Picture this: you’ve just finished working with an architect to design your dream home. The drawings are beautiful—the flow of the rooms, the natural light, the curb appeal. You can see yourself living there already.
But here’s the catch: creating the blueprint isn’t the same as building the house. Before the first brick is laid, someone has to translate that elegant drawing into a construction plan. Who pours the foundation? Where do the utility lines go? When will the materials be delivered? Choices must be made in the right order—you can’t build the roof before you frame the house. Some things must be done in sequence, while others, like landscaping, can wait until later.
The same holds true in organization design.
Too often, teams stop at creating the “blueprint”: outlining the high-level strategic shifts they want to make. They may decide to move from decentralized decision-making to global accountability or from siloed reporting to integrated teams. Those choices are essential. But by themselves, they won’t guide activation of your plans into reality.
Just as in construction, a beautiful organization design without an implementation plan leads to confusion on the ground. Builders don’t know where to start; leaders don’t know what to prioritize; team members are uncertain what to do next.
Activation Planning: Pinpointing the Decisions
That’s why the next step after design is activation planning. This means stepping back to pinpoint the specific design decisions that will bring the blueprint to life. This occurs not at the task level—“Joe needs to update the spreadsheet”—but at the decision level. Shift reporting lines for product managers to the business unit. Introduce new pricing processes.
These choices become the framework for activation. They are the “studs and beams” of the organizational house that provide enough structure to guide everything else.
Here’s where our Cube Model comes back into play, connecting activation planning directly to design. In a cube, twist one side and the whole thing shifts. Organizations are the same. If you change structure without adjusting metrics, you end up with misalignment. If you tweak processes but ignore culture, the change doesn’t stick. Everything affects everything else.
Activation planning is another opportunity to “balance the cube” to ensure the system is aligned. It not only brings us back to the design choices, but also provides a way to organize and sequence the activation of design choices across all six sides of the cube (work, structure, metrics, people, continuous alignment, culture/leadership). In this way, activation planning and cube balancing reinforce each other: the cube gives structure to activation, and activation breathes life into the cube’s design.
Why reconsider balance of the cube when planning activation? I once worked with a client who brilliantly redesigned their marketing organization but failed to update the reward system. Old incentives kept driving old behaviors. The result? Misalignment, frustration and a half-built house. The cube metaphor made the lesson stick: you can’t twist (or activate) one side without adjusting (or activating) the others.
Fueling Leadership Alignment
Another benefit of activation planning is the clarity it brings leaders. Standing in front of the blueprint, it’s easy to imagine everything at once. But when you start debating what gets prioritized, the real trade-offs emerge.
- Which decisions are foundational enablers or quick wins?
- Which decisions require major behavior and mindset shifts, and are we prepared to stand behind them?
- Which decisions will cause overload if we move too fast or combine too many?
- Which decisions must be activated in unison to avoid frustration, confusion or bottlenecks?
These conversations are where alignment is forged. Leaders see the same picture, wrestle with the same trade-offs and leave with a clearer sense of what it will really take to build.
Assessing Gaps and Impact
Finally, activation planning paves the way for gap and impact analysis. Here, “gaps” aren’t about what’s missing, but about the distance between where we are today and the future state we’ve envisioned—and what it will take to bridge that distance. It’s the difference between remodeling an existing kitchen versus building a brand-new addition.
This perspective allows leaders to plan pacing, resource support and communication with eyes wide open. By mapping downstream activities, you can better define what must happen to bring the blueprint to life and anticipate the direct and indirect impacts on stakeholders—ensuring the right business units are involved from the start.
From Vision to Groundbreaking
The blueprint is inspiring, but it’s not the build. Activation planning bridges the gap by:
- Translating shifts into design decisions.
- Balancing the cube across the system.
- Fueling alignment by forcing trade-off conversations.
- Surfacing the gap between current and future state—and clarifying the impact—before breaking ground.
So the next time you find yourself holding a beautiful organizational blueprint, pause before declaring victory. Remember: the blueprint sets the vision. But it’s the activation planning—the careful mapping of choices, trade-offs, and sequences—that ensures the house actually gets built.
