Every two years, the same scene. A new org chart appears in a deck. Boxes move. Titles shift. People rehearse a new vocabulary for what they already do. Six months later the same complaints surface in the same meetings: priorities unclear, dependencies unmanaged, work disconnected from strategy.
The reorg didn't fail. The reorg was never the answer.
What a reorg can actually solve
Reorgs solve one problem well: a structural mismatch between the work the company has decided to do and the way people are grouped to do it. That's a real problem, and when it's the problem, restructuring works.
The trouble is that most reorgs happen without the first step. The company hasn't decided what work it's doing. It's hoping that re-grouping people will surface a decision that leadership never made.
What reorgs are usually a substitute for
- A focus decision nobody wanted to own.
- A do-not list nobody wanted to publish.
- A capacity argument nobody wanted to have.
- A leader nobody wanted to performance-manage.
A reorg without a prior strategic decision is just a reshuffling of the same ambiguity into different boxes.
The cheaper version
Before any structural change, write down: which three bets are we funding next year, which work feeds each one, who owns the outcome, what's the do-not list. If you can't answer those questions, a reorg won't help — it will just delay the conversation by a quarter and burn political capital you'll need later.
If you can answer them, you'll usually find the existing structure is closer to fit-for-purpose than you thought. Most reorgs end up moving five people. The rest is theater.
The Vindaris view
Structure follows strategy, not the other way around. An execution layer that makes the strategy-to-work link visible removes the strongest argument for restructuring — because the misalignment people blame on the org chart is almost always a visibility problem dressed up as a structural one.