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An organization rarely collapses overnight. Instead, it suffers from a “death by a thousand cuts”—small, structural frictions that gradually bleed out your top talent and stall your best ideas.

In Episode 5, we looked at the tools to measure your org. Today, we look at the symptoms. If you recognize these patterns, your “people problem” is actually a Design Flaw.

The Core Concept: The “Friction” Audit

Design flaws are usually the result of “Organizational Accretion”—the habit of adding new layers, committees, and processes to solve temporary problems without ever removing the old ones.

The Framework: The Goold and Campbell “Design Tests”

In their seminal work, Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell outlined specific tests to see if a structure is fit for purpose. Here are the three most critical for modern leaders:

1. The Specialist Cultures Test: Does your design protect “expert” silos? (e.g., Do your data scientists spend all their time in admin meetings instead of coding?)
2. The Difficult Links Test: Does your design force collaboration between two units that naturally hate each other (e.g., Sales and Compliance) without a clear tie-breaker?
3. The Redundant Hierarchy Test: Does every layer of management add value, or is one layer just “passing the mail” up and down the chain?

The Five “Red Flags” of Poor Design

Symptom	The Structural Root Cause
Slow Decisions	Too many “Approver” nodes in the RAPID matrix.
Internal Politics	Misaligned Rewards (Point 4 of the Star Model).
Silo Wars	A Functional structure with no “Bridge” roles.
Burned-out Managers	A Span of Control that is too wide (>12 reports).
Strategic Drift	The Strategy isn’t reflected in the budget/headcount.

The Actionable Insight: The “Meeting-to-Doing” Ratio

Pick a high-priority project. Count the number of people who have to be “in the room” (or on the Zoom) for a decision to be made.

• The Rule of 7: Research suggests that for every person over seven in a decision-making group, decision effectiveness drops by 10%.
• If your “Innovation Committee” has 12 people, you aren’t innovating; you’re performing theater.

The Design Fix: If you find a “Redundant Layer,” don’t just fire people—re-scope the roles. Move those managers from “General Oversight” to “Technical Lead” or “Project Driver.”

Tomorrow’s Preview

We wrap up Season 1 with Episode 7: Accountability & Ownership. We’ll answer the ultimate question: Who actually owns the design? (Hint: If you’re reading this, it’s probably you).