How organisation design can help businesses in a period of profound change

Robert Shore: Hello, and welcome to the Brightmine podcast, formerly known as the
XpertHR podcast. Brightmine is a leading provider of people data, analytics and insight, offering employment law expertise, comprehensive HR resources and reward data to meet every HR and organisational challenge and opportunity. You can find us any time of the day or night at www.brightmine.com.

Hello everyone. My name is Robert Shore, and today we’re going to be talking about – no, not the Employment Rights Act 2025, not directly anyway! – but about another hot-button HR issue, organisation design. To do this, I am joined by two guests, Lilian
Duckart and Laura Kimpton.

Laura, to bring you in first. You are HR strategy and practice editor at Brightmine, of course. And as I began by saying at the beginning, really, the focus at the moment is very much on the Employment Rights Act and ensuring that organisations are compliant with legal changes which are coming thick and fast. Why should HR teams be concerned with topics such as organisation design at this moment?

Laura Kimpton: Thank you, Robert. Well, you could say that the scale of changes that
are being introduced by the Employment Rights Act 2025 make it a perfect opportunity for organisations to think about how organisation design can benefit them. The ERA is not just a compliance issue. It has the potential to fundamentally change how organisations are structured, managed and governed. Lots of changes, such as earlier unfair dismissal rights, restrictions on fire and rehire, stronger
consultation duties, predictable working hours, flexible working as the default directly affect how work is organised, not just HR policy. And having worked with Lilian on this project, I’ve come to learn that organisation design is a key practice for organisations to get right in order to drive their success.

I think that organisations are currently focused on trying to be really intentional around how they are set up to generate the most value in terms of their business, which is where organisation design has an important role to play.

Robert Shore: Yeah. Thank you. So as you say, really if you’re focused on the Employment Rights Act – which everybody must be a little bit – then you ought also to be thinking about organisation design.

So we’ve just published a series of brand-new leading practice guides on our website on organisation design, haven’t we? Why did you choose to prioritise this type of content at this particular time?

Laura Kimpton: This was very much customer-led. Basically our customers are looking for and requesting this type of content that is more strategic in nature. Towards the end of last year, Brightmine ran a survey on how HR departments are operating and evolving to meet the changing needs of their organisation. And among the 135 respondents, organisation design and restructure came out among the top five priority areas for HR teams in 2026.

There’s also a trend towards building organisation design expertise internally in HR teams instead of outsourcing it solely to external consultants, probably driven by the fact that HR business partners already have that knowledge and experience of how their business operates and live and breathe their company culture, which puts them in a strong position to drive organisation design in a way that really sticks.

And crucially, it means organisation design becomes an ongoing capability and not just a one-off exercise.

Robert Shore: So I will put a link to that leading practice guide in the show notes. And at this point I’ll bring in Lilian Duckart, who is the founder of From→To, an organisation design practice dedicated to enabling organisations to turn AI vision into impact, and also a board member of the European Organisation Design Forum. So Lilian, hello, welcome.

Laura Kimpton: Hi Robert. Thank you for having me.

Robert Shore: No, thank you for joining us. And I mean, tell us a little about your work.

Lilian Duckart: Yeah, sure. Well, I’m a certified org design professional. I do this full time now but my background is HR business partnering. And as an HR business partner I did org design for years without calling it org design. But one day I realised that the org design part of my work was what I was enjoying the most, and I decided to dedicate myself to do this full-time.

So I’ve played key roles in complex transformations and those experiences actually bring first my belief that bolder strategies only create lasting impact when executed with discipline and are embraced by the people who bring them to life.

Robert Shore: Yeah. Well that’s a great introduction and it’s wonderful to know that you sort of make plain that you have a foot in both worlds – that is org design and HR.

So actually, let’s begin with a definition. What is organisation design and how does it differ from perhaps more familiar concepts like restructuring or workforce planning?

