Throw Out Your Org Chart

This post is the seventh in a series of ten that are currently being featured on LinkedIn in honor of the Crossland Group’s 25th Anniversary.

Clients engaging in strategy implementation often fall short of fully achieving results. I was working with two organizations who had just completed bold strategies in response to shifting trends. In launching into implementation, what struck me was that folks jumped right into pulling out their org charts to figure out where people “sat” before talking about what work people needed to do.

Form follows function. I realized that organizations miss a crucial step in not starting with the work they need to be really good at to effectively implement and sustain their strategy. They get stuck in thinking that an org chart represents org structure and that boxes and arrows on a chart suffice in helping people translate how to make meaning out of a new strategy. This “aha” moment put our team on a path of continuous learning to deeply explore how we redesign and align organizations to fulfill their strategy—and move people away from leading with hierarchical charts and power dynamics that often result in incremental change.

What has evolved for us is a more sophisticated approach to org design, using honeycombs to represent a biological system in nature that depicts how all the elements work together and support each other. It engages all staff members in designing the organization, helps them see the logic of decisions being made (even with the uncertainty that change may bring), and actually transforms the culture in the process. Clients tell us that doing this work has unified leadership teams because of the conversations that emerge when they take a systems view of the organization. Most importantly, it has given clients the tools to continuously translate and adapt strategy on their own as conditions change.

#Crossland25