Essay

The same file, thirteen times. On the organisational design behind change load.

11 September 2026Organisational design

The same change, in the same building, with the same people: processed thirteen times, or four. On the design that determines how far a change has to travel.

A board decides on a new way of working. It is a good decision, carefully prepared, and it fits on a single page.

Follow that page through the building.

It goes to the middle managers first. Four of them receive it, each for their own department. Each of them reads it, translates it into what it means for their own people, and passes it on. On the shop floor, eight employees have to adjust the way they work, each on the basis of a separate translation of the same file.

Count along: the same file, thirteen times. Thirteen times explaining, aligning, deciding and rolling out.

An office building with three floors. At the top two board members hold one amber folder, on the middle floor four managers hold the same folder, and on the ground floor eight employees hold it again. — Same building, same people, same places. The only difference is where the amber folders land: with thirteen people, or with four.

The same office building with the same people. Now only some of them carry the amber folder: one board member, one manager on the middle floor and two employees directly below. The others are working on their own work. — Same building, same people, same places. The only difference is where the amber folders land: with thirteen people, or with four.

The route determines the load

The two images show the same building, with the same people in the same places. The change is the same. What differs is the route it travels.

On the left it has to pass everyone. The work is divided into functions and layers: every department guards a piece of the whole, so every change touches all of them. And every layer translates for the layer below, so the same change is explained several times over, each time a little differently.

On the right, the same change follows one route. The board decides, one department takes it on, and the teams that do the work put it in place. The rest of the building carries on.

That is not a matter of changing less. It is a matter of design.

Where the route comes from

The route a change travels is fixed long before anything changes. It follows from how the work is divided.

An organisation built around functions - purchasing, planning, quality, HR, IT - has five owners for every piece of work. A new way of working for customer service then also touches planning, IT and HR. Each of them has to come along, each with their own agenda, their own priorities and their own meetings. The more finely the work is divided, the faster that adds up: cut it into 25 pieces and you already have 300 possible alignments. More about that on organisational design.

A whiteboard covered in sticky notes: the process for one collective training course, drawn out in seven lanes - business, HR learning, HR service centre, accounting, head of L&D, procurement and supplier. Seventeen numbered steps jump back and forth between the lanes, through the systems GPS, SharePoint, SAP and VIM. — This is what it looks like in real life: a process wall from a working session. One request for a collective training course, from request to payment. Seventeen steps, seven departments, four systems - and an average lead time of a month.

An organisation built around flows - teams that carry a complete piece of work from start to finish - has one owner for that work. A new way of working for customer service then lands with customer service, which has the knowledge, the people and the job control to put it in place.

The essay on change load shows the same thing as a diagram: eight departments that have to move along, against one flow that absorbs it.

What that takes

One owner per piece of work. Not per function, but per result that a client or user receives. Whoever carries the result also carries the change to it.

Decisions close to the work. The team that does the work decides how it can be done differently. That calls for steering with principles rather than rules, as in Everyone waits for green.

A board that sets the direction.What has to change and why is the board’s decision. The route it takes to land follows from the design.

Count it yourself

Take the last change in your organisation and count two things. First: how many people put time into it, explaining it, aligning it, deciding about it or rolling it out? Then: for how many of them did their own work actually change?

Whoever really has to work differently does so on top of the ordinary work, and that comes with changing. For everyone else it is load that yields nothing. The difference between your two numbers is exactly that load - and a different organisational design can bring it down.

Want to see that number for your whole organisation? The Change Map makes it visible, and shows the design behind it.