Lilian Duckart: Yeah, absolutely. In simple, few words, I like to say that org design is the bridge between ambition and execution. What does that mean? It means that it’s a real driver of business performance. It’s increasingly recognised as such. For example, to make it practical, let’s say a company wants to become more customer-centric and what they do, they bring more customer-facing roles. But they don’t change anything else and then nothing changes. And then months later, they wonder why it didn’t change.

Well, it’s not about the intent only. It’s not about the strategy only anymore. It’s about everything that you do around the strategic intent and not seeing the design as only one piece of the pie. Like, it’s not just the org chart, which to your point with restructuring, that would be focused more on the lines and boxes exercise, the typical
lift-and-shift restructure. So that’s important but it’s not org design fully.

Org design is more holistic and that’s the beauty of it, that you get to move the organisational performance through connecting the dots.

Robert Shore: Okay. So we’ll try and give some further practical examples as we go. What are the most common organisation design challenges employers are facing at the moment? And that’s even if they don’t call them organisation design challenges, of course. What are you dealing with, people you’re working with?

Lilian Duckart: Actually, these issues have been organisational issues for a long time. The common ones, the classic ones that you tend to see are poor collaboration, confusion, slow decisions. Those things happen regardless of the kind of organisation you are dealing with. The root cause of those issues is the same one. It’s misalignment in how the organisation is set up to deliver value.

To give you an example, there was a famous case in the past couple of years where a large bank decided that they were going to incentivise their sales force by the number of accounts that they opened. So people followed incentives. It got to a point where some of them opened accounts without customer consent. And what happened? Customers of course at some point, sooner or later, they realised that they had more accounts than they had authorised. They complained, they closed their relationship with the bank. So at the end it was terrible for the bank because they lost customers’ trust, credibility. But the important bit is why that happened. Well, it happened because the goal for the sales team was to open more accounts but it wasn’t really what the bank wanted, right? The bank wanted more accounts that customers wanted.

So at the end of the day it’s just one of many examples where you see that you have to look at everything else, not just incentives, but everything else that is connected to motivating certain behaviour.

Robert Shore: How does organisation design thinking specifically address that question in a way that is different from…well, how would that question normally be addressed and why is organisation design thinking better as a way of addressing it?

Lilian Duckart: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great question. I think it’s about thinking systemically, not on a short-term basis, but thinking more about what the long-term strategy and intent the company has and connecting everything that you do with that strategic intent. There are different mental models you can use. A common one is called the STAR model. And the STAR model gives you different organisational levers that you can manipulate. You don’t have to move all of them. You have to look at all of them. For example, structure is one of them, decision-making is another one, incentives is another one. Organisation design is about thinking holistically about the problem and looking at what you have to do to achieve that long-term purpose.

Robert Shore: Are some organisations better served by this kind of design thinking than others or is it applicable to every kind of business and organisation?

Lilian Duckart: Yeah, yeah, great question. It’s actually not about size. It’s about friction. The more friction you see, the more organisation design will benefit you. Every organisation makes design choices, whether they’re intentional or not, large and small. You don’t need to be big to use org design. You need org design when things that used to be easy start becoming slow and painful. For example, a company’s growing and what they used to do in hours, now it takes weeks because decisions were made by a handful of people really quickly and all of a sudden they cannot do
that anymore so they have to rethink how they operate.

With the smaller organisations, the scale-ups if you will, you look at the growth. With large, established organisations you would look at the complexity.

Robert Shore: You were a HR professional. You are now obviously an org design expert. How should somebody who is in HR who has no particular expertise in organisation design but who wants to start thinking about it now, how can they begin to position themselves and begin to think about this question?

Lilian Duckart: Yeah, yeah. Well, this guide is a great way to start, right? It offers practical examples and practical tips to do org design at the department level. Because you don’t have to do it at the enterprise level. You can do it at the team level, at the business unit level. And HR VPs are in a really good position to think and do org design. They sit in the middle of the business calls, the way the organisation operates, the way in which work gets done. So they get this ability into everything. They are in a really good position to shape, test and deliver design choices with their business clients.

