As an engagement director at AlignOrg Solutions, I’ve had the privilege of working with senior leaders —many of them CEOs — to help their organizations translate strategy into structure. It’s work that demands clarity, decisiveness, and execution. At AlignOrg, we’re known for our strategy-first methodology. It starts from the top, moves through structure, and aligns processes, governance, and talent to deliver results.
It’s practical, proven, and effective. I stand by it.
But over the past few years, I’ve found myself pulled toward a growing tension in our field—one that speaks directly to the evolving complexity of the environments our clients operate in. It’s this…
What might we be missing in our traditional approaches to organization design that (often) don’t account for the full complexity of the systems we’re aiming to design?
This post is the beginning of a short series in which I share my experience grappling with this question. My goal is to invite executives, theorists, and practitioners into a conversation—one that doesn’t discard what works, but challenges us to think harder about what we must now evolve.
Two Design Logics in Tension
In the traditional U.S.-centric approach to organization design, strategy is king. Typically formulated by a senior leadership team, strategy is understood as a multi-year blueprint that guides the configuration of the organization. Structure follows strategy. Once the strategic intent is clarified, design becomes a process of cascading logic. What capabilities, structure, roles, systems, and talent will best deliver the intended outcomes.
This is what I’ll refer to as the “top-down, linear” approach. It values clarity, control, and alignment. It works well in stable or moderately dynamic environments where the plan can be held long enough to execute through deliberate design.
By contrast, during my time living in the United Kingdom and engaging with the European Organisation Design Forum (EODF), I was exposed to a more complexity-informed, theory-rich orientation. This school of thought treats organizations not so much as fixed systems to align but as complex adaptive systems that must evolve.
Different Viewpoints on Org Design
Thinkers like Dave Snowden, Phanish Puranam, Chris Rodgers and Joan Lurie introduced me to new ways of seeing design:
- Dave Snowden, through the Cynefin framework, argues that many organizational contexts are not merely complicated: they’re complex. Cause and effect are unclear until after the fact. In such cases, adaptive sensemaking replaces linear planning.
- Phanish Puranam treats design not as a one-time event but as a distributed, recursive process. In his micro-structural approach, local microstructures solve their own design problems. Structure emerges from context, rather than being imposed from the top down.
- Chris Rodgers, a former engineer and senior manager in the UK power generation industry, sees organizations as “wiggly.” The mandate of management is to “muddle through” the complexity with purpose, courage, and skill.
- Joan Lurie, building on Irving Borwick’s systems psychodynamics, helps leaders see themselves as embedded actors in dynamic role systems (Role-In-System) where individual behavior and organizational structure are constantly shaping each other.
These thinkers do not simply critique traditional design—they offer an entirely different paradigm for understanding organizations and how to “design” them. Instead of “plan and implement,” they invite us into “sense and respond.” Instead of clarity at the center, they prioritize learning and adapting at the edges.
A Nuanced Approach at AlignOrg
This is where I want to pause—not just as a practitioner reflecting on theory, but as someone in a boutique consulting firm that’s actively navigating this very tension.
At AlignOrg Solutions, we are known for helping organizations achieve alignment between strategy and structure in an informed but pragmatic way. But that doesn’t mean our approach is simple, linear, rigid or formulaic. In fact, the way we think about design already incorporates key principles of systems thinking and organizational complexity.
We use the metaphor of the Rubik’s Cube to describe our perspective. Just like the cube, organizations are multi-dimensional systems: structure, processes, talent, metrics, governance, and culture all intersect. Change one element, and others must shift in response. Effective design isn’t just about making individual choices; it’s about achieving multi-dimensional alignment across the system.
In this way, our method is not just top-down; it’s integrative. It reflects an understanding that strategy must be translated, and that organizations must be treated as dynamic systems, not static machines.
That said, we still lean toward the more traditional, top-down end of the spectrum: that’s where our roots are, and that’s what many of our clients count on us for. But we’re also beginning to ask: What more might be possible if we leaned even further into complexity thinking? How might we evolve our method—not to replace what works, but to deliberately evolve to better reflect the environments our clients are now operating in?
This is not a departure from our approach. It’s an invitation to stretch it.
The Tensions I’m Exploring
This series is my way of thinking out loud. In the posts to come, I’ll be exploring:
- How complexity theory challenges the traditional strategy-structure relationship—and how we might integrate the two.
- How decentralized design practices, such as Puranam’s micro-structural approach, might change what alignment and execution mean.
- How authority and decision-making operate differently in a world where not everything can (or should) be controlled from the top.
- How we might build a model of organization design that is both rigorous and adaptive—one that honors strategic intent while enabling emergence.
Join Me
If this resonates with you, I’d love to connect. Reach out directly or through AlignOrg Solutions. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m committed to asking better questions.
Let’s design forward—together.
