‘‘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.

‘‘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.What comes out is a growth plan. We structure the choices using Playing to Win, the framework developed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley. Five cascading questions: what does winning look like, where will we play, how will we win there, what capabilities must be in place, what management systems are required. The questions are interrelated, and each answer constrains the next.

The framework forces concrete choices. Not "we want to grow in Europe," but which segments, which channels, which propositions, which capabilities the organisation needs to build, sustain, or stop investing in. Nearly two-thirds of executives report that their company carries too many conflicting priorities at once. About half say their organisation has no defined list of strategic priorities at all. The discipline of choosing, and of choosing what not to do, is what separates a plan that holds from a plan that drifts.

Markets shift while transformation is underway, new information surfaces, priorities evolve. The cascading structure of Playing to Win absorbs those shifts without losing coherence. A change in market conditions changes the answer to where we play, which propagates through the rest of the cascade in a way that's traceable rather than chaotic.

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‘‘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.