Robert Shore: Obviously everybody must have a look at the guide on the Brightmine website. But also, I mean, give us a little example as a teaser of how somebody can begin to think about a single department.

Lilian Duckart: For example, let’s say you are trying to help an organisation make decisions faster, right? Let’s say a leader says, “This team is very slow. They are not collaborating well.” Right? That’s kind of like the quick rate. And the HR VP would add value by not acting immediately, right, but like taking a holistic view at this problem. So is this happening because of this or because of that? Is this really a problem? Because the solution…silos, right? Someone calls out “silos”. Let’s say this leader thinks that the poor collaboration is because of silos. Well, silos are not necessarily bad. Silos are needed to focus work when it needs to be focused. The problem is that we need to find out where we need to connect those siloed teams and build intentional linkages.

So the HR VP could look at what linkages need to be built to bring collaboration up when it needs to be up. You don’t build silos and then tear down silos. You build silos and then connect teams where it makes sense to connect.

Robert Shore: So we are promoting organisation design as a great way to think about things. Does every organisation design journey end in success and if not, why does it not work?

Lilian Duckart: Yeah, yeah. No, of course it doesn’t work all the time, right? There are lots of examples of failures out there. And those help us to become aware. For example, one of the classic ones – the best practice trap, right? – someone hears that a big brand is doing something and then others want to copy.

For example, I worked at Amazon and we had a writing culture that a lot of people would have heard of. Well, other companies tried to imitate the writing culture. But they just copied the practice without actually looking at this holistically and building the infrastructure to support the writing culture.

Robert Shore: And also about the culture as well, can you just explain that slightly? I’m not familiar with it.

Lilian Duckart: Yes, yes. So at Amazon you write documents instead of building slides, right? And then a company that is copying the practice all of a sudden decides that they are not going to build the slides, they are going to have their employees write documents but they do not support them with business writing workshops, for example, which are actually really important and Amazon has lots and lots of business writing workshops. And they actually set the time to write and to read, and then this company that is copying just the practice, they don’t do any of that. They don’t even use them to make decisions. They keep making decisions the same way they did when they were using slides. It’s just an example to show that if you only change one thing of the puzzle and not look at the whole pie and change everything that needs to be aligned and coherent to make sense of the change, it’s not going to work.

Robert Shore: So if you see a good idea in another business or something that you want to copy, you need to think about it holistically nonetheless, even if you think, “That’s a good little thing, let’s do that.”

Laura Kimpton: Exactly, exactly.

Robert Shore: It’s the wider impact.

Lilian Duckart: Exactly. And it doesn’t mean that you can never borrow ideas, right? Like there are great ideas out there. But contextualise them and make them your own, not just copy them without context.

Robert Shore: Right. Okay. Let’s talk about AI now. So, your organisation design practice, From→To (I’ll put a link to that in the show notes – the website address is www.fromtopartners.com), is dedicated to enabling organisations to turn AI vision into impact. Can you share some examples of where AI is being used to support org design journeys?

Lilian Duckart: Yes, of course. This is fascinating because it changes by the day, right? I decided to build this business because of the exciting times that we are all going through. So I’ll give you an example in three parts, which are much the three phases of design in my approach, right? You’ll find three or more phases. The main pieces of work always match within something called “discovery” or “diagnosis”, and then the design part, which is the core part, and then the delivery.

So, with this client, during the discovery, which is all focused on understanding the today and the tomorrow, you get to do a lot of reading, analysis, synthesis. And now with AI, you get to do that faster and better. I am using a tool from Google called NotebookLM to upload lots of public, very dense documents because this client is in a highly regulated sector. And what would have taken me days took me hours to really extract the key insights from those documents. And then I was able to move quicker to the design.

