Most of the projects I am currently working on refer to organisational architecture. The more companies I know, the more convinced I am that the real company is not the one showed by its official organisational chart. Organicsations have a life of their own and what really defines them is their talent mix. A company is its people, not its organisational chart. The map is not the territory.
To rethink a thriving organisation, then, instead of thinking about structural design, we must be able to gather the right talent combination. The copy-paste of the structures of successful companies is useless: organisational design is something organic, an intrinsic exercise to execute by the company itself. Maybe you might need the support of an external partner to learn the methodology to do it, but forget about the gurus who affirm they can do this accurate design by themselves: they do not exist. Redesigning is not a task to delegate, but an act that calls for common sense, creativity, courage, humility and curiosity. The starting point is the understanding of how and why the organisation built the structure that now needs to change to survive. Over and over again, I identify the same story in most of the organisations I know.
When a company is born and starts to grow, people working there have common traits: action-oriented, creative, able to deliver results with very few resources, audacious and with only one obsession: to make things happen. When the company starts to succeed and expand, those people, self-motivated by their achievements, keep on giving it all (with all the lights and shadows of what it means). The company knows the success: They have been able to create a new product (tangible or intangible) and they are game changers. The time has come to take a different perspective and change to cruising speed. New tools are introduced and, with them, new profiles to make them work. Those profiles are very different from the ones who made the company reach success. For a while, both profiles coexist, but soon the pioneers leave (because they get bored or because they are invited to do so). The company is already successful and is not seeking adventures anymore. Its retina seizes this very momentum as if it was a picture. From that moment on, unconsciously, the company will do all what it takes to keep things exactly the way they are then (profiles, tools and general way of working) in order to maintain its success. However, the company does not realise that momentum is mainly determined by what happens out there. In other words, the company is not successful thanks to its own merits, but because the economic, social, cultural and commercial scenario is playing a starring role to make the company succeed. Meanwhile the scenario remains unaltered, the company keeps on moving forward without major distress. But, sooner or later, the scenario changes dramatically. The company, installed in the typical inertia of a successful business, absorbed by its tools and storytelling, is totally detached from the real world. When this inertia becomes drift, the alarm is trigged and it is time to take action. The company realises then that its structure is suitable to keep and maintain success, but it’s not suitable to create it. Might tools be sophisticated and expensive, they are unable to think and to reinvent themselves. There is no talent in the house able to start the adventure of re-conquering success because the system itself made this talent redundant. Without this kind of talent there is no survival.
So, when rethinking our organisation, we just need to review the momentum when our company reached success and understand the talent mix which enabled the company to succeed. This will naturally lead us to the natural structure the company should have, never the other way round. In the current scenario, it is worth doing this exercise. Honestly, paying for standard (supposedly customised) organisational designs is not a good idea nowadays.
