Organisation & Change

Organisation & Change
Designing the structures, roles, and rhythms that let scaling actually happen

Organisation & Change
Disciplines

An organisation is a set of decisions about how work moves. Who decides what, how information flows, what gets escalated.

As a company grows, those decisions were always made in an earlier state of the business. They served the company that was, and stop serving the company that is.

1 Reading the organisation

‘‘Executives spend more than a third of their time making decisions. Most describe that time as ineffective.’’

Reading an organisation starts with how it operates day to day. How decisions actually get made and where they get stuck, how information moves between teams, how bottlenecks get surfaced and resolved. The formal structure says one thing about all this. People often do something different when the formal structure doesn't match the work.
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Friction in scaling organisations usually lives in the seams between teams and roles rather than in the people occupying them. Middle managers carry most of the strain. They translate strategy downward and aggregate information upward, sometimes without the authority or the time to do either well.
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A few patterns surface quickly. Most middle managers spend under a quarter of their time on developing people and forming team direction. About two in five describe themselves as overworked. Roughly half of employees can clearly state what's expected of them in their role. The friction that scaling leaders feel as slowed decisions sits inside these numbers.

Our work in practice

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Ongoing

Digital transformation in Medtech

04-03-2026

Enterprise information architecture

Ongoing

Salesforce transformation program

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‘‘Companies in the top quartile of organisational health deliver around three times the shareholder returns of those in the bottom quartile.’’

Most of the engagement is spent building a new operating model. The structure that maps roles to outcomes. The decision rights that establish who calls what and who needs to be consulted before they do. The cadences that govern how the organisation meets itself, how progress gets surfaced, how disagreement gets aired. These artefacts can feel administrative. In practice they are what a strategy runs on.
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The design itself is a sequence of trade-offs; speed against alignment. Local autonomy against consistency. Specialisation against cross-functional fluency. The right balance depends on where the organisation is in its growth, what its strategy demands, what its current capability allows. Only one in five organisations describes itself as excellent at making decisions, and those that do are roughly twice as likely to deliver above-target returns on the major ones. The decision rights inside the operating model are what determines which group an organisation joins.
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The model doesn't sit still after launch. Roles drift, decision rights blur as new pressures arrive, cadences fall out of step with what the work actually requires. Part of the engagement is establishing how those drifts get caught and corrected before they accumulate into a second restructure two years later.

2 Designing the shift

Most of our work runs on a five-stage model: growth analysis and planning at the start, then an extended programme across structures, processes, technology, and new ways of working. Organisation & Change runs through every stage, densest in the middle when the operating model takes shape inside the organisation.

‘‘The average employee absorbed ten enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016. Willingness to support them collapsed from 74% to 43%.’’

Most change programmes lose their value in the gap between a launch date and the lived reality that follows. A design ships, but the operating model arrives in the organisation across months. Teams revert to old patterns, decision rights informally re-route to who they used to belong to, new cadences fade into old ones. The design is the early step. Adoption is most of the work.

The first ninety days set the trajectory. What gets reinforced, what's allowed to slip, what gets explicitly addressed when it surfaces. Among employees who've been through a workplace transformation, only about one in five rates the experience as good. The rhythm established in the early months determines whether the new design becomes how the organisation actually works, or stays a parallel layer above it.

3 Adoption