Organizational Design Consulting
Embed strategy-aligned cross-functional collaboration to engage your workforce with an optimized structure.
Forrest Advisors organizational design consulting creates sustainable measurable results for leaders undergoing big change.
Our Organizational Change Management Pillars
The central hub for managing enterprise-wide change initiatives, fostering collaboration, and ensuring alignment with strategic goals.
Strategic workforce planning, capability development, performance optimization, and change enablement for measurable culture impact.
Align strategy, operating model, core capabilities, and culture to enable clear decision rights, streamlined processes, and seamless cross-functional collaboration.
We’ve Built a Framework for Organizational Design
Not all Organizational Design Consulting approaches are the same. Our approach to sustainability in 90 days:
The fundamentals of organizational design consulting involves purposefully structuring an organization’s elements, including reporting lines, decision rights, roles, and processes, to best support strategic objectives. Organization design involves the right leadership team, leveraging the right management systems, built with the right roles and responsibilities. This is more than just organization structure.
Key principles of success include strategy alignment, knowledge/competency matching, control vs coordination needs, and collaboration requirements, which all must be balanced. There is no one right model, but choosing the right approach from functional, divisional, and matrix structures drives empowerment and revenue growth and cost goals.
The Framework of Effective Organizational Design:
An effective organizational design framework considers the company’s strategy, operating model, core capabilities, and culture. It enables clear decision rights, streamlined processes, and seamless cross-functional collaboration. The framework must balance centralization for economies of scale with decentralization for agility and customer proximity. Senior leadership must be being the organization design to ensure success and we start there with the right strategy.
The Pillars of Organizational Design Processes:
Effective organizational design requires carefully considering and balancing these five core principles related to strategy alignment, cross-functional integration, leveraging competencies, control vs autonomy, and fostering employee motivation. The optimal design processes will be tailored to the specific strategic context and objectives of your organization.
- Strategy. Align the organizational structure and design choices with the overarching business strategy and direction. The strategy should drive decisions around centralization vs decentralization, functional vs product/geographic groupings, etc.
- Coordination. Design the organization to enable effective cross-functional coordination, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
Determine the appropriate level of integration vs separation between different units/functions. - Knowledge/Competence. Structure the organization by placing decision rights and responsibilities where the relevant knowledge and expertise resides. Match organizational roles, processes, and reporting lines to the required skills and competencies.
- Control. Balance centralized control and oversight with decentralized operational flexibility and empowerment.
Determine the appropriate level of centralization vs decentralization based on the organization’s context. - Motivation. Design roles, processes, and structures that optimize employee engagement, accountability, and motivation.
Ensure clarity of responsibilities and decision rights to drive ownership and commitment.
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Why Our Organizational Design Consulting is Unique:
We leverage design thinking principles and rapid prototyping to co-create the organizational design with cross-functional teams. This collaborative approach fosters buy-in, surfaces diverse perspectives, and allows for iterative refinement based on real-world testing and feedback loops.
In a business landscape characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, an effective Organizational Design emerges as a beacon of stability and opportunity:
We are experienced organizational design consultants with deep expertise in strategy alignment, operating model design, and change management. Our ability to balance strategic considerations with practical implementation, coupled with strong stakeholder management skills, ensures a successful and sustainable organizational transformation.
Featured Case Studies
Handling change & transformation complexity through clarity and principled execution
Engaging an boutique change management consultant to enable transformation results
Let’s Be Real. You Need To Do These Well, Or Fail At Organizational Design.
Forrest Advisors accelerates organizational design with our three primary value creation offerings:
Principles, Norms, & Behaviors
Clear vision, inclusive norms, and empowered behaviors drive cultural transformation.
High Performing Teams
Diverse talent, clear purpose, and empowering leadership foster high performance.
Workflow Management
Streamlined processes, automation, and data-driven insights optimize collaboration efficiency.
Top Organizational Design Benefits
Effective organizational design is crucial for translating strategy into operational reality. It requires carefully considering and balancing core design principles, as well as factors like culture, competencies, and collaboration needs. When organizational design consulting firms deliver, we can drive strategic alignment, operational efficiency, cross-functional coordination, agility, and employee engagement.
- Efficiency: Enables efficient execution of the organization’s strategic objectives by aligning structure, processes, and roles accordingly.
- Rapid Decisions: Optimizes operational performance by clarifying reporting lines, decision rights, and eliminating redundancies or silos.
- Collaboration: Facilitates cross-functional collaboration, knowledge sharing, and coordination across the organization.
- Flexibility: Enhances agility and responsiveness by designing a structure suited for innovation and adaptation to market changes.
- Engagement: Improves employee engagement and motivation by clearly defining responsibilities and creating a sense of ownership.
Organizational Design Consulting Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is organizational design and what are its key objectives?
A: Organizational design involves purposefully structuring an organization’s architecture, including reporting lines, roles, processes, and decision rights to best support its strategic goals. The key objectives are to maximize operational efficiency, enable effective execution, and create an agile structure aligned with the organization’s strategy.
Q: What are the core principles or factors that guide organizational design decisions?
A: The five core principles are the strategy (aligning structure with strategy), the coordination (enabling cross-functional collaboration), the knowledge/competence (placing responsibilities where expertise resides), the control (balancing centralized vs decentralized control), and the motivation (structuring to optimize employee engagement).
Q: What are the different organizational models or structures and which one is right for my organization?
A: Common models include functional (organized by specialization), divisional (grouped by product/service/geography), matrix (combining functional and divisional), network, and team-based structures. The optimal model depends on factors like the organization’s strategy, size, industry dynamics, and degree of innovation required. Our organizational design consulting firm can assist you end to end in making these big decisions.
Q: How does an organization’s strategy influence its design?
A: An organization’s overarching strategy is the primary driver and starting point for design decisions. For example, a cost leadership strategy may call for a highly centralized functional structure, while an innovation-focused strategy may require a decentralized, team-based model.
Q: What are some key steps or best practices in undertaking an organizational design initiative?
A: Best practices include securing leadership alignment on the design principles and target state, conducting a thorough current state analysis, stress-testing design options, developing a phased implementation roadmap, robust change management, and continuously monitoring/refining the new design over time.
What are the Consequences of Poorly Managed Organizational Design?
- Lacking Performance: Misalignment between organizational structure and strategy, leading to inefficiencies and suboptimal performance.
- Slow Decision-Making: Failure to balance the competing design principles like centralized control vs decentralized coordination and decision-making.
- Incomplete Design: Overlooking critical factors like culture, competencies, and collaboration needs when designing the organization.
- No Buy-In: Lack of leadership alignment and buy-in on the target organizational design and restructuring approach.
- Resistance to Change: Insufficient change management and communications during design implementation, leading to resistance and adoption challenges.
Organizations today are facing ever-increasing pressures.
When it comes to big change, our clients count on Forrest Advisors to make strategic plans a reality and spark functional teams to action. We specialize in Change Management, Transformation, and Growth Strategy.
We are for the Functional Leaders of Business Transformation. These functional leaders are critical for transformation success and they don’t get the support they need. When they do get support, it is often from a consulting industry that (let’s be honest) needs to change.
Forrest Advisors creates measurable results.
Transformation. Sparked & Sustained.
