Who Is the Architect of the Organization?

From Isolated Decisions to Conscious Organizational Design

An organization does not function the way it does by chance. Its structure, processes, recognition systems, leaders, and cultural practices are the result of decisions. The question is: who is connecting those decisions to ensure that the organization achieves its intended results?

1. “We’ve Always Done It This Way”: An Explanation or a Warning Sign?

Why do we have this organizational structure? How does corporate strategy connect with departmental plans? Why do we tolerate certain behaviors from leaders, even when they contradict our stated values? Why do some individuals hold critical positions without possessing the necessary competencies? Why might a high-performing employee receive the same recognition as someone who barely meets minimum expectations?

And there are more questions: Does anyone consciously shape organizational culture, or do we simply expect it to evolve on its own? When an individual consistently underperforms, are there consequences and improvement plans? If we claim to promote teamwork, why do our evaluation, recognition, and compensation systems continue to reward individual results exclusively?

Frequently, the answers are familiar:

• “We’ve always done it this way.”

• “That position reports directly to management.”

• “The compensation system doesn’t allow us to do it differently.”

• “That’s an HR issue.”

• “Each department has its own objectives.”

These responses may describe genuine constraints, but they may also reveal something deeper: the absence of an integrated perspective on how organizational decisions connect, reinforce, or contradict one another.

Consider a company that declares collaboration to be one of its strategic values but evaluates its executives solely on the results of their respective departments. Its messaging promotes cooperation, while its reward and accountability system encourages internal competition. What behavior should we expect?

Or imagine an organization seeking to improve customer experience while maintaining approval processes that delay decisions, performance indicators focused on internal efficiency, and responsibilities distributed across multiple departments without clear accountability for the final outcome.

In both cases, the problem is not necessarily a lack of employee commitment. It may lie in the way the system in which people operate has been designed.

Jay Galbraith, through his Star Model, emphasizes the need to align strategy, structure, processes, reward systems, and people. Tushman and Nadler, in turn, highlight the importance of aligning organizational design with the work the organization needs to perform and the mechanisms required to coordinate it.

The central idea is straightforward: changing one component in isolation does not guarantee that the others will automatically adjust.

Kaplan and Norton offer another essential perspective through the strategy map and its cause-and-effect logic. In the Balanced Scorecard framework, learning and growth capabilities support internal processes; these processes enable the organization to deliver a value proposition that meets customer needs and, ultimately, contributes to financial results.

In other words, financial and customer objectives guide the definition of internal process and learning and growth objectives. This is teleology applied in its purest form.

These relationships represent a logical process reflected in strategic planning: first defining financial and customer objectives, and then structuring the processes and learning capabilities required to achieve them.

Organizational design should follow the same logic: strengthen the capabilities and processes that drive desired outcomes rather than beginning by changing the organizational chart.

The question, therefore, is not merely whether we have an appropriate structure, but whether decisions regarding responsibilities, capabilities, processes, leadership, and incentives are aligned with the strategy and contribute to achieving the expected results.

2. The Organizational Architect: Technical, Human, and Systems Understanding

An architect understands the needs of those who will use a space, defines how it should function, integrates its components, and anticipates the consequences of design decisions.

Organizations need an equivalent capability.

However, organizational interventions are often entrusted to individuals with extensive expertise in their own functional areas but without a sufficiently broad understanding of the system as a whole.

From our perspective, this capability is expressed through three fundamental competencies:

– Translating strategy into design decisions. Understanding the business, its value proposition, and strategic priorities; defining which capabilities are required, where decisions should be made, and which responsibilities, processes, and incentives must support execution.

– Thinking systemically and diagnosing based on evidence. Understanding interdependencies and combining strategic, operational, financial, customer, and talent indicators with interviews and observations of actual work. The purpose is not to accumulate data, but to distinguish symptoms from root causes and anticipate unintended consequences.

– Understanding behavior and facilitating difficult decisions. Recognizing how culture, leadership, interests, and power dynamics influence the organization; bringing contradictions into the open, clarifying decision rights, and translating diagnostic findings into measurable interventions.

Robert Greene, in The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature, encourages us to examine how interests, motivations, emotions, and power dynamics influence decisions.

In organizations, design is not always the result of the most coherent or best-structured alternative. It may also reflect the influence of those who control resources, information, positions, or decision-making authority.

Recognizing this reality does not mean assuming malicious intent behind every decision. Rather, it means examining the foundations of those decisions, their consequences, and the interests that may influence them.

As Cameron and Quinn demonstrate, organizational culture extends beyond published values. It also encompasses shared assumptions and practices that guide behavior.

If a leader achieves financial results at the expense of their team and such behavior is tolerated, the organization sends a message about what it truly considers important.

Similarly, if innovation is declared a priority but every reasonable mistake is penalized and no resources are allocated for experimentation, the system undermines the very behavior it claims to encourage.

Organizational decisions also distribute power: they determine who has access to information, who makes decisions, who controls resources, and who is accountable for results.

For this reason, a systems perspective must combine technical analysis with an understanding of human relationships.

It is not enough to design a coherent solution on paper; it is essential to understand how that solution will function in practice.

One of Russell L. Ackoff’s most important contributions is his reminder that a system cannot be fully understood by studying its parts in isolation. The behavior of the whole also depends on the relationships among its components.

