A strategy review is supposed to answer a hard question: where should this company compete, and where should it stop? In my experience, about half of them end somewhere else entirely, with a new org chart, two new vice presidents and the same strategy as before.
A reorganization is the answer you reach for when the question was never agreed.
It’s not because the people involved are lazy. It’s because a reorganization is the easiest decision available at the end of a long, uncomfortable process.
Why it happens
Strategy reviews usually start with a vague brief: "Where should we grow?" Over eight or ten weeks, a team gathers data, interviews customers and builds options. Then the options reach the leadership team, and each one threatens someone. Exiting a market means a regional head loses half their business. Doubling down on a product means another team stops getting investment.
At that point the review needs a decision, and the leadership team can’t agree on one. So it agrees on something it can agree on: a new structure that will, in theory, make the next decision easier. Everybody keeps their seat, the review feels finished, and the hard question gets handed to the new structure.
A reorganization is the answer you reach for when the question was never agreed.
Agree the question before the work starts
The fix starts in week one, not week eight. Before any analysis, the CEO and board should write down the decision the review is meant to make, in one sentence, with the options it’s allowed to land on. "Should we enter the Canadian market, and if so, in which order?" is a question. "How do we accelerate growth?" isn’t.
We put that sentence at the top of every steering meeting. When the discussion drifts toward structure, someone points at it. It sounds bureaucratic. It’s the single most useful thing we do.
Name who loses
Every real strategy has a loser inside the company: a market that gets less money, a product line that gets frozen, a team that shrinks. If the review doesn’t say who, the organization will work it out on its own, slowly, through budget fights.
The best CEOs I’ve worked with say it early and in person. They tell the head of the business that’s going to shrink before the board meeting, not after. That conversation is uncomfortable for a week. Avoiding it makes the next two years harder.
Change the structure last
Sometimes a new strategy does need a new structure. A company moving from selling products to selling subscriptions may need a customer success team it never had. But structure should follow the decision, not replace it. If the org chart changes before anyone has agreed where the company is going, it will be designed around the people in the room rather than the work ahead.
Our rule is simple: no structural changes in the recommendation unless they’re needed to carry out the strategy, and every one of them points back to a specific part of the plan.
What it looked like at one company
A few years ago we were asked to review the strategy of a regional services group with five divisions. The brief was growth. By week six the analysis was clear: two of the divisions earned almost all the profit, one was roughly break-even, and two were losing money and would need significant investment to turn around.
The leadership team spent the next steering meeting discussing whether the group should move from five divisions to three. It was a reasonable conversation, and it would have avoided the real question entirely. We put the original sentence back on the screen: "Which businesses should the group invest in over the next five years, and which should it exit?" The discussion changed within ten minutes.
The final recommendation was to sell one of the loss-making divisions, fix the other on a strict 18-month timeline, and put most of the investment into the two strongest. The structure changed too, but only after the decision, and only because selling a division made one layer of management unnecessary.
Give the review a deadline it can’t move
Reviews drift when they don’t have a fixed end. If the board meeting where the recommendation will be decided is already in the diary, everyone works backward from it. If it’s "when the work is ready", the work is never quite ready, and the safer answer of a reorganization starts to look like a way to finish.
Book the board session before the review starts. Tell the leadership team the date. It changes how every steering meeting runs.
A test for your next review
Read the final recommendation from your last strategy review. Cross out every sentence about structure, roles or reporting lines. If what’s left still tells you where the company will compete and where it will stop, it was a strategy review. If not, it was a reorganization with a longer name.
Keep reading
More essays by the partners on the decisions we see most.
