The top 5 mistakes we see in organisational change

‍Restructuring is hard work. Roles change, expectations change, people leave. Yet it can unlock real improvement, if the design and leadership behind it are sound. Healy Jones and Emma Pennington-Foley have been thinking about what makes this work well.

Right now we are seeing more organisational change across the public sector than at any point in recent years. The drivers vary, but the pattern is consistent: pressure to shift resources, adjust priorities, and deliver more effectively.

And it’s not over. With an election year ahead, priorities could shift again, with new ministers bringing new expectations. The cycle could continue.

In our work supporting clients, we’ve seen some common missteps. Across organisations, we see the same mistakes holding leaders back from getting the value they intend. Here are the five we see most often.

1. Using restructuring to address individual performance problems

Restructuring might seem like a tidy way to deal with a performance problem, but it rarely works.

Poor performance often stems from skill gaps, unclear expectations, lack of training, weak management habits, or disengagement. None of these improve because a structure changes. The root cause remains, plus now you’ve got disruption.

The disruption can also spread and grow in ways you weren’t expecting, including upsetting things that before had been working well. You may have removed critical roles without fully understanding how the work gets done. Your high performers can lose clarity, and the confidence among the team can dip.

2. Designing without the right voices in the room

Design decisions are often made by a small senior group. But while they might have the mandate, they don’t always have the operational insight.

When teams doing the work aren’t involved at the right moments, design assumptions go untested. Pain points get missed or downplayed, and workarounds that already exist aren’t understood. When you bring in people with strong operational knowledge – such as managers, advisers, or staff with deep experience – the design improves, and in line with how the work actually happens. As a result, the new design is more likely to stick once implemented.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to open up the metaphorical design tent doors to everyone who’s affected. That would be a lot to manage! But it may mean carefully selecting a handful of staff with solid operational knowledge of what is going on, and unzipping the door early enough to test whether what looks good on paper will work IRL.
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3. Forgetting you have more than one lever

Restructuring often becomes the default response to pressure. It’s visible, it happens relatively fast, and it signals action. But it’s only one lever, and sometimes it’s not the right one.

Leaders also have choices around priorities, workforce planning, capability building, role clarity, investment sequencing, and delivery models. Many organisations overserve certain areas simply because they haven’t made active decisions about what matters most.

For example, our colleague Nancy Guérin wrote recently about the importance of understanding your processes properly as a precondition for trying to make them more efficient, especially right now as many organisations look to AI for efficiency gains. As Nancy says, “you can’t automate a process that doesn’t work well – or worse, a process that isn’t clearly understood or documented.”

When restructuring becomes the automatic move, teams experience more disruption than is necessary – and leaders miss opportunities to build capability or shift focus in more sustainable ways.
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4. Focusing on boxes and lines, not how work gets done

Structure is only one part of design, but we have seen how easy it is for boxes and lines on a page to get all the attention.

Effective change depends on understanding the work itself. What needs to be delivered? What roles exist? Is the skill mix right? Are the capabilities in the right places? What are the processes and systems that will make this model work? This is an opportunity to lift performance and effectiveness through good design.

If your current design is getting in the way of how you should be working, this is your chance to rethink how the work should happen – not just who reports to who.  

5. Assuming people will just figure it out

Restructures are stressful and emotionally charged. Leaders are under pressure, and teams feel the weight of the inevitable uncertainty.

The formal change is only one stage – the harder part comes after. People need time and support to adjust. They may be reporting to new leaders, and they may be learning unfamiliar work in a hurry. Some will be stepping into roles they didn’t expect. Teams also feel the loss of colleagues who haven’t been retained. None of this resolves itself just because the structure is confirmed.

Leaders need a clear plan for stabilising their teams, supporting capability shifts, and managing expectations, both inside and outside the team. Without this, momentum can stall, morale can fall off, and the value of the change may be lost.
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If you’re preparing for change, start here

Ask yourself:

• Are we clear about what we have to deliver?
• Are we delivering at the right service level, without over-servicing?
• What do we know about how our teams are working today? What is working well, and where are the constraints?
• Are our people focussed on the right priorities, or are we spreading effort too thin?
• How much disruption can our teams reasonably absorb right now?
• Where are our strongest performers and our people with the greatest potential, and how are we supporting them through change?

Avoiding the avoidable

Organisational change will always carry with it a certain amount of disruption and pain, but some of the disruption and pain we see and hear about through our work is avoidable.

Change will be smoother, more productive, and more lasting if you as a leader are aware of all the levers and choices available to you (like whose voices to bring into the room) and aware of all the dimensions of the change process (like what support your people need in order to adjust).

Leaders also need to take care they’re not embarking on a restructuring process to fix a problem that doesn’t stem from structures in the first place.

Organisations can shift in ways that genuinely lift performance, but it takes clarity, disciplined design, and strong leadership after the announcement.