Stop restructuring. Start designing for alignment.
Most organisations don’t fail because they lack a strategy.
They fail because their design can’t carry the strategy’s weight.
Organisational design is the strategic work of shaping how a company’s roles, processes, systems, and culture fit together to deliver on its goals - consistently, efficiently, and with enough adaptability to survive the real world. It’s a blueprint for how the organisation actually functions. It defines how people work together, make decisions, share information, and use resources to create value. Not just boxes on a chart.
When the design is misaligned, the organisation starts paying for it by being everything all at once. Meetings multiply. Decisions slow. Accountability blurs. Customers feel it. People feel it. Leaders feel it, usually at 11pm on a Sunday, when they have the familiar dread of knowing they have to face it all again tomorrow
This is why alignment sits at the centre of good design. Strategy alignment isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s the point.
A cost leadership strategy needs clarity, repeatability, and tight decision rights.
An innovation leadership strategy needs autonomy, fast feedback loops, and permission to experiment.
If you keep the same structure, the same governance, the same “how we do things here” for both… you get confusion dressed up as flexibility.
At DISCO, we treat organisational design as a whole system problem. Structure matters - reporting lines, role definitions, spans of control - but it’s only one lever.
The real power comes from working across five connected elements:
1) Strategy alignment What are we optimising for right now? Speed? Safety? Margin? Innovation? Customer intimacy? If you can’t answer that cleanly, your design will drift.
2) Structure and roles Who owns what? Where do decisions live? What’s the minimum hierarchy needed and where are the handoffs creating friction?
3) Processes and systems How does work flow? How do decisions get made? What rhythms, governance, and tools support execution without suffocating it?
4) People and culture Do we have the right talent in the right roles, with clear expectations and room to contribute? And does the culture reinforce the behaviour the strategy demands?
5) Adaptability Is the organisation built to respond not just react when markets shift, technology changes, or growth accelerates?
From there, models are simply options, not answers.
Functional structures can drive depth and efficiency.
Divisional designs can increase accountability to products or regions.
Matrix structures can create flexibility (and also complexity, if you’re not careful).
Team-based and agile approaches can improve speed and collaboration but only when the decision rights and supporting systems keep up.
The measure of “good design” isn’t how modern it looks. It’s whether it improves performance: clearer direction, better customer outcomes, stronger resilience, and a workforce that can execute without burning out.
If your organisation feels like it’s working harder for the same results, don’t start with another restructure.
Start with alignment.
Design is strategy made operational and DISCO style means we make it real, end-to-end, and workable on Monday morning.
Reach out if you'd like to chat via teams about alignment in your organisation. Promise we can keep it holiday mode. Either an early coffee before the house wakes or a late afternoon drink near the pool. I'll give you something to think about over the early new year.
Katy Cooper is an experienced Futurist, trained through The Institute for the Future, POLI-Design at Milan POLI.technic and Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. She has also studied Disruptive Innovation with INSEAD. She holds a Graduate Diploma of Management (GradDipMgt) from Australian Institute of Business. Katy is an exceptional Experience Designer and Facilitator. She helps organisations and communities build strategic plans and leadership capability for a future they can’t see yet through her foresight-driven, whole systems design practice.