What Needs to Be Reorganised When a Company Enters Transformation?
Business transformation requires more than strategic change. Responsibilities, processes, information, indicators and knowledge must also evolve with the company’s new configuration.
BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
When a company enters transformation, attention commonly focuses on the change that motivated the process: succession, expansion, new leadership, reorganisation or strategic change. But transformation is sustainable only when the organisation can operate coherently after the change stops being a project and becomes part of routine operations.
Before asking which tool or system should be implemented, it is necessary to understand which capabilities the new reality requires. Five dimensions help organise this analysis: responsibilities, processes, information and indicators, knowledge, and monitoring.
The first is responsibility. Who decides? Who executes? Who is accountable for the result? Who needs to be consulted? Recent Harvard Business Review research on decision rights shows that mechanisms intended to clarify roles can fail when they do not adequately consider where decisions should occur, who has authority and how communication works across organisational levels (GREER; JORDAN; SYTCH, 2026).
The second is processes. Every transformation changes, to some extent, the way work is performed. Some processes need to be preserved because they support critical activities; others need to be redesigned because they were built for a reality that no longer exists. Oxford literature on organisational routines addresses precisely the relationship between stability, change, learning and adaptation (PENTLAND; GOH, 2021).
The third is information. An organisation undergoing transformation needs to know whether its existing mechanisms continue to provide sufficient visibility. This includes operational data, financial information, performance indicators and reporting mechanisms. The objective is not to produce more information, but to ensure that management can see what it needs in order to monitor the new reality.
The fourth is knowledge. Changes can create gaps when people leave roles, responsibilities are redistributed or processes are altered. At the same time, transformation generates new knowledge that needs to be incorporated into the organisation.
The fifth is monitoring. A transformation does not end when a new structure is designed. It is necessary to verify whether the changes have produced the expected behaviour and capabilities. McKinsey research published in 2025 highlights that sustained transformations depend on real changes in how people work, lead and collaborate, rather than merely on formally completed programmes (MAOR et al., 2025).
A transformation can appear complete on paper and remain incomplete in practice. A new organisational chart may exist without responsibilities actually changing. A process may be documented without being used. An indicator may have been created without changing decisions.
Reorganising a company, therefore, does not simply mean changing its pieces. It means ensuring coherence between what the organisation intends to do and the way responsibilities, processes, information, knowledge and monitoring have been structured to make that possible.
This is why a consistent transformation begins with the current state. Before designing the future, it is necessary to understand what exists, which capabilities work, where the gaps are and which dependencies could compromise the change. Only then is it possible to define what should be addressed first and how the new structure can be implemented and monitored.
References
GREER, Lindy; JORDAN, Jennifer; SYTCH, Maxim. What companies get wrong about decision rights. Harvard Business Review, July/Aug. 2026. Available at: https://hbr.org/2026/07/what-companies-get-wrong-about-decision-rights. Accessed: 08 May 2026.
PENTLAND, Brian T.; GOH, Kenneth T. Organizational routines and organizational change. In: POOLE, Marshall Scott; VAN DE VEN, Andrew H. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation. 2. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. p. 339–363. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198845973.013.16.
MAOR, Dana et al. How to capture the elusive performance edge in true transformations. McKinsey & Company, 15 Dec. 2025. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/how-to-capture-the-elusive-performance-edge-in-true-transformations. Accessed: 08 May 2026.