I have always been inspired by CEOs who are fluent in the subject of people. By fluent, I mean those who can connect the subject to the business strategy and operate the people strategy like a product: creating theses based on a context, implementing tests, measuring results and evolving.

Talking about organizational design requires context; many things can influence this type of decision: business maturity, strategic intentions, cash flow, team momentum...

One of the people I was able to learn from (and support) closely was Fabricio Bloisi (Founder of Movile, former President of iFood and now CEO of Prosus).

On one of his trips to Harvard to study, Fabricio shared research that concluded that 50% of company performance is dictated by Culture, Internal Aspects of the Organization and Leadership/CEO. Industry represents only 15% of the company's result and the Economy only 5% (in the long term).

In his words:

"Companies control more than you think when it comes to performance. There are some common characteristics of successful companies, regardless of industry or economy, which have a major impact on the bottom line:

• A well-defined and well-communicated strategy
• Execution that consistently meets customer expectations
• A culture of high performance and strong values
• A structure that simplifies working with and within the organization"

The first step is to understand what motivates the leadership to review the organizational design and what the desired output is that is not being produced. We usually have a few signs:- We are financially challenged- We are losing market share- We are having difficulty innovating, entering new markets and launching new products- Customers are dissatisfied- Our growth has slowedWith clarity on the challenge, the business (in most cases) puts together a strategic plan to advance opportunities and mitigate threats. By processes, I don't mean a step-by-step description of how things work, I mean the organizational activities required to deliver a strategy. The "work to be done" tends to make clear the levers we need to evolve (and which organizational design should facilitate) in order to achieve the strategy. Let's take an example: A company intends to gain market share and has set itself the goal of growing by 200% in one year. What are the processes that generate growth for this company?

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Have an incredible product? Increase your demand generation capacity? Extend your customer relationship? Have new offers for your customer base? Increase your average ticket? Inorganic growth (M&A)? Increase productivity?

Simply saying "grow" doesn't make it clear what needs to evolve. But these levers do.

Once the levers are clear, the leadership must ask itself: What is the best way to organize ourselves in order to optimize our management, communication and talents around these levers?

Now is the time to start drawing potential structure scenarios and their trade-offs. There is no ready-made answer here, the best design is the one that is most likely to work in your context. There is no design that solves business problems without incredible talent, so for this decision it is important to weigh up (i) the people you have internally and (ii) what your resources allow you to bring in from outside (either by hiring new people, looking for talent on demand or external suppliers to support specific demands).

Once you have decided on the ideal structure, there will probably be a gap compared to the structure that exists today. And now we enter the recurring work of change management, which involves communicating and engaging the people who are already in the business and are ready to take on the new challenges, developing and monitoring the performance of those who we will bet on internally but who are not 100% ready, and bringing in external resources to make up for the expertise that is missing from the structure.

Note that in this exercise we have made several assumptions: From challenges that our business faces, to better ways of organizing ourselves and decisions about people. As I said, in my experience, the most important thing is to have a product head and validate the hypotheses and results we were looking for when we made these decisions and assumptions.

Don't forget to keep "updating your software", or rather, adapting your structure according to the context, your context. In short: Alignment on the challenges, clarity on the criteria and trade-offs of decisions and coherence between resource allocation and strategy is what, according to Harvard research, wins the game in the long term.

Organizational design is not a one-off project, it is a way of operating and deserves constant reflection on the subject. Especially in a market that has been demanding frequent changes in business.

This topic becomes the business leadership's full time job, with the full support of the people structure to support it with method and act as a partner in managing change along the way.

I hope these reflections have enriched yours, have a good journey!

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