There's an old systems-thinking line: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it's getting. A beverage manufacturer's leadership team — one facility, but functions operating in silos — was well-intentioned and hardworking, and getting exactly the results their organizational design was built to produce. Just not the results they wanted.
Facing underperformance across sites, leadership's instinct was the one most leadership teams reach for first: the fix was more effort. Tighter execution. More accountability conversations. Sharper KPIs, posted more visibly, reviewed more often.
"Organizational design" here means something specific — not an org chart, but the full system underneath the results: structure, competence, information access, incentives, process, and decision rights. All six move together. This engagement, deliberately, focused on three of them.
Effort wasn't the constraint. Decisions across functions were running on local opinion and judgment — not because people lacked discipline, but because the information a decision-maker needed simply wasn't reaching them in a form or a timeframe that mattered for the decision in front of them. By the time the right data arrived, the decision had already been made on instinct.
Effort applied against the wrong design just produces a more exhausted version of the same result.
Underneath that, a familiar pattern had taken hold: when something went wrong, the instinct across functions was to look for who else should have caught it, rather than to ask who actually owned the call. That's rarely a character problem. It's what predictably happens when decision rights are unclear — nobody defends a decision they were never clearly given authority over in the first place.
Incentives, meanwhile, were quietly working against the outcome leadership actually wanted — rewarding what got measured within each function, not what genuinely drove performance across the facility as a whole. Nobody had designed it to work that way. It had simply accumulated that way, one well-intentioned local decision at a time.
Rather than push harder against an organizational design working against itself, the engagement redesigned three of its core elements together, deliberately: decision rights — who actually has the authority to decide what, and at which level; information flow — getting the right data to the right decision-maker before the decision, not as a report afterward; and incentives — aligning what got rewarded with what actually mattered to the business, not just what was easiest to measure within one function.
The result was $7M+ in tracked, validated savings across two years — delivered not by asking people to work harder inside the existing design, but by changing the design itself.
Most performance problems that present as an execution problem are actually an organizational-design problem wearing an execution problem's clothes. Fixing the visible symptom without touching the design underneath just resets the clock until the same result reappears.
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