What firms have found useful about this work

The challenge

The firm had grown from forty to one hundred and thirty staff over five years. The senior leadership structure — designed for the smaller organisation — had not been revised. Decisions that should have been made at business unit level were escalating upward, and two committees had become effectively redundant without being formally discontinued.

The engagement

Over twelve weeks, we mapped the actual decision-making paths against the formal structure, identified five points of consistent escalation, and proposed a revised governance arrangement with clearly redistributed authority. Four working sessions with the senior team refined the proposal into an agreed redesign.

What followed

The revised structure was implemented over eight weeks. The MD reported that the volume of items reaching the executive committee fell significantly in the first quarter after implementation, and that two senior managers who had been considering leaving cited the clearer role definition as a factor in their decision to stay.

"The document they produced was specific enough to be acted on directly. That made the implementation far smoother than previous change efforts had been."

The challenge

A second-generation business owner was preparing to hand over the managing director role to a professional manager for the first time. The boundaries between the family's ownership role and the operational authority of the incoming MD were unclear — as were the roles of three other senior positions.

The engagement

We held individual conversations with the outgoing MD, the incoming appointee, and three other senior leaders, then produced written role definitions for each, with particular attention to the decision rights boundary between ownership and management. The eight-week timeline allowed for two rounds of refinement.

What followed

The transition took place six months after the engagement completed. The family owner subsequently noted that having an agreed, written account of each role's boundaries meant that the inevitable tensions of the transition period were easier to name and resolve — "we had a reference point that neither of us had written."

The question

A regional MD was weighing whether to centralise a procurement function currently distributed across four business units. There were efficiency arguments on one side and responsiveness arguments on the other. The question had been under discussion for eight months without resolution.

The note

Following a scoping call, we delivered a Pattern Note within two weeks. The note identified that the question as posed was conflating two distinct decisions: the structural question (central vs distributed) and the process question (how procurement decisions were made). It recommended resolving the process question first, as the structural one would likely resolve more easily afterwards.

What followed

The MD followed the note's framing, addressed the process question over two months, and then found the structural question significantly less contentious than it had been. The function was partially centralised — a hybrid approach that neither camp had initially proposed. The MD described the Pattern Note as "the two hundred ringgit that saved us six months of circular discussion."