The Restructure That Rearranges The Same People

The teams have new names, the reporting lines have been redrawn, and the work is being done by the same people in the same order. This happens on a fairly reliable cycle.

Every structure trades one problem for another

Grouping people by specialism produces deep expertise and slow delivery, because anything crossing disciplines requires negotiation between separate managers.

Grouping them by product produces fast delivery and duplicated effort, because each unit builds its own version of things the organisation now has several of.

There is no arrangement without a cost. Reorganising exchanges the current set of complaints for a different set, which will take about eighteen months to become audible.

The pendulum swings on a schedule

Because both structures fail in predictable ways, organisations tend to alternate, centralising until duplication is eliminated and rigidity becomes intolerable, then decentralising again.

Each swing is presented as a correction rather than as a return, and the previous arrangement is described as the problem being solved.

Anyone who has been present for two cycles recognises the destination, which explains the specific quality of the silence in the announcement meeting.

It is the cheapest visible action available

A new leader is expected to act, and structural change is fast to announce, entirely within their authority and immediately legible to everyone above them.

The alternatives, such as improving how work actually moves, take longer, are harder to describe and produce results after the point at which judgment is passed.

So the incentive favours the visible intervention, and the visible intervention is a diagram.

The disruption is real and the measurement is not

Reorganisation costs months of reduced output while relationships reform, priorities are renegotiated and people work out who now decides what.

That cost is spread thinly across everybody and never appears as a line anywhere, while the intended benefits are attributed to the change with considerable confidence.

Since nothing is measured against a counterfactual, a restructure is close to unfalsifiable, which is a useful property for an intervention to have.

The informal network survives it

Work moves through people who know who to ask, built up over years and unrelated to any chart. That network is what absorbs the disruption.

Because it survives, the organisation continues to function, which is frequently read as evidence that the restructure worked.

Repeated reorganisation eventually damages it, as the people holding those connections leave and take the map with them, which is the delayed cost nobody attributes to anything.