You can’t manage the zebra without structure.
Without good structure, work can’t get done, communication fails, and organisations become ineffective. The importance of structure can’t be overstated. If you run a project, if you manage an organisation, or if you simply want to communicate in a way that your audience actually understands, not following a few basic rules of structure will make it very hard to reach your target.
Why structure is important
Basically, structure helps us to understand and remember things. Our brains can process structured information up to 43% better than unstructured information (Abrahams, 2013, pp. 54). That means: by simply improving the structure of your communication you are almost doubling the likelihood of being understood. Not a bad return for doing nothing more than tidying up your thoughts.
I will give an eye-opening example of what this means a bit further down in this post. The second argument for good structure is its ability to organise work. This applies just as much to a small team as to a huge corporation. Let me take you on a thought experiment.
What is good structure?
Assume I would like to give you a gift 🙂 Imagine that I make you head of a business. A complete business, with employees, with a location, with all the tools, equipment, and inventory you need to run it successfully. Your new business. Imagine further that the only thing I ask you to do is to define your business organisation. I want you to paint your org chart. To make it easier, I only want you to define the first level of your direct reports. As the general manager you are about to define the “areas” reporting to you.
Now the last bit of information: the business you have been granted is not just any business. It is a ZOO. You are general manager of a zoo, so how do you organise it?
Managing the zebra: the zoo exercise
When I ask this question in class, the response typically varies with the type of course I am teaching. In a class of operational economics, the first answer is usually “FUNCTIONAL”. We can organise the zoo by functions. This is a fully correct answer, so the functional zoo might look like this:
Sales, Animal Care, Finance, Operations, HR. In my opinion this is great. This organisation can work effectively. Good job. The next proposal I often get is to organise the zoo by geographies, by the continents the animals come from. This is also perfectly fine and, in fact, very common in real life. Your zoo organised by geographies might look like this:
Again, this way of structuring the organisation is clear and precise. Usually the third answer is to organise by type of animal – mammals, birds, reptiles, and so on. A structure by type of animal might look like this:
Also this organisational structure is fine. No issues.
The MECE trick
Summing up, we have learned that there are multiple ways to organise a business. All of them can work well and which one you prefer is often a matter of individual preference, context, and strategy. The reason all three forms of structure are fine is that they follow a principle: they are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. MECE.
Mutually exclusive means no overlaps – each thing belongs in exactly one bucket. Collectively exhaustive means no gaps – everything has a place. All three alternatives above provide you with an organisation where, by structure alone, it is clear who is accountable, which team does what, and how work is organised. You can point at the org chart and immediately see where the zebra belongs. That is the power of MECE.
Breaking the MECE principle
Now let’s see what happens if we break the MECE principle. What if I suggest the following structure for your zoo: Sales, Animal Care, America, and Birds. Your first line of direct reports is composed of a Head of Sales, a Head of Animal Care, a Head of America, and a Head of Birds.
Totally fine, right? No? Why not? Why do you intuitively feel that this organisation is pure BULLSH**? 🙂 Let’s think about it. Who in this organisation is responsible for Finance? Who is in charge of African amphibians? What about American mammals? Is that the Head of Animal Care? The Director of the America division? Sales, maybe? That would be creative. You see the problem.
No overlaps and completeness
This organisation is not mutually exclusive and not collectively exhaustive. In other words, this structure is not free of overlaps and by far it is not fully complete. This leads us to a very simple rule for good structure: No overlaps and completeness.
I have seen many organisations with such a bad structure that you would not believe it. With unclear structure, everything becomes harder for employees: who is accountable for what, who can take which decision, whom do I need to talk to in order to move something forward. Structure is the key to making this clear. To achieve the “no overlaps” rule and to avoid organisational chaos, you need to ensure that the logical groups you use are of the same nature. You cannot mix “Animal Care” with “America” on the same level. Completeness, on the other hand, is often much harder to achieve, especially at the start of building a structure. But this is where good structure becomes magic. It not only organises what you know. It also reveals what you still do not know.
Starting a project organisation
Assume you are in the process of defining a project organisation. At the start of a project you most likely do not know all the tasks that need to be performed to achieve final project success. Depending on your experience with this kind of content you might have more or less clarity on the work packages in front of you. Nevertheless, it is key to start. You cannot wait until everything is perfectly clear before you move into execution. Trying to logically derive every possible task in the project would take you years of work with no tangible progress. And in my experience it still would not be complete. Two days into the project you will discover something nobody ever thought about.
