The joke
In goes the org chart, out come the building blocks. A restructure done in one go, by someone who never had to sit through the meetings.
The irony
Half of it is right. The org chart is a poor map of the work: the work runs through systems, spreadsheets, approvals and habits the chart doesn't show. The other half is wrong. Shred everything into small blocks at once and you've swapped one bad map for a pile of hand-offs. And hand-offs fail.
So what?
We do think work is breaking into capabilities: pieces with an input, a transformation and an output, made of smaller pieces, each reusable. But "no fixed bottom" doesn't mean "split everything". Where splitting stops paying is something to measure, not assume, and it's one of the first things we'll test. And we'd try it on a copy first, not on the company.
If you shredded your org chart tomorrow, what would you actually lose? Tell us in the comments, or respond to the paper.
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