# Designing the organisation *When the same problems follow every new hire, the problem is the building, not the tenant.* --- You're six months into running a division of about two hundred people. The previous leader left after eighteen months. The one before that lasted a year. Both were competent, both came in with a clear plan, and both hit the same wall: projects stall in the middle layers, customers get inconsistent answers depending on which team they reach, and the senior people spend most of their time in meetings that exist to coordinate work that shouldn't need coordinating. You've been told this is a people problem. The middle managers lack urgency. The team leads don't take ownership. The culture needs resetting. You're starting to suspect it's none of those things. --- You pull the org chart and count the layers between you and the people doing the work. Six. You run a small business unit of two hundred, and there are six reporting levels between the top and the front line. You ask each layer what decisions they make that the layer below couldn't. The answers are vague. "I provide strategic direction." "I ensure alignment." "I handle escalations." When you press on specifics, what emerges is that most of the middle layers spend their time passing information up and translating instructions back down. They review work their reports have already reviewed. They attend meetings to represent their teams in rooms where the actual question could have been answered two levels lower. The woman running one of your operational teams is sharp, experienced, ten years in the industry. Her manager's role, as far as you can tell, is to compile her team's updates into a slightly different format and present them to the next level. He adds a paragraph of commentary. That's his job. He knows it too, and it's made him territorial. When she brings something directly to the leadership meeting, he treats it as a breach of protocol. Not because the information was wrong, but because it skipped him. This pattern repeats across the division. Capable people, doing real work, hemmed in by a layer above them that exists to relay rather than to decide. --- You start tracking decisions. Not the big strategic ones, but the mid-range calls that keep the business running: approving a project scope change, choosing between two vendor options, signing off a hire. For each one, you note who made the decision, who could have made it, and how long it took from request to resolution. The gap between "who made it" and "who could have made it" is, on average, two levels. A team lead with fifteen years of experience waits for her director to approve a vendor switch she's already evaluated, costed, and stress-tested. The director glances at the summary and signs it. He adds no judgement that wasn't already in the document. But without his signature, the work stalls. Where the gap runs the other direction, things break differently. You find a manager who's been put in charge of a three-year platform migration. His previous role involved tasks that ran in weeks. He can't hold the full picture in his head, so he manages by checking on pieces: is this module done, is that integration tested. The project drifts because nobody is thinking about how the pieces connect over the next eighteen months. He's not failing through lack of effort. The work requires a longer planning horizon than the role has ever asked of him. The match between the complexity of the work and the capability of the person doing it matters enormously. Too close and the manager has nothing useful to add. Too far apart and the work outpaces the person's ability to see around corners. --- You dig into the accountability question next. Three teams share responsibility for customer onboarding. Product builds the tools, operations runs the process, and a customer success team handles the relationship. When onboarding goes badly, all three point to each other. Product says the ops team isn't following the workflow. Operations says the tools don't match how customers actually behave. Customer success says both teams ignore their feedback. Nobody is accountable for the outcome, because everybody is. The structure distributes ownership so evenly that it evaporates. You pick it apart further. The operations lead is nominally responsible for onboarding quality, but she can't change the product, can't reassign customer success resources, and can't veto a hire into the onboarding team if the person isn't right. She's accountable for results she has no authority to influence. When things go wrong, she writes a post-mortem explaining what happened. Nobody acts on it because the fixes sit in someone else's domain. Accountability without authority creates a specific kind of dysfunction. The person either overreaches, grabbing informal control to close the gap, or retreats into documentation, producing reports that prove they flagged the problem. Neither response fixes anything. Both are rational adaptations to an impossible structural position. --- You zoom out. The reporting structure, the layers, the shared accountability: none of this was designed by a single person at a single point in time. It accumulated. Someone added a management layer during a growth phase three years ago and never removed it. Shared ownership of onboarding was a compromise between two leaders who couldn't agree on territory. The approval chains were set by a previous CFO who wanted tighter controls after an audit finding. Each decision made sense in isolation. Together, they produced a system that optimises for risk avoidance and internal coordination, not for getting work done. The hiring process, originally designed to find good people quickly, now runs through seven stages because each layer added a step to protect themselves. The monthly reporting pack, designed to give leadership visibility, takes forty hours to compile because each layer adds its own commentary. The system's actual purpose drifted from its intended one long ago. You ask a team lead what behaviour the current structure rewards. She doesn't hesitate: "Not being the one who gets blamed." --- The fix is structural, not motivational. No amount of coaching, culture work, or performance management will overcome a design that fights the people inside it. You start with the layers. Two of the six are relay layers: they pass information but don't make decisions the layer below couldn't make. You remove them. The people in those roles move into positions where the work matches their capability, some into the teams they were overseeing, some into project roles that use their experience. The org chart goes from six levels to four. The effect is immediate and disorienting. Information travels faster because there are fewer handoffs. Decisions that took weeks now take days because the person closest to the problem has the authority to act. The team leads who were hemmed in by a manager above them are suddenly visible to leadership, and the quality of what reaches you improves because it hasn't been filtered through two layers of summarisation. You redraw accountability for onboarding. One person owns it. She has the authority to assign resources across the three teams involved, to approve or reject hires into onboarding roles, and to change the process without convening a committee. Product and customer success contribute, but the buck stops with her. Within two months, onboarding time drops by a third. Not because the people changed. Because one person can now see the whole picture and act on it. --- The harder part is resisting the pull back to the old shape. Organisations grow layers the way old houses grow extensions: one room at a time, each solving a local problem, until the layout makes no sense. A new compliance requirement triggers a new approval step. A difficult interpersonal dynamic gets solved by inserting a layer between two people. Growth adds headcount and someone suggests a new management tier to keep spans manageable. [[Systemantics|Gall]] observed that systems develop purposes of their own the moment they come into being. Your reporting pack exists to be compiled. Your approval chain exists to be followed. The original reason is long forgotten, but the system persists because removing it feels riskier than maintaining it. You have to design against this tendency deliberately, knowing it will reassert itself every quarter. [[Requisite Organization|Jaques]] spent decades studying what makes layers legitimate: each one should operate at a different level of complexity, working on problems the layer below can't yet see, over time horizons the layer below isn't managing. When a layer doesn't meet that test, it becomes what you found, a relay station that slows everything down. [[The Fifth Discipline|Senge]] would frame it more broadly: structure influences behaviour, and people placed in the same system tend to produce similar results regardless of their individual qualities. Deming put a number on it: 94% of problems come from the system, not the workers. Your three predecessors weren't inadequate. They were inside a structure that produced the same failures no matter who sat in the chair. --- A year later, you've stopped asking whether your people are good enough. They were always good enough. You're asking different questions instead. When something goes wrong, is this a people problem or a structure problem? When different people in the same role keep hitting the same wall, the answer is almost always structure. Where does accountability actually sit, and can the person who holds it influence the outcome? If they can't, either give them authority or move the accountability to someone who has it. And what is the structure actually optimising for? Not the version on the strategy slide, but the behaviour it rewards day to day. Three leaders came and went before you. Each one tried harder, pushed more, held people to account more visibly. The building was the problem the whole time. The people just lived in it. ---