This perspective is essential to organizational design.

A structural modification can change information flows, responsibilities, and the speed of decision-making. A compensation policy can strengthen collaboration or encourage individualistic behavior. A performance indicator can improve the results of one department while simultaneously undermining overall organizational performance.

Finally, understanding Structural Capital from Steven Alter’s perspective requires recognizing the connections among customers, products and services, value-creation processes, technology, information, and participants.

Alter’s methodology seeks something similar to what SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, Customers) seeks in process characterization.

Interestingly, almost everyone completes these frameworks, but few truly understand them.

3. How Can Organizations Develop This Capability?

Recognizing the importance of the organizational architect is only the first step.

To ensure that this responsibility is exercised systematically, we propose three practical actions:

– Establish a review forum within senior management. Not every company needs an independent committee. This responsibility can be incorporated into strategy, performance, or transformation meetings. What matters is explicitly reviewing the alignment among strategy, structure, capabilities, processes, leadership, and incentives, while assigning accountability for the agreed decisions.

– Design based on evidence and evaluate results. Every significant intervention should begin with a diagnosis, clearly identify the problem it intends to solve, and define how its impact will be evaluated. If customer service is experiencing delays, for example, it is advisable to analyze response times, approvals, handoffs between departments, and clarity of responsibilities before reorganizing teams or acquiring technology. Measuring what matters is more useful than measuring everything.

– Design backward from desired outcomes and embrace learning. Russell L. Ackoff, through systems thinking and interactive planning, encourages us to define what we want to achieve before determining how to achieve it. Before creating a process, changing a structure, or implementing a system, we should ask: What outcome do we want to produce, and for whom? What capabilities and behaviors are required? How will we know whether the design works? Organizational architecture must be reviewed periodically to close gaps and learn from both intended and unintended consequences.

Ackoff’s approach complements the logic of Kaplan and Norton’s strategy map.

The strategy map helps explain how organizational capabilities and internal processes should contribute to the customer value proposition and financial results.

Teleology takes the discussion further by asking what ultimate purposes justify those objectives and what organizational design will make their achievement possible.

The organizational architect translates this connection into coherent responsibilities, competencies, processes, decisions, and performance indicators.

A simple matrix can help identify contradictions: What strategic result are we seeking? What behavior does it require? Which processes, indicators, or recognition systems facilitate or hinder that behavior?

If the answers reveal that the organization declares one priority, measures another, and rewards a third, there is a design gap that deserves attention.

A simple matrix can be used to examine the alignment of key organizational components.

This matrix is not intended to replace a comprehensive organizational diagnosis. It is a tool for guiding conversations and making potential inconsistencies visible.

When a gap is identified, the question should not be limited to who is failing, but should also examine which aspects of organizational design enable or hinder the expected behavior.

The frequency of these reviews should respond to the organization’s needs rather than become a bureaucratic obligation.

Some decisions will require immediate attention; others will need to be observed over a sufficient period to understand their effects.

What matters is that the organization learns to treat its architecture as a management variable that can—and should—be consciously reviewed.

4. The Organizational Architect and Senior Management’s Responsibility

Organizational architecture cannot be fully delegated to Human Resources, external consultants, or a specialist.

These functions contribute methodologies, analysis, and guidance, but decisions regarding strategy, priorities, authority, resources, performance, and culture directly involve those who lead the organization.

Every time senior management tolerates a contradiction between stated values and a leader’s behavior, assigns responsibilities without sufficient authority, or maintains performance indicators that compete with one another, it contributes to shaping the organization.

The same is true when management avoids making a necessary decision.

For this reason, the role of the organizational architect is closely connected to four leadership competencies that we have addressed in various management development programs:

• Setting the direction: Defining the purpose, priorities, and conditions that guide action.

• Demonstrating personal effectiveness: Acting consistently, taking responsibility, and turning decisions into results.

• Engaging others to take action: Building agreements, aligning efforts, and mobilizing people toward shared objectives.

• Building capabilities: Developing the competencies, processes, and conditions required to achieve sustainable results.

These competencies do not replace organizational design tools. Instead, they enable decisions to become leadership practices and genuine execution capabilities.

Well-conceived organizational architecture requires leaders who can understand it, take responsibility for it, and transform it when it no longer responds to the needs of the business.

A Final Reflection: Who Is Really Designing Your Organization?

Every organization has an architecture, even when no one has explicitly designed it.

Its structures, processes, recognition systems, leadership practices, and decision-making mechanisms reflect conscious decisions, inherited habits, and solutions that may have been useful in the past but no longer respond to current needs.

The question is not whether a formal organizational architect exists, but whether the organization has the capacity to review its decisions, understand their interdependencies, and transform them when they no longer contribute to its strategic objectives.

At Euro Business Coach, we invite senior management teams to reflect on three questions:

• Does our organizational architecture align with our strategy and the relationships outlined in our strategy map?

• Do our processes, capabilities, leadership practices, and recognition systems reinforce one another?

• Who identifies organizational gaps, drives the necessary decisions, and verifies their results?

An organization does not improve simply by changing its structure.

It improves when it understands how it operates, questions what it has normalized, and consciously designs the conditions required to achieve its goals.

Who truly plays the role of organizational architect in your company?

We invite you to share your experiences and reflections.