Running Organisations
A personal perspective on structure, scale, and sustainable execution.
How I Became Interested in Organisational Structure
I didn’t set out to become interested in organisational design.
I was originally interested in personal performance. I loved productivity systems (Tim Ferriss FTW 🤘). I tinkered endlessly with tools, workflows, time management frameworks. I believed that if something felt hard, the solution was better discipline, clearer leadership, or stronger personal accountability.
I genuinely believed that great teams were simply the sum of highly responsible individuals. I had led large student organisations at university, served as a teaching assistant for a course on Leadership and Teamwork, and even became a certified Agile practitioner. Personal effectiveness felt like the master lever.
That belief followed me into digital agencies, media agencies, and startups. Across industries and scales, the assumption was similar: if something breaks, we either hired wrong or someone needs coaching.
For a long time, I agreed.
Learning My Lesson The Hard Way
At one point, I was leading international media campaigns across large numbers of countries for major clients. The work was intricate and high-stakes — part strategy, part intense cross-market coordination.
When I was visibly strained, the company invested in an executive coach. It was well-intentioned, and aligned with our shared belief: if something feels overwhelming, focus on personal effectiveness.
The coach was thoughtful and experienced, and our sessions revolved around resilience, stress management, and time management. All valuable topics.
But they did not help me at all.
In fact, I remember showing her my immaculately organised Trello board and asking how I could possibly structure it better.
She had no answer.
To cut the long story short — I burnt out, eventually.
I went to therapy. I examined my patterns. I promised myself I would live a more “balanced” life. I even signed up for that expensive gym membership with a huge attached spa.
But that's not the end of the story.
A year later, I learned that my role was handed to another person who used to work below me.
He burned out too.
That was the moment it stopped feeling personal.
This wasn’t about discipline, resilience, or effort.
It was structural.
And once you see structural strain clearly, you start noticing it everywhere.
What I Learned About Structure and Chaos
Once I started looking at organisations through a structural lens, certain patterns repeated:
Structure is often misunderstood. In smaller teams, it’s avoided because it’s assumed to slow things down. In larger ones, it’s assumed to exist — even when no one has deliberately designed it.
As teams grow, coordination effort increases disproportionately. What once worked informally begins to strain. But because the breakdown is gradual, it’s tolerated rather than redesigned.
Leadership promotions rarely include training in structural design. People are promoted for technical excellence or strategic thinking — not for designing decision flows or clarifying ownership boundaries.
And when strain appears, it is frequently misdiagnosed. We hire more senior people. We send leaders to coaching. We introduce new tools. All of which can help — but none of which resolve ambiguity in how work actually moves.
Meanwhile, high performers quietly absorb chaos. Because output is still being delivered, the underlying fragility remains invisible — until it isn’t.
I’ll elaborate on them in a future blog article.
But what is structure anyway?
It is:
❌ Not bureaucracy.
❌ Not layers of approval.
❌ Not a fancier org chart.
Structure is the agreed way your team makes decisions and moves work forward.
For example:
Before someone starts a task, do they already have all the information they need in one place — or do they need to chase three different people for background?
When there is a project, is there a reliable way of tracking status — or do you have to have catch-up meetings with people three times a week just to get a sense of what is going on?
When a decision needs to be made, is it obvious who can make it — or does it float in Slack until someone senior steps in?
When priorities clash, is there a clear way to resolve it — or does the loudest voice win?
If a new hire joins, can they see how things work — or do they need months of tribal knowledge?
That’s how structure makes a difference.
As a kid, I was taught that every good story needs six elements: who, what, when, where, why, and how. I see a lot of similarities in a good organisational structure. The team is clear on:
Who
decides and who executes.
What
is being done — and what “done” actually means.
When
it matters — cadence, deadlines, sequencing.
Where
shared information lives — documentation, communication channels.
Why
this work matters — priorities and trade-offs.
How
conflicts, dependencies, and handoffs are handled.
When any of these elements is unclear, the plot becomes confusing. Meetings multiply. Decisions escalate. People build parallel systems just to keep work moving. Progress depends less on shared clarity and more on personal memory or influence.
Not every problem is structural, but structural problems make existing problems worse
Teams can absolutely struggle because of weak strategy, poor product-market fit, talent gaps, toxic leadership, or financial constraints, just to name a few.
But.
When business is growing, revenue is healthy, and yet the team feels perpetually stretched…
When hiring doesn’t relieve pressure, or even makes things worse…
When progress relies on people making huge personal sacrifices to their time, health, and relationships…
Then structure becomes a likely culprit.
Structural ambiguity amplifies every other problem.
Clarifying it doesn’t solve everything. But without it, very little scales sustainably.
