Self-check

Before you commission a restructure: eight questions that count

Most organisational reviews redraw the chart and change nothing. The difference between a review that holds and one that costs a year is usually settled before the work begins — in what the board asked for, and what it was prepared to act on.

These eight questions are the commissioning questions from the NSC Group whitepaper “Reorganise the work, not the boxes”. They are the questions a board or executive should be able to answer plainly before authorising a review — not because the answers are hard, but because the ones that cannot be answered are where reviews come apart.

Answer honestly rather than aspirationally. A “partly” you can defend is more useful than a “yes” you cannot.

1
The question
We can state, in one sentence and without using the word “structure”, the problem this review is meant to solve.
2
Evidence
We hold evidence that the current design is the cause of that problem, rather than assuming it.
3
The work
We have mapped how the work actually flows across units, not just how the organisation chart says it should.
4
Cost
We have costed the disruption — lost productivity, recruitment, redundancy, rework — not only the projected saving.
5
Change fatigue
We know how many significant changes this workforce has absorbed in the last three years, and have factored that in.
6
Procedural fairness
We can describe how affected staff will be consulted, and what could genuinely change as a result.
7
Decision rights
We know which decisions will move, who will hold them afterwards, and what they will be accountable for.
8
Proof
We have agreed what we will measure twelve months on to know whether the review worked.

0 of 8 answered.

Using this well

Answer it individually before it is discussed. A board that fills it in together converges on a shared story, which is exactly what this is meant to test.
Pay attention to the questions where members of the same board answer differently. That divergence is usually the real finding.
Treat every “no” as a piece of work to do before commissioning, not as a reason to abandon the review.

The service behind it

Organisational review

Where the answers point to a genuine design problem, an organisational review tests structure against the work rather than against preference.

Read about the service

Where the questions come from

Reorganise the work, not the boxes

An organisational review is commissioned because the work is not getting done, and it almost always returns a new structure. This paper argues the sequence is wrong: purpose, demand, flow, decision rights and job design generate the behaviour the chart merely arranges. It examines the seventy per cent failure statistic and its missing source, the audited cost of Australian machinery-of-government changes, change fatigue as a measurable construct, procedural fairness as a design variable, and a six-stage review method with commissioning questions a board can use.

Talk the reading through

If the answers raised something you would rather not leave sitting, a short confidential conversation is usually the most useful next step.

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