Too often, business structure is mistaken for an organisational diagram: rectangles, reporting lines, and a faint hope that it’ll all make sense in practice. But in reality, structure should be  architecture. It shapes how information flows, how decisions are made, how accountability forms—or evades. And supports the company culture in terms of ensuring common values.

In one of my early advisory roles with a transnational medical technology company, I encountered a classic failure: a brilliant strategy, backed by a world-class design and development team, stuck in molasses. Why? Their structure was a bureaucratic labyrinth. Marketing couldn’t move without sign-off from medical-legal, which reported through to high-risk constructs of two business units, which themselves had no operational mandate.

The result? Paralysis. Not because people weren’t talented—but because they were trapped in the plumbing of the place.

A company says it wants agility, but keeps seven gate reviews in product development two of which have no real mandate. Says it values collaboration, but builds incentive systems around individual KPIs and sometimes internal political corporate players.. These are not cultural contradictions. They are structural betrayals.

Organisational structure is either scaffolding or shackles. But it never remains neutral.

The best leaders don’t just inherit it. A company structure. They interrogate it. They redesign it as often as necessary. Because if you don’t shape your structure to serve your future, it will shape your future to repeat the past.

In systems thinking, organisational structure defines flow by intentional architecture. Of decisions, of effort, of authority and responsibility. And when the structure is misaligned with the function, everything clogs. The more components you add without redesigning the system, the worse it gets.

Growth doesn’t just add volume. It increases pressure. If the system can’t handle the load, poorly designed structure—not culture—is your real problem.

Smart Questions to think about:

Prompt 1: What parts of your current organisational structure would no longer make sense if your goal were resilience over the next 10–15 years, not just the next year?

Prompt 2: How can you redesign flow, authority, and feedback to match function, rather than history?