Organisational boundaries have broken down.

It is easy to laugh at how Hollywood has often over estimated the pace of technological and societal change in movies like Back to the Future,Bladerunner, or The Terminator. But on the flip side, we are typically guilty of underestimating how much things have actually changed. The reality is that the last three decades have seen truly incredible changes. Not least in how organisations are structured and run:

• The growth of the Internet has transformed communication, with globally distributed teams working seamlessly across multiple continents and time zones (1995 had ~40million Internet users,while 2025 has ~5 billion). ‍
• Ubiquitous mobile computing has led to the dissolution of the working day, with increased flexibility for workers, and increased worker accessibility (out of core hours) for employers (mobile phone penetration was ~1% in 1995, and is ~100% in 2025).‍
• Increased globalisation and the incredible accessibility of air travel have allowed organisations to operate across international borders from day one, and scale rapidly across multiple markets (there were ~1.4bn air travelers in 1995, compared to ~4.6bn in 2019’spre-COVID peak).
• Rather than being a future fantasy, robotics has already led to the displacement of millions of industrial and service workers through redundancy or redeployment (there were very few industrial robots operating in any substantial way in 1995, but there are between 4 and 5million operating in 2025 – and tens of millions of consumer service robots).
• ‘Software eating the world’ has changed the day-to-day for millions of office-workers in every industry, driving a shift away from data entry and typing jobs to knowledge working, and from cubicle working to open plan, collaborative offices (only ~5% of offices were open plan in 1995, and in 2025 ~70% favour that layout).
• The explosion of social media means that even working in a cubicle doesn’t ‘protect’ workers from distraction and outside influence (social really got going in the late nineties with Facebook,but in 2025 the average young professional spends more than 2.5 hours every day actively using social media).
• All of the previous trends mean that worker mobility is commonplace (Gen Z workers change jobs more than 3x more frequently than Boomers). There are no more jobs for life, meaning that employers have to adopt completely different employment strategies.

It is no surprise that these trends are all technological – the innovation and investment in science and technology has exploded in the last 30 years. In 1995 there were only 3 major tech funds vying for investor capital (according to Investment Week), but the last decade has seen tens of thousands of funding rounds completed by tech companies every year.

However, putting it bluntly, most organisations have proved inept at changing their ways of working to take full advantage of these tech innovations. Of course, organisations have been happy to invest in new tech,but the lack of organisational change associated with the investment means that it is typically wasted. Office workers might have regularly used 2-3 different software products in 1995, but this average is now over 11. So-called ‘business transformation’ programmes are often just technology installation projects in disguise, with huge under-investment in changing what the organisation is and what it does.

The traditional organisation was designed for stability, but the most fundamental impact of technological change is that nothing will ever be stable ever again.

Suggestion 1: Accept that your organisation will keep changing

In a world of constant change, your organisation needs to keep changing. This means that reorganisations will be frequent and the change impact of this will need to be carefully managed. Where budgets allow,organisations should have someone responsible for designing how the organisation should work, and someone responsible for making sure that all aspects of the design are being adopted effectively. These responsibilities might both fall within the remit of the COO, but they are about changing the business rather than operating the business and therefore have a subtly different set of objectives and metrics.

As ever, communication and engagement with employees is key:

·     Does everyone understand the fundamental assumption of constant change?

·     Can they see the benefits for them as individuals (investment in development, exposure to new responsibilities)?

·     Do they know what the next changes are, and what their role in these changes is?

·     Does everyone always have a clear and detailed understanding of their current role, and do they have the support necessary to fulfil that role?

This approach will help provide the foundation for constant change that will help your organisation stay relevant.

Suggestion 2: Stop letting your IT department run your company

Organisational change is hard, and it is a distinctly different competency than organisational execution. Most established organisations have unsurprisingly built their success on executional excellence, which has sometimes come with an under-investment in organisational change capabilities.

In these organisations, leaders might have looked around the c-suite to figure out who to make responsible for innovation and change, and decided that the CIO or IT Director is the best choice for this. This has led to many innovation units and transformation programmes being established under IT leadership.

There are some good reasons for this: IT leaders are usually the most vocal advocates for investment (in new technology), they are usually not directly responsible for ‘business’ operations, and they usually have a good reputation for dealing with complexity.

