Organisational Evolution: The Levers of Change
You’ve changed your organisational structure three times in two years, replaced managers who “weren’t performing”, revised processes and hired consultants. Yet the same problems keep coming back: decisions that don’t move forward, lack of communication between departments, innovations that remain presentations.
What if the problem wasn’t where you’re looking? What if these symptoms revealed something deeper about how your organisation functions? This article explains why some organisational changes don’t stick and how a different approach enables evolutions that truly last.
1. Why Some Organisational Changes Don’t Stick
Facing Dysfunctions, the Natural Reflex
When an organisation encounters problems, the reflex is often to reorganize, create a committee or appoint a new person in charge. These solutions seem logical. Sometimes they work, but often, a few months later, the same problems return in a different form.
The Problem Shifts
A director contacts me to tell the recent story of his organisation: teams were isolating themselves from each other and it was decided to reorganize the departments. Except that six months later, a new problem emerged: decisions were taking three times longer. Why? Because by merging departments, they created larger teams where no one knew who decides what anymore.
They reacted by creating a coordination committee. The committee meets, but decisions continue to drag and on top of that, people in the field complain about being disconnected from the decisions made by the committee.
The problem wasn’t solved, it just shifted: first silos, then decision-making slowness, then disconnection. Each solution creates a new problem because we never touched what produces them: contradictory objectives, a bonus system that creates competition, and meetings without real power.
As long as we don’t change what actually produces the problem, we’re just shifting the symptom.
2. What It Means to Look at an Organisation as a Whole
Everything Is Connected
Looking at an organisation as a whole means understanding that everything is connected: structures, processes, incentives, habits.
Concretely, the questions to ask are:
- What, in the way this organisation functions, makes this problem logical?
- What implicit rules maintain it?
- How does a behavior or situation reinforce itself?
When Each Feeds the Problem They Criticize in the Other
I often encounter this situation: a team complains that management doesn’t trust them and controls everything. At the same time, management complains that the team never takes initiative and always waits for instructions.
What’s actually happening: The more management controls, the less the team takes initiative. The less the team takes initiative, the more management feels compelled to control. Each feeds the behavior they criticize in the other.
To break this circle, you need to intervene on what maintains it, not on people’s intentions.
Identifying the Real Levers
Rather than trying to fix symptoms, I look for leverage points. These are places where a small intervention can untangle a larger problem.
Sometimes it’s in the way of deciding: how decisions are actually made, who really has power. Sometimes it’s in incentives: what’s really rewarded, beyond the discourse. Sometimes it’s in tacit rules: what everyone follows without questioning it.
These levers require observing the organisation as a whole, not as a collection of isolated pieces. Once identified, they enable lasting results through better-targeted intervention.
3. How to Support Sustainable Organisational Evolution
Understanding Before Acting
A successful organisational evolution begins by concretely understanding the problem to solve and how it maintains itself.
Then, I observe the organisation’s actual functioning: how information flows, how decisions are really made, what stakes influence the organisation and what implicit rules govern behaviours. I also try to identify organisational resources to build on and what already works well in the organisation.
The idea is to map relationships, dynamics and what repeats itself before sketching a solution.
Intervening on Multiple Dimensions Simultaneously
Once the levers are identified, evolution often happens across several dimensions in parallel:
The way of deciding: How decisions are made, who has the power to decide, how information flows.
Team organisation: Roles, formal processes. Changing the org chart without touching relationships often serves no purpose.
Habits and beliefs: What’s valued, tacit rules. It’s the slowest to evolve, but the most determining.
These three dimensions are linked. Intervening on only one rarely creates lasting change. That’s why organisational evolution takes time: new ways of doing things need to anchor themselves gradually.
Experimenting and Adjusting
I never propose a fixed transformation plan. We define a direction, we test changes on a small scale, we observe what happens, we adjust. As we learn, we can extend the changes while preserving activities.
In this approach, resistance, difficulties, unexpected results are not obstacles: they’re information telling us where the organisation needs more time, more clarity, or a different intervention.
Anchoring Changes in Daily Life
An evolution holds when new practices become “our natural way of doing things”, not a project with a name.
To achieve this, changes must be integrated into the organisation (roles, processes), supported by the way of deciding, and consistent with what’s valued. That’s why I always work with the leadership team so they can embody the change (instead of imposing it). The coherence between discourse and actions is what allows new practices to anchor themselves.
Anchoring doesn’t stop there: an organisation that evolves sustainably develops its own capacity to adapt continuously. This happens through regular moments where the organisation observes its functioning and adjusts what can be improved. The goal is for the organisation to become autonomous in its own evolution, without depending on external intervention for each adjustment.
The Necessary Duration and Commitment
Sustainable organisational evolution takes between 6 months and 2 years, depending on the scope. The first changes are often visible within the first 2-3 months. But complete anchoring takes time.
It also requires leadership commitment, because without it, changes don’t stick. The leader must actively support the evolution and embody new practices: if the leadership team continues to function as before while you ask teams to change, the implicit message says that nothing really changes.
Conclusion
Successful organisational evolution doesn’t happen by changing the org chart every six months. It happens by understanding how your organisation functions: what dynamics maintain problems, where the real leverage points for change are, how to simultaneously evolve the way of deciding, team organisation and habits.
This approach enables identifying these levers and creating lasting evolutions that respect your organisation’s natural rhythm of adaptation. It’s not faster, but it’s what truly holds.
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