Core organization design frameworks.
We know the joke: consultants use way too many frameworks. But these are our favorites. Rooted in Jay Galbraith’s methodology and refined over years of practice, these are the essential models we rely on to guide our clients.
Organization Models
How the parts of the enterprise fit together.
The graphical view
A flexible way to draw an organization model without framework constraints. It shows how the company practically works, is easily understood by most audiences, and works for simple and complex businesses alike.
- Starting a design conversation and testing the edges of what’s plausible
- Simpler businesses, or any audience new to organization models
Example: a global food and beverage company. Which building blocks do you see, and what can you infer?
Organization models are
- Graphic depictions of the organization’s components and how they fit together
- Built from one or more of the four classic structure options
- Anchored to the work and how it flows across the business
- Great for triggering discussion and testing the edges of what’s plausible
Organization models are not
- Reporting relationships, dotted or hard lines
- Org charts
- Anchored around people
- Exhaustive of every organization unit
An organization model is a graphic depiction of the organization’s components and how they fit together. It is built from one or more of the four classic structure options and anchored to the work to be performed and how that work flows across the business. It is not an org chart: it doesn’t show reporting lines, and it isn’t anchored around people. The front/middle/back model makes the tradeoffs explicit: customer-facing coordination in the front, differentiated business accountability in the middle, and shared platforms and functions for scale and expertise in the back.
How we use it with clients
Front-back modeling lets leaders generate several options quickly by moving business, functional, and geographic units among the front, middle, and back. We keep the conversation brief and stress the modularity of the model, then use the visuals to pressure-test how power, authority, and accountability will be allocated. The most useful question is often the simplest: where does the P&L go?