Organization Design Principles
Organization Design is deciding on purpose how work, authority and information flow through a company, instead of letting the structure calcify into whatever grew up by accident.
Five boxes run left to right, tracing the path from strategy down to the structure it shapes.
Reach for this when…
- Decisions keep stalling because nobody's sure who actually owns the call.
- You've grown fast and the org chart still reflects who joined first, not what the business needs.
- Two teams are quietly duplicating the same work because nobody redrew the boundaries.
How to run it
- Start from strategy, not from people: what does the work actually require, regardless of who's currently doing it.
- Clarify roles and decision rights - who decides, who's consulted, who just needs to know.
- Design the communication paths deliberately, especially across any new boundaries you create.
- Match resource allocation to the new priorities, not the old ones.
- Build in a way to keep adjusting the structure as circumstances change, rather than treating this as a one-off reorg.
A worked example
Situation. Ana Lucia Morales runs Morales Cafe Export, a mid-sized coffee export business in Antigua, Guatemala, where sourcing and quality control had grown into two teams that both reported to her separately and regularly contradicted each other on supplier decisions.
Applied. She redrew the structure so quality control sat inside the sourcing team with clear decision rights on which farms qualified, and set a weekly fifteen-minute sync instead of routing every disagreement through her.
Result. Supplier disputes that used to take two weeks to resolve started closing in days, and Ana Lucia stopped being the bottleneck for a decision that was never really hers to make.
The catch
Redesigning structure is the easy part on paper and the hard part in practice - people's identities and status are tied up in titles and reporting lines, and a design that's logical on the org chart can still fail because nobody told the informal networks to redraw themselves too. It also tends to solve last year's problem just as this year's problem starts.
If the new org chart doesn't change who actually talks to whom day to day, you've redrawn boxes, not redesigned the organisation.