When the business you have isn’t the business you designed

Most businesses don’t become difficult to operate overnight. They evolve. A new customer creates a different requirement, someone leaves and their responsibilities are shared out, a system is introduced, a service is added, a manager takes on another team, a temporary workaround quietly becomes permanent—and every one of those decisions makes sense in the circumstances it was made in.

But years later, the business can be operating in a way nobody deliberately designed. And it can take more effort than it should to keep everything working.

Businesses adapt constantly. That’s often a strength. But every adaptation changes the relationships between people, responsibilities, systems and work, and when those changes aren’t considered together, complexity accumulates: a responsibility moves without the authority required to carry it, a new system creates information nobody owns, a process introduced to solve one problem adds work somewhere else. The work the process was absorbing doesn’t disappear. It moves.

Let’s say a business wins a contract twice the size of its usual jobs. The team that sold it also has to deliver it, so a coordination role is invented to protect delivery. The coordinator needs information the job system doesn’t hold, so a spreadsheet appears. The spreadsheet needs maintaining, so a weekly meeting appears. Three years on, the contract is long finished—and the coordinator, the spreadsheet and the meeting are still there, now routing everything, because by then they’re how the place works.

Eventually the business develops an informal operating model alongside the formal one. The capable person everyone relies on, because they know how to navigate the gaps, is usually carrying it. And the informal model may be doing most of the work.

There are recognisable signals. Decisions take longer than they should. People are busy but progress is slow. Meetings multiply. Work gets handed backwards and forwards. Managers spend more and more of their time resolving problems between teams.

Customers may still be satisfied, revenue may still be growing, the business may remain profitable—but maintaining that performance requires more coordination, intervention and effort than it once did. The business still works. It just doesn’t work as well as it could. That isn’t a verdict on the people. It’s a question about the conditions they’re working inside.

A business might respond to slow decisions with a new approval process—but if decisions are slow because authority is unclear, another process makes them slower. It might respond to poor collaboration with leadership development—but if teams are measured against competing objectives, better relationships won’t resolve the conflict. It might introduce technology to improve efficiency—but if the underlying workflow is poorly designed, automation makes an ineffective process happen faster.

The important question is what is producing the result. Answering it means tracing the visible effect backwards through how the business actually operates.

The business that exists today may be very different from the one its original operating arrangements were built to support—different customers, different people, different services, a different scale. Its strategy may have evolved without corresponding changes to responsibility, authority, information and capability.

Redesign begins by understanding the business as it now exists. What is it trying to achieve? How is value created? How does work move? Where do decisions sit? What depends on particular people? Where is effort being consumed without creating value?

Some things may need to be simplified. Others strengthened, redistributed or removed. The objective isn’t change for its own sake. It’s to make the way the business works fit the business it has become.

Businesses often wait until something breaks before reconsidering how they operate. But declining performance isn’t the only reason to redesign. Sometimes the opportunity is to remove unnecessary complexity, release capacity, improve decision-making or make the business less dependent on a few people. Sometimes it’s simply recognising that the business has outgrown arrangements that once served it well—and the best time to see that is while it’s still performing.

How much of the way your business works today was decided, and how much accumulated? The business doesn’t have to be failing for the way it works to need changing.

Once you start noticing what accumulated rather than what was decided, it’s hard to stop seeing it. Untangling it is different work. The informal model is carrying real load, and it has to be redesigned while it’s still carrying it.