Organisational design shapes behaviour long before people make conscious choices. Roles, meetings, decision rights, incentives and spaces tell people what to do, what to say, when to wait, and what risks are worth taking. In this article, I explore why leaders will find it hard to create new culture while keeping people inside a context designed for the old one.
“Our behavior conforms to the incentives and obstacles that each individual system defines as correct or incorrect.” – Be The Change
Why does context matter in organisational design?
We often speak about behaviour as if it came only from personal intention. Of course, intention matters. People make choices, and leaders have a responsibility to choose with awareness. Leadership behaviors will send a very clear message. And, doing that without creating the right context people will not fully buy in. This is why organisational design matters so much: it is the architecture in which behaviour happens.
A city designed around cars invites one way of living. A city designed around parks, walking and public spaces invites another. This is part of the transformation many cities did during 1950 and 1970 to create space for cars and what many are reverting now. The same happens inside organizations. A company designed around fast decision making creates one kind of accountability and risk tolerance. A company designed for innovation creates a different risk tolerance and structure. A company who needs full collaboration needs to design their spaces and rewards to foster people coming together and making sacrifices. When organisations ask people to behave differently without redesigning the context, they create tension. They ask for agility inside heavy approval systems. They ask for collaboration inside competitive incentives. They ask for innovation inside calendars that leave no room for exploration. The words change, but the environment continues to educate people in the old way.
What can leaders learn from other transformations?
Cities are living systems. They contain routines, symbols, constraints, rituals, flows and invisible assumptions about how life should happen. The city where we live teaches us where to gather, how to move, how close or distant to feel from others, how much nature enters daily life and how quickly we expect things to happen.
I have lived in Buenos Aires, London, Madrid and Barcelona and now in a little town, and each city shaped my behaviour in different ways. In one place, the table becomes the centre of social life. In another, the park changes how people meet. In another, the bar becomes a space for spontaneous conversation. In Barcelona, the sea, tourism, language and public space constantly reshape the experience of belonging.
This is not just an urban reflection. It is a leadership lesson. The Barcelona superblocks model is a powerful example because it reorganises public space by shifting priority from vehicles to people. Research on the model describes it as an urban and transport planning strategy that aims to reclaim public space, reduce motorised transport and promote healthier ways of living. For organisations, the analogy is direct: if the environment changes, behaviour can begin to change too.
You can also think of other examples such as smoking in close spaces changes in most of the world in the past 20 years. Do you remember how it was? Do you understand how it changed?
How does the workplace teach people what to do?
Workplaces teach through their design, even when nobody intends it. An office layout can teach hierarchy or openness. A remote-working rhythm can teach trust or surveillance. A decision process can teach ownership or dependency. A meeting culture can teach presence or exhaustion. A reporting structure can teach collaboration or protection of territory.
This is why organisational design is not only a structural matter. It is one more of many cultural messages. The way roles, meetings, incentives, technology, information flows and decision rights are arranged determines what people can do easily and what requires heroic effort. If a behaviour requires heroism to be sustained, it is not yet part of the culture.
Leaders often ask for new behaviours because the strategy requires them, but they do not always ask whether the organisational design supports those behaviours. If the strategy demands customer intimacy, do teams have access to customer reality? If the strategy demands speed, are decision rights clear and risk tolerance at the right level? If the strategy demands fast learning, is there time and psychological safety to reflect on mistakes? If the strategy demands cross-functional collaboration, are goals shared or fragmented?
“We are myriad versions of ourselves depending on context, on the people around us, even on whether or not the sun is shining that day.” – Be The Change
Why is speed not always the same as transformation?
Modern organisations are often addicted to speed. We want faster decisions, faster learning, faster adoption, faster transformation. Speed can be valuable, especially when the market is moving quickly. But not every process can be rushed without damage. Some changes require time because they involve trust, identity, habits and the meaning people attach to their work. We just need to understand that some things require speed while some others require time. Do we know which one falls in which category?
Nature is a beautiful teacher here. It reminds us that growth has rhythms. Roots do not become strong because we pull the plant upwards. Foundations do not become stable because we want the building finished by Friday. In organisations, the same is true. A culture of trust cannot be installed overnight. A leadership team cannot become genuinely aligned simply because the strategy document is ready. People need repeated experiences that make the new way credible.
This does not mean leaders should move slowly. It means they should distinguish between urgency and anxiety. The health and environmental studies on Barcelona’s superblocks show that urban redesign requires pilots, adaptation and systemic thinking. Organisational transformation requires the same: act, learn, adjust, persist.
How can leaders redesign context for culture change?
The first step is to name the behaviour the strategy requires. Not the value, not the aspiration, but the behaviour. “We need more innovation” is too broad. “We need teams to test small customer-facing ideas within two weeks without waiting for executive approval” is a behaviour. Once the behaviour is clear, leaders can examine the context around it.
What makes this behaviour easier? What makes it harder? Which systems contradict it? Which meetings slow it down? Which metrics distort it? Which leaders unconsciously undermine it? Which fear is reasonable from the employee’s perspective? The answers reveal the organisational design work required to make the behaviour possible.
Then leaders can create pilots. A pilot is not a theatre of certainty; it is a structured way to learn. Try a new meeting format in one leadership team. Redesign one decision process. Give one customer-facing team clearer authority. Protect one day a month for learning and reflection. Remove one approval step and observe what happens. If the experiment is taken seriously, it produces feedback. Without action, there is nothing.
What if the organisation is still designed for the past?
Many organisations were designed for a world that no longer exists. They were built for stability, scale, control, efficiency and predictability. These qualities still matter. The question is whether they are now preventing the organisation from learning, adapting and connecting with the future. A structure that once protected quality may now slow responsiveness. A culture that once created excellence may now create fear. A governance system that once reduced risk may now prevent intelligent experimentation.
The serious leadership challenge is not to reject the past. It is to understand which parts of the past still serve the future and which parts have become invisible constraints. That requires respect and courage. Respect, because old systems often solved real problems. Courage, because new realities require us to redesign what we may still be emotionally attached to.
Organisational design becomes a leadership act when we stop seeing structure as static and begin seeing it as a living context. If the context teaches, then leaders are responsible for what it teaches.
Conclusion: In which context are you asking people to change?
Organisational design shapes behaviour because people act inside systems, not outside them. If we want different choices, different conversations and different results, we also need to examine the context that makes current behaviour logical. Asking people to change without redesigning the environment is one of the fastest ways to create frustration.
The question for leaders is simple and demanding: Where are we asking people to behave in a new way while keeping them inside a system designed for the old one? What is the one thing in your context that you feel is contradicting the changes needed?
FAQ
Organisational design is the way roles, structures, processes, decision rights, incentives and ways of working are arranged to support strategy and behaviour.
Context shapes behaviour by making some actions easier, safer and more rewarded than others.
Because new behaviours rarely last if the surrounding systems, meetings, incentives and decision processes continue reinforcing the old culture.
Cities show that people behave differently when space, movement, access and social rituals change. Organisations can apply the same logic to work systems.