The situation
Consider an organisation that reorganises to improve coordination between three regional units. Two years earlier, the same organisation had reorganised in the opposite direction — giving those same units greater autonomy. Viewed side by side, the two moves look contradictory, even a little embarrassing: an organisation that apparently can’t decide what kind of structure it wants, restructuring its way back toward where it started.
Both strategy documents, read individually, made sense. The autonomy-focused reorganisation was introduced because central decision-making had become a bottleneck — regional teams were waiting too long for approvals that a more local structure could grant quickly. The coordination-focused reorganisation was introduced because the autonomy structure had, in turn, produced real divergence between the three units — different processes, different customer experiences, decisions that made sense locally and created friction nationally. Each document accurately diagnosed a real problem. Each reorganisation solved the problem the previous one had created.
Employees living through both changes experienced something more disorienting than the leadership narrative around either individual reorganisation suggested. From their vantage point, the organisation had spent two years pointing in opposite directions, each time with equal conviction. That experience — whiplash rather than a coherent sense of directional progress — is itself a real cost of treating a trade-off as a series of one-off corrections rather than naming it as a trade-off from the outset.
What the research says
The easy interpretation is that leadership was chasing fashions, or that one of the two designs was simply wrong and the other is the correction. Larry Greiner’s research on organisational growth, first published in Harvard Business Review and republished as an HBR Classic with additional commentary in 1998, points toward a less comfortable but more accurate reading.
Both interpretations offer a kind of comfort the trade-off reading doesn’t. “Chasing fashions” implies the organisation simply needs more discipline next time. “One design was wrong” implies the organisation now knows the right answer and can stop second-guessing it. The trade-off reading offers neither comfort — it suggests the organisation should expect to keep managing this particular tension indefinitely, with no single structure representing a permanent resolution, which is a considerably less satisfying conclusion to reach even when it happens to be the accurate one.
Greiner’s central argument was that organisations move through phases of growth, and that the practices which resolve one phase’s central problem become, in time, the source of the next phase’s crisis. He described managers living through this as “the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.” Crucially, his framing wasn’t that the earlier practice was a mistake — it was the right response to the problem the organisation had at the time. The difficulty is that solving that problem creates a different one, and the natural response is to solve the new problem, which can in turn recreate conditions closer to the old one.
Applied to this scenario, both reorganisations were reasonable. The autonomy structure correctly addressed a real bottleneck. The coordination structure correctly addressed the real divergence that autonomy produced. What’s actually happening across the two-year span isn’t indecision — it’s an organisation oscillating between two poles of a genuine trade-off between local responsiveness and coordinated consistency, treating each swing as if it were a correction of the previous mistake, when it may really be evidence that this particular tension doesn’t have a single settled answer.
What was specific and what generalises
Some elements of this situation are particular to the organisation involved — the specific units, the specific bottleneck, the specific timeline of two years between moves. What generalises, and what Greiner’s broader research supports, is the underlying shape: that a meaningful share of what looks like inconsistent strategy is actually an organisation managing a genuine trade-off rather than solving a genuine problem, without having named the trade-off as such.
That distinction matters for how a strategy document should be read and judged. A problem, once solved, should stay solved. A trade-off, once “solved” in one direction, will generate pressure to move back toward the other — not because the solution failed, but because the trade-off itself never went away. Autonomy versus coordination is one of the more recognisable examples, but it’s not the only one; similar oscillations show up around centralised versus local decision-making, and around standardisation versus responsiveness to local context. Reading a strategy document as a permanent answer to any of these, rather than as a current position on an ongoing tension, sets an organisation up to interpret its own next reorganisation as a failure of the last one — when it may simply be the same pendulum, swinging again.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Which of the organisation’s past structural changes addressed a genuine problem, and which addressed one side of a trade-off that will likely need rebalancing again?
- When a new reorganisation is proposed, does the strategy document name the trade-off it’s choosing, or does it present the choice as a final answer?
- Looking back over the organisation’s history of structural change, is there a pattern of oscillation that nobody has yet named as such?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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