Structure is breaking down
Roles, responsibilities, and decision paths that once worked no longer hold.
Work gets done, but through workarounds, escalation, and personal effort rather than clear structure.
When structure starts to break down, the problem isn’t capability.
It’s that the system people are working inside no longer supports the way the organisation actually operates.
What this usually looks like
Decisions stall or escalate unnecessarily.
Accountability shifts depending on who’s present.
Roles overlap, or leave gaps no one owns.
Informal workarounds replace formal processes.
Teams compensate for structure instead of relying on it.
Where structural breakdown tends to show up
Structural strain rarely appears everywhere at once. It shows up where pressure, growth, or change has outpaced the existing design.
Roles & accountability
Ownership becomes blurred. People step in where they can, not where they’re meant to.
Decision-making
Decisions slow down, bounce upward, or get revisited because authority isn’t clear.
Interfaces between teams
Handoffs fail. Assumptions replace agreements. Friction appears between functions, not within them.
How structure actually breaks down
Structural problems rarely start as design failures.
They emerge gradually, as the organisation grows, priorities shift, or new demands are layered onto old assumptions.
Over time, roles stretch, decision rights blur, and informal fixes accumulate.
The structure still exists on paper, but it no longer reflects how work is really happening.
At this point, the issue usually isn’t that people aren’t trying.
It’s that the structure they’re working inside no longer matches the reality of the work.
Until that mismatch is visible, attempts to “fix” structure tend to create more layers rather than more clarity.
Making sense of structural strain
When structure starts to fail, the most useful work isn’t redesigning boxes on an org chart.
It’s understanding how decisions are actually being made, where accountability is assumed rather than defined, and which parts of the system are under the most strain.
That kind of clarity comes from structured observation and analysis, with enough distance to see how the parts interact.
Start with a diagnostic conversation
If structure is breaking down, the next step isn’t a restructure.
It’s making sense of where the strain is coming from and what the organisation actually needs now.
A diagnostic conversation is a focused, one-off session to clarify what’s happening structurally and decide what (if anything) should happen next.
You don’t need to prepare.
You don’t need to be certain.
And you’re not committing to ongoing work.
This conversation is about clarity, not commitment.