And within the design, one of the main things that you get to do with the clients is to create the design criteria and use that to challenge thinking and ultimately align on different choices. Well, we are using…we have actually already completed this phase but we used ChatGPT to generate design criteria that obviously was not going to be their final one, but you do that to bring examples and inspire people to…wordsmithing and change their…and create their own, rather than starting from scratch. They have something, they have a good base to work with.

And right now we are about to start the delivery phase. And the way we are going to use AI is to get a pulse or regular pulse on how their chosen design is going and incorporate feedback quickly and course-correct.

Robert Shore: Organisation design – great thing to adopt. Obviously it brings with it change, and change can cause anxiety among people. It causes me a great deal of anxiety. How does HR help make sure that I and other people like me have a positive mindset about change and therefore about organisation design?

Lilian Duckart: I think the mindset needs to change from a one-off change to evolution kind of thing. Because I think those…we had one kind of change every few months are long gone, and we get to see change all the time. But if we approach it as, “Let’s communicate about this change. Let’s see who’s impacted and how they are going to be trained and…”, that’s not going to work anymore. I think we need to make organisations resilient through org design. And that resilience comes from helping them to build the ability to adapt.

So with org design we could do this in three ways. We could help them clarify decision-making so every time there’s a change they also know how decisions are going to be made. We can help them build self-feedback loops so it’s not like finding out feedback at the end of the cycle but throughout the cycle. And then encouraging experimentation, right? That mindset of trying and testing things as you go is going to make organisations more resilient.

Laura Kimpton: And also not being frightened of mistakes either, being open to experiment and having that psychological safety.

Lilian Duckart: Exactly.

Robert Shore: Yeah. So actually, that was my last question I think, really, for you, Lilian, which is about if HR professionals take – I mean, maybe that’s not the one thing but that’s certainly one thing – take one thing away from this discussion, what should it or what could it be? What’s a practical first step they can take in their own organisations? Where to begin?

Lilian Duckart: I think it’s about building that org design capability, thinking of it as a business capability, very practical, that it’s actually going to help them improve organisational performance. So if I put it in just a few words, I would say that org design is one of the most practical organisational levers that HR VPs have to help their business.

Robert Shore: Laura, do you want to give us a teaser, a bit more detail into what the guides that Lilian has authored for us include?

Laura Kimpton: Yes. So to plug the guides even more, Lilian has authored for us, as we said, a practical introduction to organisation design and set out an example organisation design journey. It’s packed with practical tools and frameworks that HR practitioners can use to translate that high-level strategy into day-to-day execution, in other words the work that people do. They’ve been pitched as a general introduction to those with little or no knowledge, but also give plenty of detailed examples and comprehensive guidance for those who are embarking on an organisation design journey for the first time. To find the guides, subscribers can log onto the Brightmine HR and Compliance Centre, go to Resource types and to Leading practice guides, and here you’ll be able to access the full list of the other 45 guides we have available.

Robert Shore: Forty-five? Okay, tell us a little about the Leading practice guides. What makes them different to other resource types on our HR and Compliance Centre, and also what sort of topics are they focused on?

Laura Kimpton: I think it’s fair to say that the Brightmine HR and Compliance Centre is best known for its template Policies and Letters. But we also have a bit of a hidden gem in the form of the Leading practice guides – and I’m biased because I work on them. These guides provide strategic practices that can help an organisation become an employer of choice, one that can recruit and retain the best talent. They’re aimed at HR professionals in strategic and leadership roles responsible for making decisions and putting together policies and practices that will have long-term, organisation-wide impact in areas such as culture, talent management, DEI, employee experience and change management. And obviously now also organisation design. We work with consultants and subject matter experts like Lilian to author the guides, so we benefit from these contributors’ experience of working with many different organisations.

Robert Shore: We will put a link also to this particular Leading practice guide in the show notes, and also how you can find Lilian and her work elsewhere. I’ll say thank you once again to Lilian. Thank you, Lilian.

Lilian Duckart: Thank you both. Thank you, Robert, thank you, Laura.

Robert Shore: And thank you, Laura. And I’ll just say to listeners, until next time.