Designing the company you are becoming

Designing the company you are becoming

Most organisational restructures happen too late. They are a reaction to a crisis: growth has outpaced the org chart, decisions are stuck in committees, and talented people are leaving because they no longer know how to get things done.

The best operators treat org design as a continuous practice, not a one-off event. They regularly ask: does the structure match the work we need to do next? Do the right people have the right decision rights? Does the culture reinforce the behaviours we need?

This article is a short framework for designing the company you are becoming.

Start with the work, not the boxes

Before you redraw the chart, write down the critical work streams for the next 12–18 months. What must the company get better at? Where are the handoffs? Where are the bottlenecks? Structure is a servant of the work, not the other way around.

If you start with names, titles, or reporting lines, you will simply preserve the past. Start with the work and you will see where the organisation is fighting itself.

Decision rights before headcount

Adding people is the most expensive way to fix a decision problem. Too often, senior leaders hire more capacity when the real issue is that nobody knows who decides what.

Make decision rights explicit. For every key activity, define who recommends, who decides, who executes, and who is consulted. This is the fastest way to reduce friction and clarify accountability.

Culture as a design constraint

Org design is not just about roles and teams. It is also about how people behave. The culture you want should be visible in the rituals, the meetings, the metrics, and the promotion criteria.

If you want people to move fast, design for small, autonomous teams. If you want customer obsession, put customer outcomes at the centre of every team’s mandate. If you want collaboration, reward shared results, not individual wins.

Design for the next phase, not the last one

The organisation that got you here is rarely the one that will take you forward. Build for the next phase of scale, even if it feels slightly uncomfortable today. The structures that made you successful at 20 people will not serve you at 200.

Designing the company you are becoming means making choices before you are forced to. It means saying no to some roles, habits, and heroes that made you successful. That is the hard, necessary work of the COO.