The finding
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko, both then leading Bain & Company’s Global Organization Practice, surveyed executives at more than 350 global companies and published the results in Harvard Business Review. The headline figure is worth sitting with: only around 15% of those surveyed said they worked in an organisation that helps the business outperform its competitors. The other 85% were, in effect, describing organisations whose structure was not actively working in their favour — and in most cases, that structure looked entirely conventional on paper.
The org chart those companies used to explain themselves to new hires, investors and each other told a story of clean lines and clear reporting relationships. What it didn’t capture was where decisions genuinely got made, revisited, or quietly stalled. Rogers and Blenko’s research located decision-making bottlenecks at four recurring points: between global and local levels, between the centre and the business unit, between one function and another, and between internal teams and outside partners. None of those four sits on a reporting line. All of them sit between boxes, in the white space the chart doesn’t draw.
That the figure sits at roughly 15% rather than closer to zero is itself informative. It suggests this isn’t a mark of poorly run organisations specifically — the survey covered large, established global companies, presumably with reasonably competent leadership by most conventional measures. The gap between org chart and decision reality appears to be closer to a default condition of scale than a failure specific to any particular company culture or leadership team.
What it means in practice
Consider an organisation where a team receives seven objectives for the quarter, each one described as critical by a different senior stakeholder. On the org chart, every one of those stakeholders has a legitimate claim — they each head a function the team reports into indirectly, or supports directly. The team has capacity for perhaps four of the seven. When they ask which three should wait, each stakeholder is willing to concede that theirs could — but none of them has the standing to make that call for someone else’s priority.
This is not a resourcing problem in the way it first appears. It is a structural one: the organisation has delegated prioritisation downward, to people without the authority to actually prioritise between claims that sit above their own reporting line. The chart shows who the team reports to. It does not show who has the authority to tell one stakeholder their objective is waiting. In many organisations, nobody formally does — and the org chart’s tidy hierarchy quietly implies that someone must, which is part of why the gap goes unnoticed for so long.
Jay Galbraith’s work on organisation design, published in Interfaces, offers a useful lens on why this happens as organisations grow. His argument was that organisational form should track the amount of uncertainty a task involves — as uncertainty rises, more information has to move sideways between people and functions for decisions to get made well. A hierarchy is efficient at moving information up and down. It was never designed to move it sideways, and most organisations don’t build a deliberate substitute; they let it happen informally, through relationships, until the informal version stops keeping pace with growth.
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Questions worth considering
- Where in the organisation does the decision to not do something actually get made — and is that the same place the org chart implies it should be?
- When two reasonable priorities compete for the same team’s time, who currently has the standing to choose between them?
- How would a leadership team know if that authority had quietly gone missing, rather than simply being hard to find?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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