Restructuring Has Stopped Working — Here's What Replaces It
The reflex when things feel too complex is to redraw the org chart. It rarely works — and the reason has less to do with design than with nerve.
Ask most leaders whether their organisation is too complex and around two-thirds will say yes. Ask what they did about it last time, and the answer is almost always the same: they redrew the org chart. New boxes, new reporting lines, a reorganisation announced with confidence — and, a year later, the same friction in a slightly different shape.
The data is unforgiving. Fewer than a quarter of operating-model redesigns deliver sustained performance improvement, and clarity on strategic priorities collapses from 56% in the C-suite to 27% by middle management. Restructuring keeps promising simplicity and keeps failing to deliver it, because the problem was never the chart. It's how work actually moves through it — the decisions, approvals and hand-offs that sit between a plan and its execution.
Two organisations show the alternative. Bayer, a 160-year-old company, dismantled its approval chain — cutting management layers from twelve or thirteen down to five to seven and pushing 95% of decisions to the team doing the work. And FK Bodø/Glimt, a club from a fishing town north of the Arctic Circle, beat Manchester City, Atlético and Inter by out-simplifying opponents it could never out-recruit — seven shots to Inter's thirty.
What both examples reveal is uncomfortable: staying complex is rarely a design failure. It's a courage failure. Real simplicity isn't what's left after you design well — it's what's left after someone with authority decides who doesn't get minutes, and lives with being disliked for it. That's the argument at the heart of Principle 5 of The Winning System.
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