Organisational Design
How organisations structure themselves to execute strategy: units, hierarchies, decision rights, coordination mechanisms, roles and their fit with the work to be done. It is the discipline of the org chart and everything the org chart cannot show.
Organisational structure is spatial demand's deep grammar: interdependency, adjacency, team boundaries and coordination needs all originate in how the organisation is designed. It also moves — reorganisations are the most frequent invalidator of stacking plans and demand models — which makes org design both a primary evidence source and a standing recalibration trigger.
- What coordination and interdependency does this structure actually create?
- Where do formal structure and real work networks diverge?
- What spatial consequences does a proposed reorganisation carry?
- How should workplace models absorb structural change without rebuilding?
- Organisational design research (contingency theory to contemporary operating-model work)
- Org charts, reporting data and decision-rights documentation
- Interdependency evidence from business needs interviews and network data
- Reorganisation history: how often, how deep, with what spatial wake
Adjacency requirements derived from designed coordination needs, verified against actual work networks; stacking plans built with structural-change tolerance (growth and flexibility allocations); reorganisations routed through change impact analysis before, not after, the moves; workplace governance connected to org design governance so neither surprises the other.
Business Needs Interviews
Function-level interviews that map how work is actually performed: processes, interdependencies, adjacencies, focus, confidentiality and operational constraints.
Stacking and Blocking
The allocation of teams, functions and zones across floors and buildings — converting adjacency evidence, capacity models and building constraints into a spatial distribution.
Assumption Recalibration
The continuous governance of the assumption register — monitoring divergence, acting on triggers, and regenerating affected models before the strategy quietly becomes fiction.
Establish a Leadership Team
Form the senior, cross-functional body that owns strategic principles and carries workplace trade-offs.
Designing the workplace to the org chart: formal structure taken as coordination truth when the real work networks routinely run across it. The chart is a hypothesis about how work flows; the evidence layer exists to test it.
The co-design of organisational and spatial structure — treating them as one design problem — is intellectually obvious and practically rare; the integration methods remain underdeveloped.