How is an organisational review different from a restructure?

A restructure is a decision about reporting lines. A review is an examination of whether the work is designed to be done at all — purpose, demand, flow, decision rights and job design — with structure treated as one possible conclusion among several. Some reviews we run end in a structural change; others end in changed decision rights, measures or job design, which is usually cheaper and more durable.

Is it true that seventy per cent of change initiatives fail?

There is no reliable evidence for it. The figure was traced through the change-management literature by Hughes (2011), who found it propagating from citation to citation without a study underneath. Where an origin is offered it is Kotter's 1995 article, which drew on the author's consulting experience rather than a dataset. What we do have is good evidence about which design and process choices predict better outcomes, and that is a more useful body of knowledge.

How long does an organisational review take?

It depends on the size of the organisation and how much evidence already exists. The diagnostic phase is where the time goes, because it is gathered from the work rather than only from interviews with the people who manage it. We scope each engagement individually rather than quoting a standard duration.

What if we have already restructured recently?

Then recent change load is a constraint on what we recommend, not background colour. Cumulative change fatigue is measurable and it reduces the capacity of a workforce to absorb the next change. Sometimes the right advice is a narrower intervention now rather than a comprehensive one the organisation cannot carry.

What should a board ask before commissioning a review?

Six questions: what specific decision or piece of work will be done differently; what evidence says the current arrangement is the cause; what the change will cost, including disruption; what improvement is claimed and how it will be measured; how many changes this workforce has absorbed in the past three years; and who will report the results, to whom, and when. A review that cannot answer these is not ready to be commissioned — whoever is proposing it, including us.

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Organisational review

Structure, roles and capability, examined against what the work actually requires.

What is an organisational review?

An organisational review is an independent examination of how an organisation is arranged to do its work: its purpose, structure, roles, decision rights, capability, workload and performance, tested against what it actually has to deliver. It ends in findings and options, not opinions.

It is commissioned because the work is not getting done — delivery is slow, accountability is unclear, cost is rising, or a strategy has not translated into performance. The brief that follows almost always asks for a new structure. That request is a symptom report rather than a specification, and treating it as the latter is the most common way a review wastes its budget.

Why redrawing the chart usually changes nothing

Structure is the default intervention because it is visible, it can be decided in a room, and it produces an artefact a board can approve. It is also, on the evidence, a weak place to intervene. Meadows ranks structure and rules near the low end of twelve leverage points in a system; purpose, measures and the distribution of authority sit much higher.

The consequences are practical. Duplication is usually a symptom of unclear demand and undefined handoffs, so moving the boxes moves the duplication with them. Accountability gaps are usually the residue of decisions nobody is authorised to make, so a new role without new authority reproduces the gap under a new title. And the disruption is not free: Australian audit-office reporting on machinery-of-government changes has found benefits unarticulated, benefit achievement unmonitored and costs untracked, with a minimum direct cost of $23.7 million constructed after the fact for a single 2019 departmental change.

The counterfactual test — if the new chart went live tomorrow, which three specific decisions would be made differently, by whom, on what information?
The measurement test — can the organisation describe today's cost and delivery well enough to demonstrate an improvement later?
The absorption test — how many changes has this workforce absorbed in the past three years, and what did the last three teach people about engaging with them?

What we diagnose before we discuss structure

Four things determine whether work gets done. We establish them first, and let the structural options follow as a conclusion rather than an assumption.

Purpose and demand — what each unit is for in the eyes of the people it serves, what demand actually arrives by type and volume, and how much of it is failure demand created by the organisation's own earlier failures.
Flow and handoffs — a representative piece of work followed end to end, recording where it waits, is re-entered, is checked by someone who adds no information, or goes back.
Decision rights — what each level may decide without escalating, compared with what it actually escalates. The gap between formal and practised authority explains more about speed than the shape of the chart.
Job design — autonomy, skill variety, task significance and social support, which the evidence treats as design choices that predict performance, learning and wellbeing.

