Organization Design Consulting and Strategy

Organization Strategy

BCG’s approach to organization design starts with a single premise: changing a company’s performance requires changing the organizational context in which its employees perform.

What happens in a company is not simply a matter of organization structures, processes, and systems but also one of behavior—that is, how people act, interact, and make decisions. To address this underlying driver of performance, BCG applies a set of levers that transform individual behaviors, encourage new ways of working, and create a purpose-driven organizational culture.

By using this organization design approach, BCG recently ranked as best among market leaders on organization strategy consulting, earning top scores for depth of capabilities, breadth of capabilities, and client impact, according to ALM Intelligence.

Redesigning More than Organization Structure

Creating a high-performance organization requires not only optimizing an organization’s structure and roles but also changing its ways of working and its approach to building and aligning capabilities in leadership and culture.

Changing the Structure and Roles. High-performing companies don’t manage their organization’s complexity by prescribing specific behaviors. Rather, they create a context that encourages optimal behaviors. Critical to success are a flat organization structure, a well-designed corporate center, effective use of shared services, and a strong people strategy that fosters collaboration.
Embracing New Ways of Working. BCG analysis shows that new ways of working can make a company a top performer, with faster growth and higher profits than its peers. We work with clients to support organization change through agile ways of working, lean processes, and end-to-end digitization.
Aligning Leadership and Culture. Companies with aligned leadership and a purpose-driven organizational culture outperform their peers, attract and retain a diverse workforce with high-caliber skills, and empower employees to collaborate and innovate in agile ways.

Smart Design for Performance

BCG’s approach to redesigning an organization, which we call Smart Design for Performance, has demonstrated great success in boosting company performance, mastering complexity, and enhancing employee engagement. The organization design approach involves three main steps:

Define the purpose of the reorganization. Clearly identify the company’s performance shortfall—that is, the gap between its current and target performance. Determine the precise aims of the reorganization effort—with regard to competitive advantage, strategic priorities, and the organization’s pain points.

Define the target behaviors and design the organization accordingly. Determine the behaviors that will support the purpose of the reorganization. Design the organization to promote those behaviors, using a broad range of leading organization design elements, including organization structure, roles and responsibilities, individual talent, and organization enablers.

Make it happen. Establish the right context throughout the organization and enhance the capabilities of leaders and top talent through distributed design, rigorous program management with multilayered communication, and capability building.

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When a Paycheck Is Not Enough

Pay, promotion, and benefits have been the traditional carrots for hiring, exciting, and retaining employees. But feeling safe, challenged, and valued at work can be even more important than a paycheck, says Gabi Novacek, a BCG Henderson Institute fellow researching diversity, equity, and inclusion on the latest episode of The So What from BCG.

Listen Now

These are a few of BCG’s experts from around the globe who lead our organization design consulting teams:

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BCG’s Organization Design Tools

The Smart Design for Performance approach, paired with our robust set of tools, puts companies on a path to becoming a flexible, high-performing, and modern organization.

BCG’s patented OrgBuilder tool helps clients actively resolve complexity and avoid bureaucracy to ensure the successful implementation of any organization structure and design change.

BCG’s unique Smart Simplicity approach can help companies manage the ever-increasing complexity that bogs down performance and growth.
Our OrgVantage solution allows our organization design consulting teams to perform a holistic organization diagnostic that evaluates performance against 12 context levers.
BCG’s distributed approach to design ensures that managers deep within the organization are responsible for defining roles and aligning people with positions.