Organizational Design
Strategy tools for organizational design.
29 tools
- Adizes' Corporate Lifecycle — Maps organisations onto lifecycle stages, from founding energy through Prime to decline, if unmanaged.
- Catchball Process — Pass a goal up and down the organisation until the target and the people hitting it actually agree.
- Change Management — Move people from the old way of working to the new one deliberately, and reinforce it until it sticks.
- Communication Systems — Design who tells whom what, through which channel, on what cadence - deliberately, not by accident.
- Congruence Model — Check whether your strategy, work, people, structure and culture actually fit together, or fight each other.
- Cultural Web — Map six everyday elements around the organisational paradigm to see what actually drives behaviour.
- Culture Map — Plot eight scales, from communicating to scheduling, to see exactly where cross-border teams actually clash.
- Culture Mapping — Write down what your organisation actually does and believes, from real evidence, then check it against strategy.
- Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) Strategy — Replace management hierarchy with on-chain rules and member voting, so decisions don't need central approval.
- IIDC Strategic Tool — Four stages, Identify, Investigate, Develop, Communicate, so strategy doesn't skip from hunch to announcement.
- Interrelationship Digraph — Map how a set of problems drive each other, then count the arrows, to separate root causes from symptoms.
- Leadership team — What turns senior executives into a real team: mandate, decision rights, honest conflict, mutual accountability.
- MECE Framework — Split a problem into categories that don't overlap and together cover the whole thing.
- McKinsey's 7S Framework — Check that strategy, structure, systems, skills, staff, style and shared values actually align.
- Mintzberg's Organizational Configurations — Five organisational shapes - from simple structure to adhocracy - matched to how coordination actually happens.
- Organization Design Principles — Decide on purpose how work, authority and information flow, instead of letting structure grow by accident.
- Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) — Score your culture as Clan, Adhocracy, Market or Hierarchy, then compare where you are to where you want to be.
- Pentagon and Triangle — Check a strategy's five key elements and the three-stage process that built it, side by side.
- Pyramid of Organisational Development — Layer the seven things an organisation needs to build as it grows, from business concept to corporate culture, so you fix the base before building
- RACI Matrix (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) — Assign Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed to every task so ownership never sits in a gap.
- Resource Audit — List what you actually have and rate what's rare and hard to copy. That's what makes it an advantage.
- Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) — Map who does the work, who owns the outcome, who's consulted, and who's just informed. One task, one accountable person.
- Responsibility Matrices — RACI is the default responsibility matrix, but RASCI, RAPID and DACI variants exist. Pick the one that fits your decision.
- Rethinking Matrix Organization — Map where dual reporting lines actually stall decisions, and give those decisions a single owner.
- Strategic Consistency Triangle — Check that what you say, what you actually do, and what others confirm about you all agree - trust breaks in the gaps between them.
- Top-Down Strategy — Leadership sets the goal, then cascades it down so every level decides against the same target.
- Using the Greiner Curve — Five growth phases, each ending in its own crisis - so you know which one is coming for you.
- VRIO Analysis — Ask four questions of a resource in sequence: valuable, rare, hard to copy, organised to use. Where it fails names your real edge.
- Weisbord's Six-Box Model — Diagnose six boxes, purposes, structure, relationships, rewards, leadership, mechanisms, to find where it's actually stuck.