BUILT FROM THE INSIDE

NOT FROM THE OUTSIDE

WHO’S BEHIND IT

I’m James, an organisation design and effectiveness specialist. For more than 15 years I’ve worked inside organisations, not alongside them. I’ve advised executive teams, redesigned operating models, built performance and succession frameworks, and partnered with Finance on headcount and investment decisions. I’ve done it in businesses scaling from a few hundred people to over two thousand, and in large, complex organisations with global teams.

I’ve also delivered Organisational Design after a consultancy-led redesign to make it work in practice. The recommendations looked convincing on the page. What they lacked was time spent inside the business, and anyone still accountable for how it played out a year later. That gap is where most organisation design succeeds or fails, and it’s where I’ve spent my career.

A recurring part of my work has been producing organisation health checks for leadership teams. Gathering the data took months. By the time the report was presented, it was already out of date. Often that showed within minutes, the moment someone asked about a team that had changed since the data was pulled.

Org Health Check is my answer to both problems. It gives leaders the same depth of insight, kept current every month, built on published research rather than opinion, and open enough to challenge. No slide deck and no follow-on engagement, just a clear picture you can act on.

James Wrighton

Founder & CEO

Org Health Check Ltd

“Good organisation design isn’t judged on the day it’s presented.

It’s judged a year later, by the people living with it.”

1

Evidence beats instinct.

2

The SIX principles behind everything we build

Organisational insight you can trust, check and act on

Too many decisions about structure, cost and people are made on gut feel or “how we did it last time”. Experience matters, but it isn’t evidence. Every measure we use is grounded in published research on organisation design and effectiveness.

Insight should be current, not annual.

A structural review that takes months to produce is out of date the day it’s presented. Your organisation changes every month, so your diagnosis should too.

3

You should always be able to check our working.

Every finding shows the numbers behind it. Where the research doesn’t give a single right answer, we say so. Our scoring thresholds are our own calibration of the evidence, and we’re open about that.

4

Structure is never just structure.

The analysis that shows how you’re organised also informs your budgets, the roles you’ll need next, where capability sits, and where succession risk is hiding.

5

The answer is yours to act on.

We’re not here to sell you the next phase of work. We give you a clear diagnosis and the reasoning behind it, so you can act on it yourself, with your own team.

6

Personal data stays personal. AND PROTECTED.

Our AI never sees names or individual records, only aggregated, de-identified figures. Each client’s data is held in its own ring-fenced database.

THE RESEARCH

See where our thinking comes from

Foundations of organisation design and effectiveness

  • Burns, T. and Stalker, G.M. (1961) The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock.

  • Chandler, A.D. (1962) Strategy and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Lawrence, P.R. and Lorsch, J.W. (1967) ‘Differentiation and integration in complex organizations’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 12(1), pp. 1–47.

  • Thompson, J.D. (1967) Organizations in Action. New York: McGraw-Hill.

  • Pugh, D.S., Hickson, D.J., Hinings, C.R. and Turner, C. (1968) ‘Dimensions of organization structure’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 13(1), pp. 65–105.

  • Mintzberg, H. (1979) The Structuring of Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

  • Quinn, R.E. and Rohrbaugh, J. (1983) ‘A spatial model of effectiveness criteria’, Management Science, 29(3), pp. 363–377.

  • Cameron, K.S. (1986) ‘Effectiveness as paradox: consensus and conflict in conceptions of organizational effectiveness’, Management Science, 32(5), pp. 539–553.

  • Nadler, D.A. and Tushman, M.L. (1997) Competing by Design. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Donaldson, L. (2001) The Contingency Theory of Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

  • Galbraith, J.R. (2014) Designing Organizations. 3rd edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

  • Burton, R.M., Obel, B. and Håkonsson, D.D. (2015) Organizational Design: A Step-by-Step Approach. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Stanford, N. (2018) Organization Design: The Practitioner’s Guide. 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge.

Management Cost Efficiency (share of payroll in management)

  • Parkinson, C.N. (1955) ‘Parkinson’s law’, The Economist, 19 November.

  • Pondy, L.R. (1969) ‘Effects of size, complexity, and ownership on administrative intensity’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 14(1), pp. 47–60.

  • Blau, P.M. (1970) ‘A formal theory of differentiation in organizations’, American Sociological Review, 35(2), pp. 201–218.

  • Hamel, G. and Zanini, M. (2020) Humanocracy. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

Workforce Distribution (balance across departments)

  • Burton, R.M., Lauridsen, J. and Obel, B. (2002) ‘Return on assets loss from situational and contingency misfits’, Management Science, 48(11), pp. 1461–1485.

  • See also Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) and Galbraith (2014), above.

Data sources

  • Office for National Statistics. Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE).

  • Office for National Statistics. Standard Occupational Classification (SOC 2020).

Span Calibration (manager load and job family breadth)

  • Graicunas, V.A. (1937) ‘Relationship in organization’, in Gulick, L. and Urwick, L. (eds) Papers on the Science of Administration. New York: Institute of Public Administration.

  • Urwick, L.F. (1956) ‘The manager’s span of control’, Harvard Business Review, 34(3), pp. 39–47.

  • Woodward, J. (1965) Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice. London: Oxford University Press.

  • Ouchi, W.G. and Dowling, J.B. (1974) ‘Defining the span of control’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 19(3), pp. 357–365.

  • Gittell, J.H. (2001) ‘Supervisory span, relational coordination, and flight departure performance: a reassessment of postbureaucracy theory’, Organization Science, 12(4), pp. 468–483.

  • Meier, K.J. and Bohte, J. (2003) ‘Span of control and public organizations: implementing Luther Gulick’s research design’, Public Administration Review, 63(1), pp. 61–70.

Layer Efficiency (management layers)

  • Williamson, O.E. (1967) ‘Hierarchical control and optimum firm size’, Journal of Political Economy, 75(2), pp. 123–138.

  • Keren, M. and Levhari, D. (1979) ‘The optimum span of control in a pure hierarchy’, Management Science, 25(11), pp. 1162–1172.

  • Jaques, E. (1989) Requisite Organization. Arlington, VA: Cason Hall.

  • Jaques, E. (1990) ‘In praise of hierarchy’, Harvard Business Review, 68(1), pp. 127–133.

  • Rajan, R.G. and Wulf, J. (2006) ‘The flattening firm: evidence from panel data on the changing nature of corporate hierarchies’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 88(4), pp. 759–773.

  • Wulf, J. (2012) ‘The flattened firm: not as advertised’, California Management Review, 55(1), pp. 5–23.

Layer Distribution (organisational shape)

  • Garicano, L. (2000) ‘Hierarchies and the organization of knowledge in production’, Journal of Political Economy, 108(5), pp. 874–904.

  • Garicano, L. and Rossi-Hansberg, E. (2006) ‘Organization and inequality in a knowledge economy’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(4), pp. 1383–1435.

Evidence-based decision making

  • Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R.I. (2006) ‘Evidence-based management’, Harvard Business Review, 84(1), pp. 62–74.

  • Rousseau, D.M. (2006) ‘Is there such a thing as “evidence-based management”?’, Academy of Management Review, 31(2), pp. 256–269.

  • Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Allen Lane.

  • Barends, E. and Rousseau, D.M. (2018) Evidence-Based Management. London: Kogan Page.

  • Kahneman, D., Sibony, O. and Sunstein, C.R. (2021) Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. London: William Collins.