You Already Have an Organization Design

I am writing this at Prague airport. Shortly I fly to Amsterdam for Org Design Summit, where people from product, engineering, HR and company leadership sit in one shared track and talk about how organizations are built.

When I tell someone I do organization design, the usual follow-up is whether I draw org charts. I don't. The chart comes out of the decisions this piece is about, and then it shapes the product's architecture, the backlog and the culture in turn. A company without a strict hierarchy has those decisions too. In a flat organization the relationships look more like a web than a pyramid, and the questions of who decides what and who may change what apply just the same.

What organization design is

Organization design is the set of decisions about how work gets done in a company:

• who decides what,
• who is responsible for what, and what they may change on their own,
• what gets measured and what gets rewarded,
• how many hands a single request passes through before it reaches a customer.

Every company has these decisions. Most of them started as a fix for some past problem. Something broke once, so an approval step was added. A team was overloaded, so it was split in two, and a coordination meeting appeared between the halves. Each decision made sense on the day it was made. The problem has changed since; the rule stayed.

So a company always has an organization design. Either someone designs it on purpose, or it assembles itself from layers of old fixes.

That is also where most recurring problems come from. When results disappoint, the search for a cause usually stops at how people behave, so the fix lands on people, tools or process. The cause sits one level down: in who decides, who owns what, and what gets measured.

Where you see it in an ordinary week

Take a problem that crosses a single job description. Say, a defect customers have been reporting for three months, where the fix needs changes in two teams and a signature from another department.

One of three things usually happens to it: it gets escalated, it moves from meeting to meeting, or it sits. All three come from the same arrangement. The people who see the problem may not change what produces it. The people who may change it see it only as a line in a report.

A company built this way can run for years. It can only change as fast as the few people allowed to change the rules can manage. Put other people in the same seats and it would work the same way.

Why AI makes it easier to see

AI has made individuals faster. A developer writes a change in an hour; an analyst prepares the material in an afternoon. But measure the time from the moment a request arose to the moment the customer has it, and the number often barely moves. The time goes to waiting: for review, for approval, for the other team, for the meeting where it can be decided.

The organization design created those waits, and the new tool simply showed them. That is why a conference like the one in Amsterdam puts leadership, HR, engineering and product in one track. Where work gets stuck is set by roles, career paths, rewards and team boundaries all at once.

How to work on it in small steps

Practical work on organization design is smaller than a reorganization. A reorg moves people into new boxes and often carries the rules that produce the problem along with them. Small steps look like this:

1. Pick one problem that keeps coming back and walk the path of a single request from where it starts to the customer. Write down every handoff and every wait.
2. Behind each wait, find the rule: who has to approve, who may change it, what is measured. Find out when and why it was introduced, and whether that reason still holds.
3. Change one thing. Move one decision closer to the people doing the work, or remove one handoff. After a few weeks, check whether the request's path got shorter and what new thing showed up.

A test for Monday

Pick a problem you have solved once already that came back. Then ask two questions:

• Who sees it first?
• Who may change what causes it?

If it is the same person or team, the arrangement gives them room to actually solve it. If they are different people, several levels or several handoffs apart, you have found the place worth starting: move the decision about the cause closer to the people who see the problem. You already have an organization design there. From now on, you can design it on purpose.