I’ve helped redesign a lot of organizations over the years, and there’s a peculiar pattern I’ve noticed. Leaders will often propose an organizational structure that looks remarkably similar to one the organization previously abandoned. There’s nothing inherently wrong with reconsidering an old design. An organizational structure that was inappropriate five years ago may be exactly what the organization needs today. The problem is that leaders frequently don’t remember why they abandoned it in the first place.
Organizations commonly vacillate between two or three different structures (e.g., functional, divisional, geographical). They experience the limitations of one, redesign around those limitations, live with the new structure for several years, and eventually become frustrated with its limitations. By then, the problems associated with the old structure have faded from organizational memory, making yesterday’s solution look surprisingly attractive again. Organizations that forget why they changed are destined to rediscover why they changed. This is what I call Organizational Amnesia. Old solutions begin to appear novel after the problems that originally discredited them have been forgotten.
The antidote is a better system for creating Organizational Design Wisdom. Wisdom is more than accumulated knowledge. Knowledge accumulates, wisdom evolves. It develops as knowledge is repeatedly tested against reality, refined through reflection, and ultimately used to improve judgment. Organizations can do the same thing. An organization cannot learn from experience it does not remember. One practical place to start is Organizational Design.
Before the Redesign: Preserve Why
Every significant Organizational Design effort should produce a Basis of Design (BoD). A good BoD doesn’t merely frame the guidelines and boundary conditions for the design. It explains why the final design was selected over the alternatives. What problem are we trying to solve? What alternatives did we consider? What assumptions informed the design? What tradeoffs did we knowingly accept? Why did we ultimately choose this design?
Those questions matter because the organizational chart itself tells future leaders very little about the thinking that produced it. Five years later, circumstances may have changed substantially. Leaders should be free to reach a different conclusion. But they should do so knowing why their predecessors reached the conclusion they did. Preserve the decision, but more importantly, preserve the reasoning behind it.
After the Redesign: Build Knowledge
Once the design effort is complete, conduct a formal Lessons Learned exercise. Where the BoD captures, among other things, the reasoning that went into the design, the Lessons Learned document captures what the organization discovered while actually developing and implementing it. What worked particularly well? What proved more difficult than expected? Which assumptions were challenged during implementation? What would the team do differently next time? Record those insights while they’re still fresh. Don’t rely on the people involved to remember them. Some will leave. Others will move into different roles. Even those who remain will gradually reconstruct their memories around subsequent experience.
But the purpose of Lessons Learned isn’t merely documentation. It’s reflection. The people involved have accumulated experiences from different parts of the effort. A Lessons Learned exercise gives them an opportunity to step back, examine those experiences holistically, understand how they relate to one another, and convert what happened into a more coherent understanding of the design effort. Documentation preserves experience; reflection converts experience into learning. This is knowledge-building reflection.
Later: Let Reality Grade the Design
A Lessons Learned document serves a valuable purpose, but it doesn’t tell the whole story of the redesign effort. At the end of a redesign, you can assess the design process and early implementation. You cannot yet know how well the organizational design will perform over time. Reality hasn’t had enough time to test it.
That’s why every significant redesign should include a scheduled Retrospective, or Lookback, after an appropriate amount of time has elapsed. A small realignment may reveal its consequences in a few months. A major enterprise redesign may require a full year or longer. Your organizational design team can determine how much time should elapse before a meaningful evaluation can be performed.
At that time, ask a more consequential set of questions. Did the design accomplish what we expected? Which assumptions held? Which didn’t? What unintended consequences emerged? Which tradeoffs proved more consequential than anticipated? What would we preserve or change if we were designing the organization again today?
This is another act of reflection, but its purpose is different. Lessons Learned asks what the organization learned from the experience of designing and implementing the organization. The Retrospective asks what reality has taught the organization after living with the design over time. That temporal distance matters. Consequences have emerged. Assumptions have encountered operating reality. Some beliefs have endured; others have been refined, challenged, or overturned.
