For the next few weeks we're going to be writing about organisational re-designs, aka restructures and how businesses could look at them differently.
The thing is, most restructures are targeting inefficiency. Duplicate roles, overlapping responsibilities, too many layers, spare capacity, or work that appears to be happening in more than one place. Anyone who has worked in an organisation with more than even 20 people, will have experienced some form of this. There are definitely organisations carrying genuine duplication and complexity that no longer serves a useful purpose.
However, the risk is that, in the effort to make an organisation leaner and cleaner, we also remove some of the things that make it adaptable.
While duplication seems like waste, it can have its benefits too. Two teams looking at a similar problem from different perspectives may produce better thinking than one type of expertise could produce alone. Likewise, extra capacity can have its perks. A person with some room in their workload can step in when something unexpected happens, like a customer has an unusual problem, a project gets stuck, or something needs to move quickly across organisational boundaries. Having the flex to role shift because there's capacity in the system can be extremely valuable.
Innovation is also, by its nature, not especially efficient. It often involves ideas that lead nowhere, experiments that fail and time spent exploring things that may never produce a return. While the learning is invaluable, on paper these are often the hardest activities to defend during a restructure because their value is difficult to quantify in the here and now.
There is an important difference between waste and capacity. Waste adds little or no value. Capacity gives an organisation the space to respond, experiment, learn and absorb the unexpected. The challenge is that the two can look remarkably similar when viewed through a purely financial or efficiency lens.
So before consolidating every function, removing every overlap or designing roles to run at full capacity, it is worth asking a few different questions. What does this apparent inefficiency enable? What would become harder if we removed it? Where does experimentation currently happen? Who has the capacity to respond when something changes that wasn't in the plan?
We're not denying that efficiency is important. Few organisations can afford unnecessary cost or complexity. The danger comes when efficiency becomes the only measure of good design, and realistically, efficacy is a greater trump card.
An organisation can become extremely efficient at delivering the work it already knows how to do, while unconsciously removing its capacity to do anything else.