Reorgs and Crash Diets: What They Have in Common

By |May 6th, 2014|Categories: Strategy|Tags: , , , |Comments Off on Reorgs and Crash Diets: What They Have in Common

TransAccel is often asked to help organizations figure out where they should be three to five years from now, and we immediately set about assessing where they are, thinking about strategies, and devising transition plans. But here’s the thing: Very often the client wants to start with a structural reorganization.

Now the truth is if you start with a structural reorganization, it’s like going on a crash diet. Everybody knows the naughty non-foods you can cut out, just like everybody knows which low-performers could be eliminated or how work could be shuffled around to immediate effect. So you lose a few pounds by cutting out “empty calories” and get rid of some of the obvious encumbrances at work—a quick fix that’s very gratifying. But what happens after that? Usually all the weight comes right back (and then some) and the reorganization doesn’t really change a thing—everything reverts to the way it was. Why? Because the underlying behaviors are still the same.

A diet that relies on simply cutting calories is bound to plateau or fail because there’s considerably more to maintaining a healthy weight and body that includes exercise, eating complex carbohydrates, drinking plenty of water and getting plenty of rest. It is a lifestyle change. Likewise, restructuring an organization is much more complex than focusing solely on getting rid of problematic players or reshuffling the team. The key to sustainable organizational change is to look at the organization holistically and to define the operating model and its various components: roles, processes, governance, sourcing, services, and then structure, and how these are interconnected and measured. Are the right people in the right roles? Are there processes that could be simplified, platforms that could be shared? What
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