When People Outgrow Structure

What two engagements, a decade apart, taught me about organizational misalignment and how to address it before it becomes permanent.

The most revealing question you can ask inside any organization is not what each division does, but how they describe the divisions they depend on.

In late 2011, I was retained by an international, non-governmental organization (NGO) to conduct an independent assessment ahead of a planned realignment between two of its divisions. One focused on policy and campaigns, the other on communications. What I found, through structured interviews across both teams, was an organization with genuine talent on both sides of a divide and an almost complete breakdown in the shared understanding of what each side was for.

The communications team felt disrespected; consulted last, handed fully formed briefs, asked to execute rather than advise. The campaigns team felt underserved, expecting a nimble strategic partner and finding instead a function that pushed back on urgency. Both characterizations held real truth. Neither told the whole story.

The tension had calcified into a structural problem both sides had come to accept as simply the way things were. The policy and campaigns division had grown significantly. Demand on the communications function had increased by as much as forty percent over three years but the structural relationship between the two divisions had not kept pace. The model that was working, where staff worked directly embedded inside campaign teams, was flourishing. Everything outside it was not.

What an external assessment can do in that environment is give the organization a mirror. Not to assign blame but to identify the patterns clearly enough that leadership can see the structural choices they are actually making, rather than the ones they intend to make. The deeper finding was straightforward: the organization needed to decide what kind of relationship it wanted between these two divisions, because the current structure was trying to have it both ways and succeeding at neither.

A different kind of complexity

Almost exactly ten years later, the challenge I encountered with a UN agency communications team was different in almost every dimension and almost identical in one.

The team was operating inside an active conflict response. Small, distributed, working under sustained pressure across a country where the humanitarian situation required constant communication to multiple audiences simultaneously. The work began with a structured audit that included strategy alignment, audience targeting, message consistency, brand perception and then moved into individualized coaching for each team member, a crisis toolkit for frontline staff, and a sustained mentoring phase for the senior communications officer.

What the audit revealed was a capable team working at high volume without a sufficiently shared framework for what they were trying to achieve. They knew their context deeply. What they lacked was the structured distance to see their own work as others were seeing it. The capacity building had to work with that reality by being immediately applicable, moving between a coaching conversation and a concrete deliverable within the same week.

What the decade between them confirms

A decade apart, on opposite ends of the organizational stability spectrum, both engagements came down to the same dynamic: teams with more capability than their structure or environment was allowing them to use. In the first case, the barrier was organizational. Two divisions that had grown apart as the institution expanded, without anyone redesigning the relationship between them. In the second, the barrier was environmental. The pace and pressure of a humanitarian response that left little room for the reflective work that builds lasting capability.

In both cases, what an outside engagement provided was something genuinely difficult to create from within: the structured clarity to see the work as it actually was, and the space to choose something different.

This pattern is not unique to communications, or to NGOs, or to crisis environments. It appears when an organization grows faster than its internal design and the work being done has outpaced the structure meant to support it. The divisions most affected are usually the ones that have been quietly absorbing the cost of a misalignment they were not involved in creating.

The organizations that address that misalignment before it becomes permanent tend to emerge from whatever transition they are navigating with their teams intact and their capacity to deliver the work ahead, stronger.

The signals are usually visible before leadership is ready to act on them: two divisions that have stopped collaborating and started competing, a capable team that is consistently described as difficult to work with, planning processes that exclude the people who will have to implement the plan, or a function that was designed for an earlier version of the organization and has never been redesigned. None of these are people problems. They are structural ones. And they are more addressable than they appear once someone is willing to name them clearly.

If your organization is facing similar misalignment, let's connect and explore how to move forward.