Organisation Design

The Surprisingly Simple Guide to Organisation Design

Please step away from the Org Chart now!

Before you start moving boxes around, there's a more importnant question to answer.

Updated September 2026

“We need to restructure.”

It’s a sentence that tends to make HR people reach for an organisation chart. Before long, somebody has opened PowerPoint. Boxes are moving. Reporting lines are changing. One department has mysteriously acquired the word “Strategic” and somebody who was a Head of Something on Tuesday is now apparently a Director of Something Else.

Everyone stands back and admires the new structure. They applaud, they cheer. There is just one small problem.

Nobody has quite established what problem it was supposed to solve.

Organisation design isn't an organisation chart

An org chart is super useful. It tells you who reports to whom and gives you something to stare at thoughtfully during meetings. But it isn't organisation design. Proper organisation design starts with what the business is trying to achieve and works backwards from there.

·      What needs to happen for the strategy to succeed?

·      What work actually needs doing?

·      What capabilities do you need?

·      Where should decisions be made?

·      How should work flow between teams?

·      Where does accountability sit?

·      What needs to be consistent and what needs to be flexible?

Only then do you get to the boxes.

Yes, there is quite a lot of science behind it

There are entire books devoted to it. There are models too; The McKinsey 7-S model, Galbraith's Star Model, Burke-Litwin and plenty of others. Every large management consultancy will have their own slide deck showing how they can slash headcount, reduce costs and deliver double the productivity. Caution advised…Caveat emptor.

They look at different combinations of strategy, structure, people, processes, systems, skills, culture, rewards and ways of working.

They're useful. We use them. We’re just not convinced your leadership team particularly wants a 200-slide presentation explaining them. What they really need to understand is this:

An organisation is a system. Change one part and something else will usually move with it.

Combine two teams and you've changed more than reporting lines. You've potentially changed accountabilities, workloads, decision-making, management spans, career paths, capability requirements, relationships, processes and how work gets done. Quite a lot really.

Which is why simply drawing the new structure and announcing it on Monday rarely ends terribly well. (Actually it usually just ends terribly)

Start with the outcome

Before designing anything, we like to ask a much less sophisticated question:

What are we trying to make better here?

Perhaps you want to grow, reduce costs, make decisions faster, improve customer service, introduce new technology, remove duplication, create clearer accountability, give managers sensible spans of control. Or perhaps the business has simply grown and the structure that worked brilliantly with 30 people is becoming increasingly bizarre with 130.

All perfectly reasonable. But they are different problems. And different problems require different designs.

There isn't a universally brilliant organisation structure waiting to be discovered. There is only a structure that is better suited to what your business needs to do next.

Resist the temptation to design around people

This is one of the harder bits....Because organisations contain people. People we like, people who have been there forever, people we don't want to lose. People with impressive job titles, people who are excellent at 80% of a role but perhaps not the 20% we're going to need in future.

So it's very easy to start designing around the people you've already got.

“Sarah could fit in there.”

“Joe probably needs to report to Katia.”

“We can't move Payroll because…”

Stop.

First design the work. Then think about the capabilities needed to do it. Then think about the people.

That doesn't mean treating people as interchangeable boxes on a spreadsheet. Quite the opposite. It means giving yourself a much better chance of creating meaningful roles that people can actually succeed in.

And don't forget how the thing is supposed to work

This is the bit that org charts are particularly bad at. They show hierarchy but they don't show how anything actually gets done.

Imagine you've created three beautifully logical functions. Marvellous. But wait, now a customer has a problem involving all three.

Who owns it? Who makes the decision? How does information move between them? What happens when they disagree?

If the answer is “they'll work it out”, you haven't quite finished the organisation design.

You've just finished the pretty picture.

Digital People HR says…

Good organisation design can be sophisticated. Behind the scenes, we might look at strategy, capabilities, roles, spans and layers, decision rights, processes, interfaces, systems, culture, cost and workforce data. We might use established organisation design models to make sure we're asking the right questions.

You don't necessarily need to know any of that.

You need to know what you're trying to achieve. Our job is to help turn that into an organisation that can actually deliver it. And sometimes the answer won't be a restructure at all. It might be clearer accountability, a better process, different capability or better management… Or simply finally making a decision everyone has been politely avoiding since last February. That's the point of good org design.

Don't start with the boxes. Start with the business.

Thinking about a restructure?

Before you start moving names around PowerPoint, get in touch.

We can help you work out what you're actually trying to fix — and then design the organisation around that.

And of course, we’ll still do you an awesome slide deck at the end.