When an organization wants to move faster, the first thing it usually reaches for is structure. It breaks big teams into small ones, and regroups people who were organized around functions into teams organized around purpose. The expectation is that making things smaller and lighter will make them faster.
And yet, we often hear that even after changing the structure, things move just as slowly as before—sometimes even slower. The reason is surprisingly simple. The structure changed, but the way people work within it—how they communicate, who is responsible for what, how far they can decide on their own—stayed exactly the same.
When the structure changes, at least three things need to change along with it.
First, communication. If you've broken teams into smaller units, communication should get smaller too. If you still route work that could be settled by talking directly to the team next door up through the hierarchy and back down again, the seats got closer but the road got longer. If the habit of gathering everything upward and then handing it back down stays the same, splitting the teams loses its meaning.
Next, roles and responsibilities. A new structure needs new boundaries. If you lay the old structure's lines of responsibility directly on top of the new teams, gray zones appear—"Wait, whose job is this?" And work that belongs to no one ends up getting done by no one.
Last is authority, and honestly, this is the one most often left out. If decision-making power stays up top as before while only execution flows downward, the small team has to climb back up for permission every time it wants to decide something. The team built to be fast ends up standing still the longest, waiting on a single decision.
In the end, changing the structure is only the beginning. Just as changing the bowl means changing how you serve, changing the structure means the ways of communicating, the lines of responsibility, and the location of authority all have to move with it. Otherwise you're left in an awkward state—new in shape, but old in how the work actually gets done.
Is your organization, perhaps, drawing up a new structure while leaving everything else as it was? Maybe the reason things aren't getting faster isn't that the structure is wrong, but that only the structure changed.
And this isn't something that plays out only on the org chart. In the end, it comes down to each person's day. Think back on what you did today. Was it something you raised because you wanted to? Something the team agreed to take on together? Or something that was decided somewhere and handed down to you? Are you walking alongside the person who first proposed it—or were you simply handed the work and left to wander on your own?
If these questions are hard to answer right away, it may mean that the work flowed to you, but the reasons it began and the people you're meant to do it with didn't flow with it. When decisions come down but context doesn't come with them, a person can be clearly working and still be lost. Maybe a structure working well isn't something grand at all—it's simply a state where each person can answer these questions clearly.
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