Here's a paper I just finished reading, and I recommend to you:
Robert H. Waterman, Jr, Thomas J. Peters, and Julien R. Phillips, Structure is not organization, Business Horizons 23:3 (1980-06). (pdf) (notes)
I found this one as a reference in The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins (notes) in the section on securing early wins. That section boils down to: you really need to understand how your organization is put together, and how the various components and functions affect each other, in order to make change work.
This paper is (I think) the source of the McKinsey 7S Framework—the seven S's being:
- Structure
- Strategy
- Systems
- Skills
- Style
- Staff
- Superordinate goals
I think that list of traits is mostly obvious, in a subconscious way, but people tend to focus on (1) structure and (2) strategy. I'm not sure what fallacy it is, but I understand the tendency toward thinking that if I just organize a group of people or an organization in a certain way, then a successful outcome will just fall out of it. "If you build it they will come", right? Similarly for strategy: all we ever need is a good plan and we're all set to win.
Structure is king. Strategy is king. We've all experienced how the outcome really goes when we push the lever all the way in either direction.
[p. 17] Our assertion is that productive organization change is not simply a matter of structure, although structure is important. It is not so simple as the interaction between strategy and structure, although strategy is critical too. Our claim is that effective organizational change is really the relationship between structure, strategy, systems, style, skills, staff, and something we call superordinate goals.
One of the important things that the drive for the One True Strategy or Structure completely misses is the importance of the people involved in crafting the ideas and, even more importantly, grinding and polishing them until the ideas work. To forget that is inhumane.
[p. 24] We are often told, “Get the structure ‘right’ and the people will fit” or “Don’t compromise the ‘optimum’ organization for people considerations.” At the other end of the spectrum we are earnestly advised, “The right people can make any organization work.” Neither view is correct. People do count, but staff is only one of our seven variables.
Anyway, the lasting thought I had after reading this is: for complex systems, it's not likely that there's just one factor you need to adjust to fix something that's out of balance. But that's obvious, no? Of course. Who doesn't understand that by intuition, let alone experience? But the 7 S's are a nice, simple basis for a checklist or template to consider when planning to make a change that affects a complex system. (And by "simple" I don't mean it's simple to change anything complex, but that having a short list is as simple as you can hope for.)