Organisational Development

Make your organisation fit for your ambition

A CEO once told us, half-laughing, half-tired: “We used to make decisions in the corridor. Now we need a calendar invitation, a steering group, and a follow‑up meeting to decide on the follow‑up meeting.”

Growth often brings hidden cost: more layers, more handovers, more meetings. Decisions take longer because more people need to weigh in. Work gets duplicated because ownership isn’t clear.

Collaboration stops being a lever for speed and becomes a tax on time and focus.

At LQ, we help you shape an organisation that supports your ambition in real life: clear enough to move fast, strong enough to scale, and human enough to bring people with you.

When organisations come to us

We’re usually asked to help when leaders recognise that something is no longer working, but it’s hard to put a finger on where to start.

Typical signals:

  • Results lag behind the ambition, despite hard work.
  • Complexity has grown: multiple teams working on similar topics, with little synergy.
  • Collaboration across units feels forced rather than natural.
  • The organisation feels too expensive or top-heavy.
  • Professionals spend more time coordinating and reporting than practising their craft.
  • Leadership feels pressure to restructure, while knowing that a poorly handled change could do more harm than good.

And often there’s a deeper tension underneath:

“We want to work more together, but we don’t want to lose autonomy, speed or ownership.”

Organisational Development

What organisational development means at LQ

For us, organisational development is not a theoretical exercise. It’s deeply practical.

We work on the concrete elements that determine whether strategy turns into action:

  • organisational structure
  • roles and responsibilities
  • decision rights and mandates
  • governance and ways of working
  • collaboration across teams and units

Always in service of one question:

Does the way you are organised help people do the work that matters most?

We’re also explicit about what organisational development is not.

There is no perfect design that makes everything easy. Organisations are living systems. What we aim for is not perfection, but a setup that makes the desired outcomes more likely.

That’s why our work connects most strongly to 2 of our Six Batteries of Change:

  • Powerful Management Infrastructure: Is the bridge between the strategy and the many projects that help to implement it.
  • Healthy Culture: In open, collaborative and environments receptive to new ideas, change is more likely to be successful than in unhealthy environments that are characterized by power distance, silo departments, and inside-out thinking.

Together, these 2 batteries are what translate strategy into day-to-day decisions and behaviour.

Organisational Development

Fair Process Leadership

Organisational change touches identity, pride and meaning. People want to know that their work, and their expertise, matters.

When change feels ‘done to them’, resistance is a natural response.

That’s why we work with Fair Process Leadership: a proven approach developed at INSEAD.

In practice, this means we consistently do three things:

1. Starting with the real problem

Before designing solutions, we involve people in clarifying the question:

What are we actually trying to solve?

This alone often brings relief and clarity. Many frustrations turn out to have shared roots.

2. Explore the full solution space

Restructuring may be part of the answer, but it’s rarely the only lever.

Together, we explore alternatives such as leadership practices, prioritisation, strategy clarity, meeting rhythms or behavioural agreements.

Only then do we decide what combination will truly help the organisation move forward.

3. Decide with mandate, not distance

We make decision-making explicit.

That means: the people who carry the accountability also carry the decision.

We agree things like:

  • Who decides what (per topic: strategy, budget, priorities, people, process, customer).
  • What ‘good input’ looks like and who needs to be involved before a decision is made.
  • Decision rights and guardrails (what teams can decide locally, and what needs cross‑organisational alignment).
  • Escalation routes and timelines so decisions don’t stall in endless alignment cycles.

What this looks like in practice

We start broad, involving a representative group from each discipline across the organisation to build shared understanding.

We then work with a focused design team, drawn from the organisation itself, to develop the future design and governance.

And throughout, we always work face to face. Trust, alignment and ownership are built together, not in a slide deck.

Organisational Development

What organisations gain

When structure, governance and ways of working align, decisions speed up, collaboration improves, and work starts to flow again.

What leaders typically notice first is simple: less friction, more delivery.

  • Roles, responsibilities and decision rights are unambiguous
  • Less duplication, fewer handovers, fewer alignment loops
  • Stronger collaboration across boundaries (without extra bureaucracy)
  • Energy shifts from coordination to value creation
  • Faster, cleaner decisions, including smoother formal consultation
  • Structure and governance that support execution

And perhaps most importantly: renewed confidence that the organisation is working with its people.

"If your organisation no longer flows, because growth has added complexity and collaboration isn't delivering, that's exactly the moment to redesign how you're organised. We've done this before, and we know how to make it land."

If growth no longer feels like progress

There’s usually a moment when leaders realise: we can’t keep adding meetings and layers to solve today’s challenges.

It might be time to talk if:

  • growth has introduced complexity that no longer adds value
  • collaboration is taking more effort, and execution is slowing down
  • you’re considering a redesign and want to do it without losing trust, focus or momentum

Sounds familiar?

Let’s have a conversation. We’ll help you get clear on what’s really going on, and what would make the biggest difference next.

Take our free Quick Scan