Structure follows strategy, or strategy stalls
Every strategy implies work that has to flow across the organisation. If the structure forces that work through long dependency chains, handoffs and committees, progress slows regardless of how good the goals are. Dependencies kill momentum: each one is a queue, a negotiation and a chance to be deprioritised by someone else’s workload.
Designing for progress
- Organise around the strategic outcomes and value streams, not just functional convenience.
- Give the teams that own strategic OKRs the cross-functional capabilities they need, so key results do not stall waiting on other departments.
- Keep coordination mechanisms deliberate: clear decision rights, explicit interfaces between teams, an operating rhythm that surfaces blockers weekly.
- Revisit the design as strategy changes; the structure that got you here was optimised for the old bets.
The briefing works through real re-designs, including what to centralise, what to embed and how to re-draw boundaries without a re-org that consumes the year.
Structure follows strategy, or fights it
Org design is a management system: whatever the boxes were meant to mean, they signal priorities, decide who collaborates by default, and set the transaction cost of every cross-functional effort. A structure designed for last decade's strategy taxes this decade's, invisibly, in coordination overhead nobody itemises.
The methodology connection
The strategy library's rule applies: capabilities flow from the strategy, and structure exists to build must-have capabilities, not to mirror the industry's org charts, the same earn-your-place logic as functional strategy. For the work that matters most, our methodology resources dedicated cross-functional teams around the quarter's strategic bets rather than routing them through the line, because the most important goals deserve first-team attention, not evenings. And every reorganisation should pass the barnacle check first: what is the current structure still rewarding that the strategy no longer wants, the Barnacle Problem in organogram form.