The screen flickered, the projector whirred for a moment, and then it was there. The Chart. A sprawling, magnificent web of boxes and lines that looked less like a corporate structure and more like the frantic last-minute battle plan of a losing general. A quiet, collective intake of breath filled the room, the kind of sound you hear before the turbulence announcement. We were all looking for our names, tracing lines with our eyes, trying to figure out if our careers had just been routed through Siberia. My old team, a group of 12 people who sat within shouting distance of each other, was now scattered across four new ‘Global Centers of Excellence.’ My cubicle-mate, Dave, was suddenly part of the ‘Synergistic Value Realization Stream,’ while I was now under the ‘Integrated Capability Nexus.’ We still had to work on the exact same projects. Now we just needed to book a 32-minute meeting to do it.

A visual representation of a fragmented and disorganized corporate structure.

The Grand Theater of Illusion

This is the grand theater of modern business. When faced with a deep, systemic problem-flagging sales, a toxic culture, a product that nobody wants-the first lever leadership reaches for isn’t the difficult one. It’s not the lever for ‘Fixing Our Broken Communication’ or ‘Admitting Our Strategy is Flawed.’ No, it’s the big, shiny, red lever labeled ‘REORGANIZATION.’ It gives the illusion of massive, decisive action. It generates beautiful slide decks. It costs a fortune in consulting fees, often upwards of $272,000 for the initial planning phase alone. And 92% of the time, it changes absolutely nothing of substance.

It’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, the view might be different for a few people, but the iceberg of reality remains dead ahead. The fundamental work doesn’t change. Ask Helen G.H., a woman I worked with years ago whose official title was Hazmat Disposal Coordinator. Her job was to make sure barrels of genuinely terrifying industrial byproducts went from Point A to Point B without melting through the floor. In one particularly chaotic year, she had 2 different managers and her department was renamed 2 times. First, it was ‘Waste Flow Logistics.’ Then it became ‘Sustainable Resource Cycling.’ Helen told me, deadpan, that the chemicals didn’t care what her department was called. Their molecular structure remained stubbornly unchanged by corporate jargon. Her job was real. The chart was a ghost.

My Own Failure of Imagination

I say all this with the bitterness of a convert. I have to admit, I once drew the boxes myself. I was younger, convinced of my own intellectual brilliance, and certain that if I could just get the structure right, the dysfunctional behaviors would magically resolve. I spent 42 late nights moving names around a PowerPoint slide, creating elegant swim lanes and dotted reporting lines. I presented it with the confidence of someone who had discovered a new law of physics. People applauded. And for a few weeks, the novelty worked. But soon, the old patterns re-emerged. The information hoarders still hoarded, now just under a different VP. The teams that refused to collaborate still refused, they just had a new acronym. My beautiful chart was a map to the same old swamp. It was my biggest professional failure, and it took me years to see it for what it was: a refusal to do the hard work.

We get so locked into our own corporate bubble that we forget how real businesses are built. It reminds me of a friend who burned out after the third re-org in two years at a major tech firm. He and his partner cashed out and did something completely different. They started a small business from their garage, focusing on something tangible, something that people actually needed. They didn’t have strategy off-sites or synergy summits; they had sewing machines and fabric swatches. They make exceptionally high-quality baby clothes. Their biggest ‘structural’ problems were about sourcing sustainable cotton and figuring out international shipping, not about who reports to whom in the ‘Infant Apparel Innovation Pod.’ Their success is built on a solid process, not a fluid org chart. Looking at their simple, effective setup for producing Kids Clothing NZ made me realize how much corporate life complicates the simple act of creating value.

The Real Problem: Fixing Code, Not Icons

That’s the whole point. My friend’s company works because they focused on the work, not the diagram of the work. They fixed the process of making and selling, so the structure just naturally formed around it. In most corporations, we do the opposite. We draw a fantasy structure and then hope that reality will contort itself to fit our PowerPoint. We create new silos and call them ‘centers,’ forcing teams to spend 52% of their time on ‘cross-functional alignment’-which is just a sanitized term for ‘begging other departments for the information you need to do your actual job.’

This is the digital equivalent of trying to fix a buggy piece of software by moving its icon to a different folder on your desktop. It feels like you’re organizing, but the underlying code is still a mess. The application will still crash. You’ll still find yourself force-quitting it over and over, hoping the next restart will magically fix the deep-seated flaw. It never does. The real problems are almost always about process, strategy, or culture. Is the company’s direction clear? No? A re-org won’t fix that. Are your people rewarded for collaboration or for individual heroism? If it’s the latter, no ‘One Team’ initiative will ever work. Do you have leaders who punish honesty and reward sycophants? Changing their job titles from ‘Director’ to ‘Head of Value Enablement’ won’t make them better leaders.

The Real Cost of Fake Change

We saw this play out in a recent project that was supposed to increase efficiency by 22%. After a massive reshuffle, the project was handed to a new ‘Acceleration Unit.’ The team spent the first six weeks just trying to get security access to the right servers, a problem that had existed for years but was never prioritized. The re-org didn’t just fail to solve the problem; it made it worse by adding a layer of confusion and breaking informal relationships that had served as workarounds. The total number of employees affected by the constant churn was 1,432, each one of them losing precious productivity to the chaos.

So the next time you see the projector flicker on to reveal a new set of boxes and lines, ask yourself what problem this is truly meant to solve. Look past the jargon and the bold new department names. Look for the real work. Chances are, you’ll find it in the same place it was yesterday, being done by the same people, wrestling with the same old obstacles. And somewhere in the building, a person like Helen G.H. will be ignoring the email announcement, putting on her gloves, and getting ready to deal with something dangerously real.