Improving leadership’s performance in their organizational design

How Org Topologies and Leading with Obeya Strengthen Each Other.

Introduction

Many organizations struggle with structural inertia—entrenched ways of working that limit adaptiveness and stifle value creation. Leadership teams often find themselves constrained to inherited organizational systems shaped by legacy decisions. As a result, decision-making is fragmented, tough problems persist, and leadership influence on outcomes remains limited.

Often, organizational design is overlooked, and without a clear framework to diagnose and elevate organizational design, teams remain constrained by invisible boundaries, reinforcing misalignment between strategy and execution. Without a structured and systemic approach, leadership teams may find themselves reacting to challenges instead of proactively shaping the organization for long-term success.

This is where Org Topologies™ (OT) and Leading with Obeya (LWO) come together as a powerful combination. OT helps diagnose and design the right organizational structures to enable strategy execution and value creation. LWO provides a leadership system to connect people to shared goals, monitor performance, and continually improve. Together, they ensure that organizational design changes are both well-founded and continuously reinforced within the leadership system, supporting both strategic alignment and operational execution.

The integration of LWO and OT strengthens leadership effectiveness in two essential ways

1. Challenging the leadership team’s position in organizational design

Many leadership teams operate within predefined boundaries, shaped by historical decisions, reporting lines, and traditional management structures. However, these boundaries rarely reflect the actual flow of value creation in the organization. As a result, leadership remains stuck with limited influence on the overall results and persistent performance issues remain unsolved.

LWO starts with fundamental questions:

What is the shared goal? And who do we need to achieve it? 

This broadens leadership’s perspective beyond their immediate team,  inviting a broader group to align on shared purpose. OT then challenges whether the existing organizational design truly enables this goal, offering insights into root causes of misalignment and identifying structural adjustments that may be needed.

Org Topologies provides a way to assess whether the leadership team is optimally positioned within the system or if its structure inadvertently reinforces these constraints. It maps out how leadership’s - and their organization’s - current placement affects value delivery, creating a deeper awareness of systemic bottlenecks, and possible ways to elevate the organizational design based on the leadership’s optimization goal.

2. Sustaining organizational design changes into the leadership system and operational execution

A big challenge organizations face is ensuring that org design changes don’t remain isolated interventions. Even well-designed structural changes risk losing momentum if they are not embedded in the leadership system.

This is where Leading with Obeya can play an impactful role. When changes are made to organizational design (OT suggests changes to the organizational design), LWO ensures they are integrated into leadership decision-making and remain a continuous focus. It prevents organizational design changes from being a one-time fix by embedding them into the leadership system’s regular focus, reinforcing them over time.

By treating LWO as a strategic elevating kata within OT, leadership teams develop a rhythm of assessing, reinforcing, and evolving organizational design in alignment with strategy and business goals. This ensures that structural changes are not only implemented but sustained, while adapting to evolving needs.

How Org Topologies improves your leadership system

Beyond optimizing organizational design, Org Topologies also helps leadership teams reflect on and improve their organizational system. It provides a structured way to assess whether leadership is positioned effectively to drive strategic goals or merely reacting to existing constraints.

By visualizing different Org Topologies archetypes, leadership teams can recognize how their organizational design influences decision-making, collaboration, and the ability to drive effectively execute your strategy. This creates an opportunity to refine leadership effectiveness itself, ensuring that leaders are not just managing within a system, but actively shaping it.

How Leading with Obeya helps organizations in their current organizational setup

Leading with Obeya provides a way to align leadership focus, improve collaboration, and drive continuous improvement within the current system. Many organizations struggle with fragmented decision-making, misaligned priorities, and a lack of end-to-end visibility. LWO addresses these challenges by creating a shared space where leadership teams can connect their goals, strategies, and execution efforts in a structured and visual way. Instead of waiting for an organizational redesign to solve systemic issues, LWO helps leadership teams work effectively within their current setup while identifying necessary adjustments over time. By reinforcing a rhythm of structured problem-solving, learning, and adaptation, LWO enables organizations to navigate complexity, improve decision-making, and create a culture of continuous alignment and improvement, which also enable organizational design elevations.

A systemic approach to leadership and organizational design

Together, Org Topologies and Leading with Obeya provide a systemic approach that ensures both leadership effectiveness and organizational design work in harmony.

• OT offers a way to analyze structural constraints and identify opportunities to elevate organizational design.

• LWO provides the leadership practice to sustain and refine those shifts over time.

By combining these two perspectives, organizations move beyond reactive leadership and static design, creating an environment where continuous improvement, alignment, and execution become second nature.

Looking ahead

In future articles, we will explore practical ways to apply this combined approach in different organizational scenarios. We will dive deeper into methods for assessing leadership positioning, overcoming common design challenges, and ensuring that leadership systems actively support organizational evolution.

Learn more about Org Topologies in the primer, on the website or in one of the classes. 

Learn more about Leading with Obeya on the website or one of the classes.