Case Study: Organizational Design & Collaboration Transformation

Helping Teams Move from Fragmented Structures to Shared Capability-Based Collaboration

A large organization was facing growing fragmentation as they scaled. The issues included:

• siloed teams
• unclear ownership
• duplicated effort
• communication breakdowns

Leadership needed a way to see how work, decisions, and priorities actually moved across the organization, so teams could collaborate without adding rigid new structure on top of an already-complex system. The leadership team approached me to help them think about organizing by capability.

My Roles

• As a Systems Mapper, I ran discovery sessions and mapping exercises with cross-functional stakeholders to surface hidden dependencies, duplicated work, and where communication was breaking down.
• As a Facilitator, I led collaborative design conversations where the stakeholders co-created the new approaches to ownership and collaboration.
• As a Visual Sense-Maker, I built the systems maps and collaboration frameworks the group used to see their own complexity clearly enough to act on it.

These efforts resulted in the Culture Design Canvas, created by stakeholders in mural.

Outcomes

1. Teams gained a shared, visual understanding of how work and decisions actually moved across the organization. Thus replacing fragmented, team-by-team mental models.
2. Cross-functional collaboration shifted from department-based thinking to capability-based thinking.
3. The visual frameworks created during the engagement became ongoing tools the organization continued using for communication and planning.
4. Six teams reorganized around capabilities, with zero layoffs or staff reductions.

Chad provided excellent guidance and leadership around coordinating and facilitating organizational design effort for [Data Platforms].
— Director of Engineering, Data Platforms Team

If this is the kind of clarity your team's missing right now, reach out. I'd genuinely like to hear what you're working through.