Every company is aiming for growth and development. But sooner or later, any growing company runs into the same set of questions: which direction should we move in next? What makes us unique, and how do we want to stand apart from competitors going forward? Can we run more efficiently? What steps would help us better match external conditions? At that point, it becomes obvious that strategy work is needed. Owners and managers — either on their own or with outside consultants — put together that document. But once it comes time to actually implement the strategy, many companies start running into serious difficulty.

The most common obstacle turns out to be the organisational structure itself — its misalignment with the strategy. You can think of structure as a riverbed the water flows through: if you don’t change the riverbed, the water ends up at the exact same place it always did.

But finding that connection isn’t straightforward. The choice has to be made across a huge number of variables. What’s more, changing an organisational structure actually takes even longer than developing the strategy itself — it’s a genuinely complex process. And if we go by Alfred Chandler’s view, strategy comes first, and structure is built afterward.

Yet we often see successful companies dragging their feet on changing their structure. Leaders have specific doubts or fears, which fall into four groups.

Because external conditions are shifting fairly quickly across most industries, a company being slow or inefficient about restructuring puts the entire strategy implementation at risk — and, ultimately, the viability of the business itself. Leaders need to use the right tools, applied skilfully, to choose and build the business model that’s genuinely optimal for the company.

One genuinely important question is how different structural variables influence one another, and how that ultimately shows up in the company’s performance. Take price and service quality, for example. If a company raises its prices while service quality rises too, the consumer will generally find that acceptable. But the company’s structure needs to include the specific component that actually drives that quality improvement. Should you introduce a reward system that ties pay to employee performance? Yes, that makes sense — but only if employees actually have the authority to make the decisions that matter. And the broader that authority is, the more it makes sense to tie pay closely to final results. Broadly speaking, the more decentralised a company becomes, the more attention motivation deserves. These examples show how individual variables connect to one another: as we lean more heavily on one variable, the potential return from another one grows alongside it.

The reverse can happen too. Say a company invests serious money in a flexible production structure, but its product range stays narrow, fails to attract customers through variety, and the company lacks the capability to bring new products to market quickly. In that case, the money spent on production has effectively gone to waste. So when building a growth strategy, a leader first needs to identify the key factors that will actually determine the company’s success — and at the same time, account for the structural components that drive, or could influence, those factors.

If a company is already developing successfully right now, it’s also worth analysing exactly which structural principles are driving that success. Those findings need to feed into how change gets planned, so the foundation of current success doesn’t get torn down while the groundwork for future reform is still being laid. It also helps optimise costs once implementation actually begins. To put it as an image: if you’re standing on one mountain peak and want to reach another, you should plot your route to stay as high as possible between the two summits — while accepting that you’ll sometimes need to descend along the way. What matters most is that the leader understands those small descents are inevitable, and not a reason to panic or abandon the goal altogether.