Redraw the org chart, announce the new structure, and within twelve months most companies find themselves quietly operating the old one again. The boxes changed. The decisions didn't.
The chart is not the operating model
An operating model is decision rights, information flow, and incentives — the chart is just a picture of reporting lines. Redesigns that stop at the chart leave the actual mechanics of how a call gets made untouched, so people route around the new structure within a quarter.
Name the decisions, not just the roles
Before any redesign, we ask clients to list the twenty decisions that most determine performance — pricing exceptions, capital requests, hiring above a threshold — and who currently makes each one in practice, not on paper. That list, not the chart, is the real design brief.
Incentives have to move with authority
Give a role new decision rights without adjusting how that role is measured and compensated, and the old incentives will quietly pull behavior back to the old pattern. The redesigns that hold are the ones where structure, decision rights, and incentives move together.