Organisational Design

This is for owners and managing directors of manufacturing businesses where the structure has stopped fitting the company. The symptoms are familiar: everything escalates to one or two people, nobody is sure who owns a recurring problem, two functions blame each other for the same failure, and the leadership team spends its week on decisions that should have been made two levels down. The work is redesigning who decides what, and making the structure support that rather than fight it.

It is not a reorganisation chart exercise. Boxes and lines are the output, not the point.

Where the structure is actually failing

We start by looking at how decisions really get made rather than how the organogram says they do — talking to people at several levels, sitting in on the meetings that matter, and following a few live problems through the business to see where they stall. What typically comes out:

• Accountability that stops short of authority — someone owns a target but cannot change the things that drive it
• Shared ownership that means no ownership — quality, delivery or cost sitting with "everyone", so it sits with no one
• Spans of control that are wrong in both directions — supervisors with forty reports, and layers that exist mainly to pass information upward
• Escalation as the default — decisions routed up because the criteria for making them locally were never written down
• Roles defined by the person in them rather than by what the business needs — a serious problem the day that person leaves

Designing the accountability framework

The core of the work is making accountability explicit and matching it with the authority to act. For each role that matters, that means being clear on what it owns, what it decides alone, what it decides with others, what it escalates and what it is measured on.

Alongside that we define the operating rhythm — which meetings exist, who attends, what each one decides, and what information it needs in front of it. Most businesses we see have plenty of meetings and few decisions, and getting the rhythm right is often what makes a new structure hold rather than quietly revert.

Measures matter here too. A role with an accountability but no visible measure tends to drift; a measure the role cannot influence breeds cynicism. We work through the small set of numbers each role genuinely owns.

Making it hold

Structures fail in implementation more often than in design. People revert to old escalation habits, leaders take back decisions they have delegated, and within six months the chart on the wall describes something that is no longer true.

Anna Lavender-Moore leads this side of the practice. Her MSc in Organisational & Business Psychology and her time as an Operational Excellence Manager at Moog mean the design accounts for how people behave under pressure, not just how it reads on paper. In practice that means working with the leadership team on what they need to stop doing, and building in a point to review what is and is not holding.

Where structure problems are entangled with culture or values — and they often are — we deal with both, because redesigning reporting lines rarely fixes a business where nobody feels safe raising a problem.

Engagements are scoped to results, not retainers.

Frequently asked questions

Does this mean redundancies?

Not inherently, and it is not the aim. Most of what we find is misallocated decision rights and unclear ownership rather than too many people. Where the review does raise questions about headcount, those are your decisions to make with proper employment advice.

How big does a business need to be for this to be worth doing?

It tends to become pressing somewhere between thirty and a few hundred people, when informal coordination stops scaling and the MD becomes the bottleneck. Smaller businesses can get value from the decision-rights work without a formal restructure.

How involved does my leadership team need to be?

Closely. The design has to be one they will actually operate, and the parts that change their own habits are the parts most likely to slip. We would expect structured time with them through the engagement rather than presenting a finished answer at the end.