How the review is run is part of the result

Procedural fairness is not a communications task added at the end. The survivor research is consistent: the people who remain after a restructure show measurable declines in trust, commitment and discretionary effort, and those declines are strongly conditioned by whether the process was perceived as fair. Change fatigue is a validated construct, not a figure of speech — frequency of change and the uncertainty around it each independently predict strain.

So we design the consultation before we design the options: who is asked, at what point, what they can genuinely influence, and how they will be told what was decided and why. Where a decision is already made, we advise saying so rather than staging a consultation about it.

The problem

Structures accumulate. Roles are created to solve a problem and outlive it. Eventually the organisation chart describes history rather than the work — and the cost shows up as duplication, gaps, and people carrying loads nobody designed. Consequently, organisational performance wanes.

The more expensive failure is the response: a review scoped to produce a new chart. New reporting lines are drawn, functions are consolidated or split, titles change, and the organisation absorbs the disruption in exchange for an improvement that, in a great many cases, does not arrive.

The method

An independent review of organisational performance, structure, roles, reporting lines, capability and workload, tested against what the organisation actually needs to deliver. We interview, we examine documentation, and we quantify wherever quantification is possible.

The work runs in six stages: frame the problem in terms of the work and agree that restatement with the commissioning executive; diagnose the work system — purpose, demand and failure demand, flow and handoffs, decision rights, job design; establish a baseline of what the current arrangement costs and delivers; develop options with honest trade-offs; implement in stages, fairly; and re-measure against the baseline at a defined interval. The last stage is the one most often omitted, and the only one that produces organisational learning.

What you receive

The problem restated in terms of the work, tested with the executive who commissioned the review
A diagnosis of the work system: demand and failure demand, flow and handoffs, decision rights and job design
Current-state analysis of structure, roles and capability, with duplication, gaps and misalignment evidenced
A measured baseline of what today's arrangement costs and delivers
Options for a future-state structure, each carrying what it improves, what it costs to implement, what it degrades, and how the improvement will be measured
A staged implementation plan with a consultation design and a re-measurement point

We do not open a review with a fear statistic. The seventy per cent change-failure figure has no traceable empirical source, and we ask clients to strike it from business cases we are asked to review.

Who this suits

Boards, chief executives and HR leaders post-merger, mid-growth, under budget pressure, or preparing for a change of leadership — and any executive being asked to approve a new structure without an account of what it will cost or improve.

Reorganise the work, not the boxes

Our whitepaper on why most organisational reviews redraw the chart and change nothing: the missing evidence behind the seventy per cent statistic, the audited cost of restructuring, change fatigue, procedural fairness, and a six-stage review method with commissioning questions for a board.

Read the whitepaper

Common questions

How is an organisational review different from a restructure?: A restructure is a decision about reporting lines. A review is an examination of whether the work is designed to be done at all — purpose, demand, flow, decision rights and job design — with structure treated as one possible conclusion among several. Some reviews we run end in a structural change; others end in changed decision rights, measures or job design, which is usually cheaper and more durable.
Is it true that seventy per cent of change initiatives fail?: There is no reliable evidence for it. The figure was traced through the change-management literature by Hughes (2011), who found it propagating from citation to citation without a study underneath. Where an origin is offered it is Kotter's 1995 article, which drew on the author's consulting experience rather than a dataset. What we do have is good evidence about which design and process choices predict better outcomes, and that is a more useful body of knowledge.
How long does an organisational review take?: It depends on the size of the organisation and how much evidence already exists. The diagnostic phase is where the time goes, because it is gathered from the work rather than only from interviews with the people who manage it. We scope each engagement individually rather than quoting a standard duration.
What if we have already restructured recently?: Then recent change load is a constraint on what we recommend, not background colour. Cumulative change fatigue is measurable and it reduces the capacity of a workforce to absorb the next change. Sometimes the right advice is a narrower intervention now rather than a comprehensive one the organisation cannot carry.
What should a board ask before commissioning a review?: Six questions: what specific decision or piece of work will be done differently; what evidence says the current arrangement is the cause; what the change will cost, including disruption; what improvement is claimed and how it will be measured; how many changes this workforce has absorbed in the past three years; and who will report the results, to whom, and when. A review that cannot answer these is not ready to be commissioned — whoever is proposing it, including us.

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