Let’s be honest.

Exec dashboards always look fine — beautiful works of fiction.

Lines go up. Colors stay green. Progress looks unstoppable, and everyone’s hitting their “targets” — at least on slides.

Meanwhile, teams are drowning in dependencies, decisions crawl through molasses, and nobody’s entirely sure if all this activity is producing actual outcomes.

It’s not deceit; it’s design. The org structure itself distorts reality — so by the time information climbs the hierarchy, it’s been through more spin cycles than a washing machine.

And then someone asks, “Why aren’t we shipping faster?”

Nobody ever answers, “Our structure’s misaligned,” or, “Work bounces off teams like pinballs — lots of motion, very little progress.”

Instead, they say, “We need to hire more product managers,” “We need more accountability,” or my favorite: “We need better estimates.”

So we hire more managers. We add dashboards. More status trackers.

Pretty soon, half the organization is reporting on the work instead of doing it. More steering-committee meetings. Lines go up. Colors stay green…

And yet, we’re still asking, “Why can’t we see what’s really happening?”

Because, my friend, you don’t have a reporting problem.

You have an org-design problem in a reporting costume.

The Great Shipping Mirage

When delivery slows, everyone goes hunting for the culprit.

Maybe estimators are bad. Maybe Product didn’t write clear requirements. Maybe Engineering needs to improve estimation accuracy, as if uncertainty is just a rounding error.

It always sounds sensible — until you realize every fix points backward.

The real problem isn’t at the team level; it’s in how the teams connect.

The structure creates the drag.

Work doesn’t flow cleanly through the organization — it ricochets between functions, hand-offs, and sign-offs.

Everyone’s doing their part, but the system itself turns effort into friction.

So when leaders ask, “Why aren’t we shipping faster?” the honest answer isn’t “bad execution.”

It’s just bad design.

The Friction Factory

Every org eventually turns into a friction factory.

Work ricochets between functions. Dependencies pile up. Decisions require summits. A single release needs a working group, two program managers, and three sync meetings.

None of this happens because people don’t care or aren’t competent. It happens because the structure wasn’t built for flow— it was built for control.

It’s not incompetence; it’s geometry. Lines on paper look tidy. Lines of communication never are.

Your org might be cross-functional — just not in the direction value needs to move.

When friction shows up, we don’t redesign; we compensate.

We create “alignment meetings,” steering committees, and coordination roles.

Each one helps a little — but together, they create a second organization whose only job is explaining the first one.

The result: you’re managing the management of the work. It’s very meta, and very slow.

If your structure requires heroic collaboration to deliver anything, congratulations — you’ve designed a friction engine.

What Actually Helps

You can’t fix friction with process; you fix it with clearer flow.

Structure by outcome.

If multiple teams share ownership of the same goal, no one owns it. If it takes three departments to move one metric, you don’t have a speed issue — you have a design issue.

Functional silos optimized for internal victory: Marketing hits its lead target while Engineering quietly screams into a pillow.

Shorten decision paths.

Push authority to where context lives. If every decision feels like a pilgrimage, your org is allergic to movement.

Design visibility into the work.

Don’t bolt it on after. The best reporting is structural — when the work itself makes progress visible.

Make metrics follow outcomes, not activity.

If a number looks healthy but the customer doesn’t, change the number. Velocity and utilization are comforting, but customers don’t care.

Most friction isn’t because people are lazy — it’s because your org chart and your value chain are in different time zones.

The “We’re Not Broken, Just Badly Assembled” Playbook

Admit it’s structural. If your best people spend half their time “navigating the org,” the maze is the problem.

Follow the friction. Every delay hides a design flaw. Find it, name it, fix it.

Give each outcome a single owner. Shared accountability is management fan-fiction.

Treat process as scaffolding, not architecture. It supports the structure; it shouldn’t define it.

Keep a sense of humor. You’ll need it. Reorgs are emotional — but laughing through them beats crying in PowerPoint.

Take your time. Improvement is a journey. If the org is making money, you’ll find the transformation journey harder.

But Let’s Be Fair

Not all friction is bad. Some of it’s load-bearing.

That tedious approval chain? It might be saving you from a compliance nightmare.

Those endless alignment meetings? Sometimes they’re the only thing stopping three teams from shipping incompatible “solutions.”

And “structure by outcome”? Great in theory — right up until you realize you have fifty outcomes. Coordination doesn’t vanish; it just changes costumes.

Even the “single owner” dream gets fuzzy in complex systems. Payments can’t move without fraud checks. Security can’t move without platform support.

In reality, accountability overlaps — because reality does.

Big orgs aren’t always slow because they’re broken. Sometimes they’re slow because the work is hard: regulated, global, high-risk, high-stakes.

Some slowness is the price of not breaking everything.

So What Actually Matters

The question isn’t “how do we eliminate all friction?” It’s “which friction is helping us, and which is just… friction?”

Good friction protects customers. Bad friction protects turf.

Good friction prevents catastrophic mistakes. Bad friction prevents any mistakes—including the instructive ones.

Good friction makes sure the right people weigh in. Bad friction makes sure everyone weighs in.

The just not about drawing better org charts. It’s developing taste for what matters.

When three teams need sign-off on a button color, that’s not risk management—that’s organizational anxiety.

When launching a financial product requires legal, compliance, and security review? That’s Thursday.

The Part Nobody Wants to Hear

If your org is making money, transformation is harder. Success calcifies.

The structures that got you here are now in everyone’s muscle memory, political capital is invested in the current design, and “let’s redesign how we work” sounds like “let’s stop making money and play org-chart Jenga instead.”

This is why most reorgs happen during crises. Pain is clarifying.

But waiting for crisis means your best people leave first—they see the friction, they know it’s fixable, and they’re not sticking around for the drama.

The alternative is slower, less dramatic, and requires something most orgs lack: the ability to fix things that aren’t fully broken yet.

What This Means for You

Start small. Pick one painful handoff. One decision that requires a pilgrimage. One place where your best people are spending half their energy navigating instead of building.

Fix that.

Then find the next one.

You’re not redesigning the organization. You’re removing impediments to the work that matters.

And yes, measure flow—not to create another dashboard, but to see where work gets stuck. Not velocity. Not utilization. The actual movement of value through your system.

Because in the end, the goal isn’t perfect structure. It’s less friction between intent and impact.

The rest is just lines on paper.