More companies are creating organization design roles. Not as a nice-to-have, but as a real function. They're hiring for it, building teams around it, and paying well for people who can do it.

When I run trainings on organization design, leaders always ask the same question: "How do I know if someone on my team can do this work?" It's a good question, because the answer isn't obvious.

The best organization designers I've met are all exceptional diagnosticians.

They can look at an organization and see what's really going on. When a leadership team says "our problem is we need clearer roles," a good designer knows that's rarely the actual problem. It's a symptom. The real issue might be that three different parts of the strategy require ownership of the same resources. Or the incentive system rewards individual performance when the work requires collaboration. Or there's no forum where cross-functional decisions actually get made, so everything escalates or stalls.

This diagnostic ability is like being a good doctor. You have to listen to what the patient says is wrong, but you also have to know what questions and tests will reveal the underlying cause. Why is this team constantly missing deadlines? Is it a resource problem, a priority problem, or a structural problem? The answers look similar on the surface but require completely different solutions.

And like medicine, you can't diagnose well without having seen it before. That's where pattern recognition comes in. After you've watched enough organizations struggle with the same fundamental issues, you start to recognize them faster. You've seen what happens when companies try to operate with a simple structure but complex strategy. You know what it looks like when decision rights are unclear versus when the system creates overlapping authorities. These patterns repeat across industries and company sizes, but you only spot them through repetition.

The good diagnosticians are also deeply curious about how things actually work. They don't accept the official story. They want to know how decisions really get made, not how the org chart says they get made. They'll ask about expense approvals and meeting schedules and email chains because they're genuinely interested in the machinery of the organization. This curiosity isn't performative. They actually want to understand the system.

But here's the thing: you can be a brilliant diagnostician and still fail at organization design if you can't work with people. The technical skills only get you halfway there.

The designers who actually succeed know how to ask questions that make people think differently. They can surface conflict without making it personal. They know when to push and when to let a leadership team work through something themselves. People want to work with them because they make hard conversations easier, not harder.

This consulting skill matters because organization design isn't about handing down expert answers. Your job is to guide a leadership team to discover the right solution for their context. That means being comfortable with ambiguity, managing group dynamics, and knowing that sometimes the best thing you can do is ask one more clarifying question instead of jumping to recommendations.

Most companies don't realize they need this capability until they're stuck. They've reorganized three times in two years and things keep getting worse. Or they've grown fast and nobody can figure out who decides what. That's when they discover that moving boxes around an org chart isn't the same as fixing the underlying problems.

The need for this skill is only accelerating. AI is forcing companies to rethink everything about how work gets done. Which decisions can be automated? Which roles need to change? How do teams collaborate when half the work is being done by models? These aren't just technology questions. They're organization design questions. And the companies that answer them well will be the ones with people who can diagnose what's actually happening, recognize the patterns as they emerge, and guide leadership through the messy work of restructuring around new capabilities.

You can't learn this from a book. You need the experience library, the curiosity, and the ability to help others see what you're seeing.