This is wisdom-building reflection. Lessons Learned asks what experience taught us. A Retrospective asks what reality taught us over time.
Preserve the Organizational Memory
Now keep it. Maintain a historical archive of Organizational Design efforts—large, medium, and small. For each meaningful redesign, preserve the Basis of Design, Lessons Learned, and Retrospective along with the other supporting plans, visuals, specifications, and materials necessary to understand the effort.
Over time, this becomes something far more valuable than an archive of old organizational charts. It becomes a record of the organization’s evolving understanding of how it should be designed and why. But there’s an important catch. A meticulously maintained archive that nobody consults is merely an expensive filing cabinet.
Before the Next Redesign: Remember
At the beginning of every new Organizational Design effort, consult the archive. Before drawing new organizational charts or debating reporting relationships, understand what the organization has already tried. Review the relevant Basis of Design documents. Read the Lessons Learned. Study the Retrospectives. Pay particular attention when someone proposes something the organization has done before. Don’t reject it merely because it’s old. The circumstances may be different enough to warrant reconsideration.
Instead, ask: Why did we move away from this design last time, and what has changed that makes it appropriate now? That’s a fundamentally different conversation from rediscovering an old design without realizing you’ve already lived through it. The objective isn’t to bind today’s leaders to yesterday’s decisions. It’s to give today’s leaders the benefit of yesterday’s experience.
Carry the Wisdom Forward
Reviewing the organization’s design history isn’t enough. The accumulated insights from previous design efforts should be explicitly incorporated into the Basis of Design for the new effort. Document what previous redesigns taught the organization. Identify which Lessons Learned and Retrospective findings remain relevant under current circumstances. Then articulate what the organization now understands as a result.
Most importantly, establish clear traceability between that accumulated Wisdom and the rules, guidelines, boundary conditions, and recommendations governing the new design. If a previous design created excessive fragmentation, for example, don’t merely record that observation. Determine whether the lesson remains applicable and, if it does, translate it into explicit design guidance intended to prevent unnecessary fragmentation this time. If an assumption underlying an earlier design proved incorrect, make sure the new BoD reflects what reality subsequently taught the organization. This creates an important chain of traceability:
Past Experience → Reflection → Learning → Wisdom → Design Guidance → New Design
The purpose isn’t to make previous experience dispositive. Today’s circumstances may justify doing something the organization deliberately rejected before. The purpose is to ensure that today’s decisions benefit from what the organization has already learned. The new BoD therefore does more than establish the basis for the next design. It provides evidence that Organizational Design Wisdom has accumulated and demonstrates how that Wisdom is influencing present judgment.
From Memory to Wisdom
There’s an important distinction here:
- A Basis of Design isn’t wisdom.
- A Lessons Learned document isn’t wisdom.
- A Retrospective isn’t wisdom.
- Even a comprehensive historical archive isn’t wisdom.
Those things create organizational memory.
Organizational Design Wisdom emerges when leaders retrieve that memory, reconsider what the organization has learned against present circumstances, and allow that accumulated learning to improve the judgment they exercise today. Organizational memory becomes Organizational Wisdom only when past learning informs future judgment. That’s how organizations stop merely accumulating experience and begin benefiting from it.
And importantly, that Wisdom is observable. When accumulated learning can be traced into subsequent design guidance, judgment, and action, the organization has evidence that experience hasn’t merely been preserved—it has changed how the organization thinks.
Start With the Last Redesign
You don’t need to build a comprehensive Organizational Design Wisdom capability tomorrow. Start with your most recent Organizational Design effort. Find the people who participated and gather whatever documentation still exists. Reconstruct why the design was chosen. Capture what was learned during implementation. And if enough time has passed, conduct the Retrospective now. Then put those materials somewhere the next design team will actually find them.
And establish one simple requirement: No future Organizational Design effort begins without reviewing what the organization has already learned. Because your organization is going to accumulate experience whether you manage it or not. The question is whether that experience will become wisdom—or simply become history.
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