Working on the edge of organisational design.

If you’re an org design practitioner (or you’re aspiring to become one), here’s the thing you learn fast:

org design isn’t a re-org. It’s an operating system upgrade.

When we treat design as shifting reporting lines, renaming teams, creating a new layer (or removing one) we might get a short burst of clarity. But we rarely solve the underlying problem: the organisation’s design no longer fits its strategy, environment, or stage of growth.

Practitioners work in that gap.

Organisational design is the strategic process of shaping roles, processes, systems, and culture so the organisation can execute its strategy effectively - and adapt when the strategy (or the world) changes. It’s about performance, profitability, customer outcomes, and resilience. And it’s about doing that work in a way that people can actually live inside.

The practitioner’s real job: create alignment you can operate

The heart of org design is alignment - between what the organisation says it’s trying to do and how it’s currently set up to do it.

In DISCO style, we look for alignment across five connected elements:

1) Strategy What do your potential futures look like? Are you clear on what our ambition is? What are you optimising for now? Growth? Cost? Innovation? Reliability? Customer intimacy? If the strategy is unclear, your design will inherit that fuzziness. A practitioner’s first contribution is often forcing clarity.

2) Structure and roles Designers don’t just draw an org chart they define accountability. Who owns outcomes? Where do decisions live? How do teams interface? What’s the minimum hierarchy required to create clarity without bottlenecking delivery?

3) Workflows, governance, and systems This is where most “re-orgs” fail. The lines change, but the work doesn’t. If decision rights, forums, handoffs, and tooling stay the same, you’ve just reorganised confusion. Practitioners design the path work travels and the guardrails for the road trip.

4) People and culture Good design is human. It considers capability, leadership load, incentives, identity, and the unwritten norms that shape behaviour. Practitioners ask: do we have the talent where the work is? Are managers set up to succeed? Are we designing a culture we actually want to reinforce?

5) Adaptability The organisation has to be able to respond to shifting markets, changing customer needs, new technology, and growth. Design isn’t static. You’re building sensing mechanisms and feedback loops not just structure.

Common traps (and how practitioners avoid them)

• Starting with the org chart. Start with strategy and performance problems.

• Treating stakeholders as “inputs.” They’re the people who will make or break adoption.

• Designing an ideal world. Design for Monday morning reality: constraints, legacy systems, capacity, politics.

• Calling it “done” at launch. The launch is the halfway mark. Implementation is the work.

A practitioner’s toolkit: what to get good at

If you want to build credibility quickly, focus on these capabilities:

• Map the whole system. Identify what data you have, what's missing and a plan to uncover it. What is it saying about the organisation?

• Diagnose the real constraint. Is there decision latency? Role confusion? Too many handoffs? Lack of enterprise leadership? Genuine capability gaps? Incentives out of whack with the strategy?

• Design decision rights. Who decides, who consults, who executes, and how escalation works.

• Make the work visible. Value streams, customer journeys, operating rhythms, and where work gets stuck.

• Translate between worlds. Strategy language for executives; practical clarity for teams.

• Hold the line on alignment. If the design doesn’t support the strategy, it’s theatre.

What “DISCO” looks like in practice

For us, DISCO organisational design means: alignment first, look at the whole system, and measure the change. We don’t just propose a model - we build the conditions for performance:

• Clear accountabilities and interfaces

• Decision-making that matches the pace of the environment

• Workflows and systems that support execution

• Culture choices that are explicit, not accidental

• A practical transition path so people can move without chaos

• And a whole system measurement of how the change is going.

If you’re an aspiring practitioner, here’s a simple starting move: the next time someone poses the solution is a restructure, respond with:

“What performance problem are we trying to solve and what needs to align for that to be true?”

That’s the work. That’s the craft.

And done well, it’s one of the highest-leverage contributions you can make inside an organisation.

Want to attend our Introduction to Practice Lab this February?

We're partnering with the World Flourishing Organization to deliver a Flourishing Professionals: Intro to Practice Lab beginning in the first week of February.

Check out our launch post here

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.