The finding
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko, both partners at Bain & Company, surveyed executives at more than 350 global companies and found that only about 15% described their organisation as one that helps the business outperform competitors. Their research located decision-making stalls at a small number of recurring bottlenecks — between global and local levels, between centre and business unit, between one function and another, and between an organisation and outside partners. What makes this finding useful is not the taxonomy itself, but what it implies: decision-making difficulty in a growing organisation is disproportionately structural, arising at the seams between parts of the organisation, rather than being evenly distributed or primarily a matter of individual capability.
Donald Sull and colleagues at MIT Sloan reached a related conclusion from a different angle. Studying more than 250 companies, they found the central execution problem was not vertical alignment — most organisations’ planning processes are sound — but cross-unit coordination, precisely the kind of seam Rogers and Blenko describe. Two independently conducted, large-sample studies converging on the same structural location is itself a notable pattern: when something goes wrong at the interface between parts of an organisation, the evidence suggests looking at the seam before looking at the people standing on either side of it. Neither study set out to test the other’s claim, and neither team appears to have been aware of the other’s specific finding when publishing; the convergence is a product of two different methodologies arriving independently at a similar structural conclusion, which is a stronger form of evidence than either finding would be alone.
What it looks like in practice
Consider an organisation where two directors, whose functions depend heavily on each other, have almost no regular contact and communicate mainly through their respective teams. The obvious explanation is a personality difficulty — two senior people who simply don’t get on.
Both describe the relationship as fine. Neither has any diary commitment involving the other. There is no shared objective linking their two functions. There is no forum below board level where both of them are ever present at the same time. The absence of relationship, in other words, is not something either of them is choosing. It is a structural fact: the organisation has created no occasion for these two interdependent roles to actually come together, and nothing about how either of them individually behaves would change that — a distinction worth holding onto, because it means the usual remedy of encouraging the two directors to “build a better relationship” addresses a symptom that was never really about the relationship in the first place.
Why this keeps getting misdiagnosed
The tendency to read this kind of gap as personal rather than structural is understandable, because a personal explanation is immediately actionable in a way a structural one is not — it suggests a conversation, a mediator, a relationship-building exercise. A structural explanation requires looking at the organisation’s design, which is a less familiar and less comfortable place to look, particularly for people embedded inside that same design.
Rogers and Blenko’s finding that only 15% of organisations see themselves as structurally set up to outperform suggests this kind of gap is common rather than exceptional — which itself argues against a purely personal explanation in most individual cases, since personality clashes are not that evenly distributed across 85% of large organisations. Where the picture genuinely varies is in how visible the structural gap is before someone looks for it directly: in some organisations, the missing forum is glaringly absent once named; in others, informal workarounds mask it well enough that the underlying structural gap can persist for years without anyone experiencing acute friction — until, as in this scenario, someone finally asks where two interdependent functions are actually supposed to meet, and finds no answer.
The workaround itself is worth noticing, because it is usually what keeps the underlying gap invisible for so long. Teams below the two directors typically develop informal routines to manage the coordination the structure fails to provide — a shared spreadsheet, a habit of copying the right person on emails, a junior staff member who happens to know both sides well enough to translate between them. These routines genuinely work, which is precisely the problem: they absorb the cost of the missing structure well enough that nobody higher up experiences the gap directly, and the two directors themselves can honestly report that things are fine, because from where they sit, they are.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- For any two functions that depend heavily on each other, is there an actual forum where both are regularly present — or only an assumption that one exists?
- When a working relationship is described as “fine” between two people who rarely interact, what is that assessment actually based on?
- Would the seams Rogers and Blenko describe — global/local, centre/unit, function/function — map onto specific, nameable points in this organisation’s structure?
- What informal workaround is currently absorbing the cost of a structural gap, and what would happen if the person maintaining it left?
This perspective is part of Leadership.
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