“The next major frontier is redesigning the organisation as an ecosystem – not just optimising individual parts of it.”
Business as usual is no longer adequate. That was the opening slide of a presentation I wrote in the 1990s – and I could deliver it word for word today. The disrupting forces have changed: back then it was globalisation and the internet; now it is AI and the largest intergenerational workforce shift in history. But the core structural problem in organisations has barely moved.
After more than thirty years designing and implementing team-based structures, I have come to one inescapable conclusion: the hierarchy is not just inefficient, it is actively working against the results leaders say they want.
Thirty Years of Transformation. Same Stuck Organisations.
The consulting industry has given us business process re-engineering, lean, agile, digital transformation, customer experience, and now AI adoption. Each has delivered real value. But here is what I notice across all of them: nearly every one was designed to optimise the existing organisation, not challenge its underlying architecture.
BPR redesigned processes. Customer experience redesigned the journey. Agile redesigned projects. AI is redesigning tasks. What none of them tackled was the way the organisation itself is structured – how decisions are made, where accountability sits, and whether people are genuinely empowered to act.
Approximately 70% of organisations are still running on a traditional hierarchy or fixed matrix. The evidence that team-based structures outperform them has existed for over forty years. The gap between knowing and doing is the most expensive problem in business today.
The Burning Platform Has Never Been More Critical
Three forces are converging right now to make this impossible to defer.
- AI is accelerating change beyond what hierarchies can absorb. The average organisation has six layers of decision-making. That approval chain is no longer governance – it is drag.
- Gen Y and Z now make up more than 60% of most workforces. They reject hierarchy and control, they demand autonomy, and they bring AI fluency that is rapidly becoming table stakes. You cannot retain them in a structure designed for a 1950s factory.
- Cost pressure is forcing choices that may do more harm than good. Haphazard downsizing creates change fatigue that undermines the very transformation programs organisations need most.
There has never been a greater burning platform to redesign how organisations work.
AI Is Not the Villain – Leaders Are Making a Choice
IKEA began implementing AI customer service tools in 2022. When the technology reached the point of handling 57% of customer conversations, the easy path would have been 8,500 layoffs. Instead, IKEA recognised that the remaining 43% of conversations required something AI could not replicate – complex design questions, spatial reasoning, genuine human judgment. They retrained their people as room design specialists, opened new revenue streams, and grew sales by close to five billion dollars over five years.
AI is not the bad guy. Behind every redundancy there is a leader with a spreadsheet making a choice. That leader could make a different choice – to grow their people, enrich the work, and build an organisation that AI enables rather than one that uses it as a cost-cutting tool.
Stages of Organisation Structures
Organisational design is not a binary choice between hierarchy and self-management. It is a continuum – and skipping stages is one of the most common reasons change programs fail.
Your Blueprint: Three Things in Alignment
The most dangerous assumption before any redesign is that calling people a team will change how work gets done. It will not. A real move to team-based design is a revolution – in decision rights, accountability, information flow, and how leadership is understood and practised.
A best-fit blueprint comes from three things: where you want to go (your strategy), what you need to solve (your burning challenge – slow decisions, silos, disengagement, cost), and where you are now (your genuine readiness for change). Whatever your starting point, move one stage at a time – the Team Maturity Model maps the stages between traditional hierarchy and full self-direction, and each one builds the capability the next demands. For example, if you are currently a hierarchy or matrix, don’t leap straight to agile or self-directed teams. Move first to an intermediate stage – clustered teams or chains of teams. Pilot with your strongest leaders. Build the capability before you shift the structure.
The organisations that will define the next decade are not the ones with the cleverest AI tools. They are the ones that redesigned how their people work together – with real autonomy, clear accountability, and the structural freedom to move at the speed the world demands. That redesign starts with a single step in the right direction.
© Learning Ventures · Evelyn Moolenburgh