Regulated utility, 2,400-person operations group
Illustrative engagement example. Composite scenario assembled from EquitiFy practice patterns. Names, sectors, and exact metrics have been altered to protect client confidentiality.
The Challenge
Where it started.
The operations group ran a large, safety-critical part of a regulated utility. Roughly 2,400 people across field crews, control rooms, planning, and support. A reorganization had merged two divisions that had spent a decade operating as rivals, and the new structure existed on paper long before it existed in practice.
The symptoms were familiar. Decisions that used to take a day now took three weeks because nobody was sure who owned them. Two parallel sets of meetings covered the same ground with different people and different numbers. Field leaders were quietly routing around the new structure to get anything done, which meant the reorganization was being undone in the hallways even as the executives announced its success.
Leadership did not need a new strategy. The merger was the right call. What they needed was for the new organization to actually function, and to do it without a dip in safety performance or a wave of senior departures while a regulator watched closely.
The Approach
Mapped to CHAMPS®.
We treated the reorganization as an operating problem, not a communications exercise. We ran the diagnosis and the redesign through the framework, so the work held to the same standard we ask of clients.
We named who owns what.
We mapped every recurring decision in the division and found the ones with no clear owner or with two. Then we assigned decision rights, in writing, and made them visible. Most of the three-week delays disappeared once people stopped waiting to find out whether it was their call.
We retired the duplicate forums.
The two parallel meeting structures were a relic of the old rivalry. We collapsed them into one operating cadence with a single source of numbers, and we were direct with leaders about which legacy habits had to go. Some of those conversations were uncomfortable. They were also the point.
We ran the new cadence with them.
Rather than hand over a binder, we sat in the new forums for the first eight weeks, coaching the chairs on how to run a decision meeting instead of a status meeting. By the end the leaders were running them without us in the room.
We left a way to keep it honest.
We installed a short set of leading indicators, including decision cycle time and a measure of how often work was being routed around the structure. The division reviews them monthly, so drift gets caught before it becomes another quiet workaround.
What changed
The result.
Within two quarters, the time it took to move a standard operating decision through the division fell by roughly a third. The number that mattered more to leadership was harder to put on a slide: field leaders stopped routing around the structure, because the structure now answered their questions faster than the workaround did.
Safety performance held steady through the transition, which was the non-negotiable. No senior leaders left during the installation window, in a division where leadership turnover during reorganizations had historically run high. The single operating cadence replaced the two competing ones, and the executive team finally saw one set of numbers instead of two that never quite agreed.
The reorganization that had existed only on paper became the way the division actually worked. The regulator saw a group that had absorbed a major structural change without a dip in the metrics it cared about.
Lessons
What we carry forward.
- 1A reorganization is not finished when it is announced. It is finished when the new structure answers questions faster than the old workaround did.
- 2Most decision delays are not capacity problems. They are ownership problems. Name who owns the call and the delay usually evaporates.
- 3Duplicate meetings are where merged organizations hide their unfinished business. Collapsing them forces the real reconciliation.
- 4Leaders learn a new cadence by running it with a coach in the room, not by reading about it. The eight weeks of presence did more than the design document.
- 5A small set of leading indicators, reviewed on a fixed cadence, is what keeps a change from quietly unwinding once the consultants leave.
Recognize the pattern?
If any of this sounds like where you are, the next step is a conversation. We start most engagements with a 90-day diagnostic and a written read of what we would do.