Andrew Day
September 2025
Organisations don’t change simply because we rewire the structure or launch a new cultural initiative. Lasting transformation happens when both the design of the organisation, its structures, roles, processes, and systems, and its dynamics, the emotional, relational, and behavioural patterns, are worked on simultaneously.
Design and dynamics: two sides of the same system
Organisation design provides the architecture of work, the scaffolding that enables strategy to be implemented. It includes tasks, roles, boundaries, decision rights, reporting lines, performance systems, and information flows. It shapes who talks to whom, how fast things move, what gets measured, and how resources are allocated. Done well, it enables clarity, coherence, and coordination. Done poorly, it breeds confusion, duplication, bottlenecks, or disengagement.
But structure alone doesn’t determine behaviour. The same design can produce very different experiences and outcomes depending on how people relate to it, how they interpret roles, how they show up in teams, how they respond to ambiguity or conflict. This is the terrain of dynamics: the interpersonal and systemic patterns that emerge from lived experience. These include emotions, such as fear and anxiety, and defences such as blame, avoidance, over-functioning, collusion etc, implicit, often invisible ways in which people adapt to the system they’re in.
Yet design and dynamics are not two separate realms. They are interdependent and co-evolving. Structures shape how people behave. But people’s behaviours, especially unexamined ones, also reinforce or distort the intended effects of design. If a structure is unclear, people often revert to informal authority and personal relationships to get work done. If performance systems reward individual results over collective success, collaboration becomes a risk, not a norm.
Beneath it all: basic assumptions
What often goes unnoticed is that both structure and dynamics rest on shared assumptions, ideas about how the organisation works, what matters, what leaders stand for, what gets rewarded, and what must be avoided. These assumptions may be partly conscious, the stated values or strategic beliefs of the organisation, but many are unconscious: held in bodies, habits, and group norms, passed down or shaped by past success and trauma.
For example:
- A company might espouse innovation and risk-taking but assume that mistakes will damage careers, so people stay safe.
- A structure may claim to distribute authority, but the unspoken belief is that power only really resides at the top, so decision-making slows or is second-guessed.
- A leadership team may value feedback, but underneath lies the assumption that disagreement equals disloyalty, so people withhold challenge.
- An organisation may value agility and flexibility, but under resource teams so that they are always time challenged.
These assumptions live in the system, and in people. They manifest in design choices and in everyday behaviour. They explain why changes that make sense on paper don’t take root in practice. People sense that something deeper hasn’t shifted. The design might have changed, but the underlying narrative has not.
Working at depth: OD and transformation
This is why organisation development must go deeper than surface-level change. OD practitioners work not only with the formal and the visible, structures, roles, plans, but also with the informal and the invisible, relationships, narratives, assumptions, and meaning-making.
We ask:
- What is the system currently producing, in terms of behaviour, decisions, and outcomes, and why?
- What assumptions are shaping these patterns?
- What are people not saying, not seeing, or not allowed to feel?
- Where is the energy, and where is the fear?
We also help clients name the gap between espoused values and theory-in-use, the difference between what the organisation says it believes and what it actually does under pressure. Surfacing such incongruities is uncomfortable, but essential. It opens the space for genuine reflection and choice. Without it, we risk implementing new designs into old mindsets.
Case illustration
A successful asset management business had grown over a decade because its highly experienced executive team and a few other capable individuals had immersed themselves in much of the day-to-day commercial decision making. Tight central control however had now become a limiter for further growth. The underpinning belief being that effective leaders had to be immersed in the detail and oversee the decision making of others. To develop, the business needed to re-design its operating model by separating lines of business, clarifying decision making responsibility and accountabilities. At the same time, the leadership dynamics of the business had to shift. The executive needed to shift to a more strategic role and the next level of managers needed to take on greater responsibility and exercise leadership of their areas of the business.
Design and dynamics as levers for belief change
While assumptions shape design and dynamics, the reverse is also true: changing structure and behaviour can, over time, shift assumptions. For example:
- Redistributing authority through clear decision rights can challenge assumptions that “only senior leaders can decide.”
- Creating psychologically safe spaces for conflict can challenge the belief that disagreement is dangerous.
- Aligning rewards with collaboration can slowly shift the assumption that “success is individual.”
But these shifts don’t happen automatically. They require conscious attention to how the system is being re-shaped and what it signals. Every change communicates something, about what is valued, what is safe, and what is possible. OD helps leaders become stewards of this meaning-making process.
In closing: seeing and working with the whole
If we want transformation to be more than surface change, if we want it to be sustainable, humane, and generative, we must work with the whole system: the structures that shape behaviour, the dynamics that sustain or distort them, and the deep assumptions that live underneath.
This work is not linear. It’s iterative, relational, and sometimes messy. But it is the work that makes all other work possible. OD offers a way to navigate this complexity, not by choosing between design or dynamics, but by holding both in view, while reaching beneath them to what really maintains the system: the stories we tell, the truths we avoid, and the futures we believe are possible.