However, there is also an illogic to this. With the greatest respect to the many, many fantastic IT Directors out there, why on earth would the person you probably hired to make sure everyone can reliably access the Internet be the best person to help define how every aspect of your business should work?

This fallacy introduces technology-bias into business change. Overly architected, tech-centric projects that typically fail to deliver their expected benefits. Because you are asking your IT function to do things that are pretty far outside their comfort zone, it has normalised the extensive use of consulting…which is in no-one’s best interests other than the consultants.

The preferable archetype is for the CEO to establish a strategic development function, responsible for defining the future of the organisation and driving the implementation of step-changes across all departments. This is a pretty common structure, and will (on average) deliver better results that the IT-led approach. The trick, as always, is in its design and execution.

Decisions around ownership of investment funds,accountability for outcomes, and decision-making for tech, process and organisational designs all contribute to making this structure work (or not).

Suggestion 3: Try to focus on outcomes and capabilities

It is true that many useful business changes are opportunistic. Maybe taking advantage of a new technology, or thinking about how best to leverage customer data. However, at some point it is critical to translate the trigger for the opportunity (e.g. the new technology becoming available) into the associated benefit or objective.

In an ideal world, strategy and planning will start with objectives and then work backwards to choose the best ways to achieve these objectives. This avoids the proximity bias that can be associated with the more opportunistic initiatives described above. For example, is the new technology the best way to achieve the associated benefits, or is it simply the only way we have considered.

A focus on outcomes is a critical competency for future-focused organisations. It helps ensure that changes are valuable,achievable and proportionate (rather than just being exciting).

Note: Enforcing an outcomes focus is effortful, and requires real discipline. Therefore it will be useful to think about how you can establish ceremonies and rubrics to help enforce this type of thinking consistently. This could be as simple as forcing every project to be named as the outcome it is trying to achieve, and the investment requests to be defined in terms of the capabilities they will enable.

Suggestion 4: Don’t lose sight of the basics

Organisational change competence is often associated with agility. This is not wrong, but ‘agile’ is a loaded and oft-misused term.Arising from the love affair that IT departments and consultants have had with Agile software development methodologies, the term has crept into every organisational nook and cranny.

The problem has been that whilst Agile is a fantastic approach for developing software (in a way that helps reduce the risk of development failure and promotes a focus on the user), it is not as well-defined or understood in its use outside of software development teams. This has led to‘agile’ being an excuse to throw off the shackles of sensible organisational management and let people do whatever they want whenever they want. Obviously this is not good.

In a similar way, pervasive tech innovation has leaked so heavily into our social consciousness that many organisations have pushed to make every team focus on innovation. Taken to the extreme, this would mean that no-one is focused on execution and the business would collapse. Whilst very few businesses have been that stupid, the combination of agile working and ‘democratised innovation’ has commonly resulted in some ill-effects:

• Degradation of clear roles and boundaries:thinking outside of the box is probably good, but unilaterally working outside of the box is a disaster. If people and teams don’t work between their guardrails and stick to their role profiles, then organisational chaos ensues.
• Organisational bloat: decentralised business change (i.e. ‘democratised innovation’) means that little investments and headcount increases can pop-up all over the organisation. And the combined impact of all of this can be significant.
• Empire-building and in-fighting: these are two of the most damaging behaviours for any organisation, and allowing people to silently accrete responsibilities is a sure-fire way to encourage them.

So although this entire article is encouraging investment in, and adoption of, new organisational practices…it is important to remember that the basics of running an organisation still hold true. People need to know what to do, and all of the organisation’s cogs need to fit together neatly.

Note: the above comments ignore organisations that thrive with deliberately organic role boundaries (e.g. holocracies). These can work,and are fascinating models, but are not typical and would require another full series of articles to explore properly.

Getting into the detail

This article is effectively an introduction to the Designing a Future Ready Organisation series. Forthcoming articles will explore the following topics:

·     How to design for constant change.

·     How to build a disciplined culture.

·     How to think make the most of outsourcing.

·     How to engage with AI.

Links will be added here as and when these are published.

In the meantime, if anything in the above has piqued your interest, please reach out for a coffee chat or sign up to one of our events.

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