Rebecca Henderson

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The org chart that haunts me is my own.

I have redesigned organizational structures dozens of times across my career. Moved boxes around. Drawn new reporting lines. Created teams, dissolved teams, merged teams. Every time, I believed I was solving a problem. Henderson's work showed me I was rearranging furniture inside a building whose architecture I had never examined.

There is a difference between changing components and changing architecture. It sounds obvious when you say it. It is not obvious when you are living inside it. The components are visible — the people, the roles, the tools, the deliverables. The architecture is invisible — the assumptions about how those components relate to each other, the embedded knowledge about which handoffs are necessary, which sequences are natural, which boundaries are