A colleague of mine put it bluntly in an advisory conversation: “Sometimes the process works against the organization.”
He’s right about the friction. We all have seen it, right? But process and structure aren’t opponents per se. The trouble starts when we design one and leave the other to chance.
German organizational theory drew this line decades ago: Aufbauorganisation (structure) and Ablauforganisation (process). Yet, in practice, structure set the premises, and then the process side, as Gaitanides and Ackermann put it, degenerated into a stopgap (a “Lückenbüßer” as they called it).
Software shows the pattern most sharply: Conway’s Law (1968). A system’s structure mirrors the communication structure of the organization that designs it. The practitioner answer is the Inverse Conway Maneuver, popularized by Team Topologies: shape teams around the architecture and flow you want, not around the boxes you already have. A heuristic, not a law. But it asks the questions in the right order.
The friction, although real, rarely comes from process fighting structure. It comes from a structure that was never designed for the process it has to carry. I like that picture. Because we too often forget that a structure is simply to support a process and not for the structure itself.
Have you also seen reorganization teams redraw the org chart differently and still leave the friction exactly where it was?