most common symptoms and what they usually mean ¶
Slow decisions usually mean unclear ownership: two or more people believe they have authority over the same decision, so it escalates or stalls. Duplicated effort usually means unclear boundaries between teams, often because the org chart was drawn around people rather than functions. High turnover in a specific layer of management usually means that layer has accountability without authority, a structural problem that no amount of management training will fix.
Why the presenting symptom is rarely the root cause ¶
Leadership teams often try to solve structural problems with behavioural interventions: better communication, clearer priorities, more frequent check-ins. These help at the margins but don't address the underlying cause. If two teams are duplicating effort because their charters overlap, asking them to coordinate more closely is a workaround, not a solution. The overlap needs to be resolved structurally, which means someone has to give something up.
The role of growth in structural breakdown ¶
Most structural problems in mid-sized companies are a direct consequence of growth that outpaced the operating model. The company that was built around the founder's direct relationships now has 200 people who have never met the founder. The informal coordination mechanisms that worked at 30 people don't scale. This is not a failure of leadership; it's a predictable consequence of growth, and it has a structural solution.
What a diagnostic process looks like ¶
A useful organisational diagnostic starts with the symptoms but doesn't stop there. It maps the decision rights across the organisation (who decides what, formally and informally), identifies where the formal structure and the informal structure diverge, and traces the specific friction points back to their structural causes. This typically takes three to four weeks of interviews and document review before any design work begins.
Designing the transition, not just the destination ¶
The most common failure in organisational design work is producing a new org chart without a sequenced plan for getting there. The transition is where the risk lives. Which changes can be made immediately? Which need to wait for a natural moment (a departure, a promotion, a new hire)? Which will require difficult conversations that need to be planned carefully? A design that doesn't account for the transition is a design that won't be implemented.
If the symptoms described here sound familiar, the next step is usually a structured conversation about what's actually causing them. We're happy to think through it before any formal engagement begins.