STRATEGIC AI as an ACCELERATOR

How Org Design and AI Drive Performance

Different org designs serve different goals: adaptiveness, flow, efficiency, etc.
The wrong design blocks performance: unfit structures derail business objectives like market share or profit.
Leaders must design deliberately: org goals (e.g. adaptive) should align with and influence business objectives.
Org Topologies shows the path: aligning design with strategy makes 10X performance achievable.
Apply AI strategically: with Org Topologies as a vector, AI reduces barriers and accelerates elevation.

When AI Is Applied Non-Strategically ...

“Adopt AI!”
“Redefine your leadership in the age of AI!”
“Form agentic agile teams!”

These slogans sound bold—but they likely won't drive real improvement. At best, they fuel the sales of self-proclaimed “AI consultants.” At worst, they distract people from the real work.

Companies need to keep up and adopt AI. There is a fear of falling behind if you don’t, but the implications of AI in the organization are unknown. Companies explore what AI can do for them by adopting AI as a new tool: Everyone gets a GPT license and is encouraged to start using it to support their daily work.

This approach yields benefits such as AI-generated tests, automated code analysis, enhanced planning and reporting, product integrations such as chatbots, and AI-supported decision models, etc. All of these are local AI implementations, improving the work of individuals, existing teams, and departments.

Unfortunately, all your competitors are doing exactly the same. These are easy wins, they’re obvious and available to everyone. This is not creating a long-lived competitive edge for your company. This is non-strategic AI, and it is unlikely to deliver any long-term performance increase.

Because non-strategic AI accelerates whatever structure and habits you already have:

Siloed teams become faster in isolation.
Narrow specialists become more irrelevant faster.
Private code ownership triggers bottlenecks more often.
Dependency boards become more visible gridlocks.
In summary, an unclear strategy becomes faster chaos.

AI won't magically solve your core organizational problems. It will speed up the current trends, possibly even making things worse.

>The real limit isn’t in the AI itself, it’s in the constraints of your current org design.

We jokingly call such non-strategic improvement attempts 1X improvement—no visible improvement over time whatsoever. Same-same. But now with AI.

How Org Topologies™ Change This Dynamic

Every organization has a design. But is it intentional, or did it grow organically?

Org Topologies (OT) and its MADE method of systemic change help get radical clarity on your current org design:

What is our business ambition?
Which org topology are we in currently?
Assess: Is our organization fit for purpose?

If there is no strong fit for purpose, then OT helps you define the new target org design:

Define your target topology.
List the desired strategic capabilities to obtain.
Find ways to get closer to that new state.

Now, this target design provides a strong direction and clear framing for experimenting and adopting AI. Strategically.

Strategic AI for 10X Improvement

With Org Topologies providing you with a strategic improvement vector, AI becomes a possible change enabler and accelerator:

AI supports rightward movement on the OT map (i.e., broadening skill mandates). This is achieved by enabling teams to become more end-to-end capable and increase throughput using AI-assisted multi-learning.
AI supports upward movement too (i.e., broadening work mandates) by enabling teams to tackle larger business problems holistically, thereby providing unprecedented innovation capabilities.

So the question changes from situational “How can we adopt AI as fast as possible because all competitors do that?” to a more strategic “How can we use AI to get closer to our target?”

This is where 10X performance improvement becomes possible. Not because AI suddenly fixes all the org flaws, but because it gets embedded in a strategic, thoughtful org redesign and improvement work.

Available Now: In-Company Leadership Workshop