So how do you start? You start by defining the best possible structure with the knowledge you have right now. By that I mean: you define clear work packages, you make them distinct, and you make them assignable to different members of your project team. Then you just start. You execute. And while executing, you keep adjusting the structure. As you move on, things get clearer and your structure becomes more complete. The structure even helps you identify potential gaps.
The Mendeleev concept
We all know the periodic table of chemical elements first discovered and published by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1896. At least we weakly remember our time in chemistry class at school where this was shown to us 🙂
Mendeleev understood that in nature all chemical elements follow a sequence and can be organised by the number of protons in their atom nucleus. By writing down this structure something interesting happened: Mendeleev was able to foresee new elements. At his time only 63 of today’s 118 chemical elements were known (Dmitri Mendeleev, accessed 16.02.2020, Wikipedia). The structure told him where to search. It allowed him to identify relationships between the various element properties. It allowed him to predict undiscovered elements. He was even able to predict the properties of elements that had not yet been found but were expected to fill the gaps in the table.
In other words, he could clearly see the “holes” in the known organisation of elements, because the structure told him where something was missing. This is what good structure can do in management as well. It shows you where something might be missing or wrongly placed.
Structure in communication
The last element of structure I want to talk about is communication. I will use a simple, beautiful, and very clear example from the book The Pyramid Principle written by Barbara Minto in 1978. Minto, a McKinsey alumna, developed the concept during her 10 years at the firm.
Imagine you are in a business situation where someone approaches you with an urgent request. Please read the message and try to understand what is going on:
“Sorry for interrupting you, but John Collins just telephoned to say that he can’t make the meeting at 3:00. Hal Johnson says he doesn’t mind taking it later, or even tomorrow, but not before 10:30, and Don Clifford’s secretary says that Clifford won’t return from Frankfurt until tomorrow, late. The conference room is booked tomorrow, but free Thursday. Thursday at 11:00 looks to be a good time. Is that OK for you?” (Minto, 2002, p. 3)
This is the way most people communicate: hard to understand, full of irrelevant detail, and the main point comes at the very end, if at all. Now let’s see the magic that structure can do to communication:
“Sorry for interrupting you, but could we reschedule today’s meeting to Thursday at 11:00? This would be more convenient for Collins and Johnson, and would also permit Clifford to be present.” (Minto, 2002, p. 3)
Magic, isn’t it 🙂 Same content. Same facts. But structured. It is just a simple example to show why structure helps. Start with the conclusion first. Only then (if needed) provide the underlying arguments that led you there. The structure of your arguments should, again, follow the MECE principle.
First tell the time, then explain the clock
The already mentioned Matt Abrahams once famously said: “First tell the time, then explain how the clock is working.” In my experience many people do it in the opposite way. First they try to walk you through all the reasoning and arguments they have thought about. Only then, sometimes minutes later, they finally tell you the conclusion. Remember Abrahams. Do not do that. First the time, then the clock. Much easier to follow.
Given this illustration, think about what structure can do for more complex communication, such as a comprehensive concept document or an important presentation. If you want to get your message across, you need to apply structure. The better the structure, the better the message will be understood.
Applying it to management
In my experience, one of the hardest parts of starting any kind of change is slicing the overwhelming number of things that need to be done into reasonable work packages. A member of my team once told me: “Starting a project from zero is like staring at a blank piece of paper.” Where do we start? What do we do first? Whom and what skills do we need?
When the bus arrives
In my classes I often use the metaphor of a bus full of people. Imagine you are a project manager starting a project. I am the sponsor of this project. As this project is of maximum importance to me, I provide you with a ton of resources. I personally convince everyone to support the project. I drive around with my bus collecting every helping hand I can find. Now imagine you are sitting at your desk, staring at the famous blank piece of paper, still not having been able to define the structure of your project. At exactly this very moment I arrive with my bus. I get out and proudly present to you every one of the 100 people I just handpicked for our project. Then I leave you, fully convinced that I have done everything possible to make you successful. In my head the project will now immediately accelerate to light speed.
What will actually happen? Nothing will happen. If you have no structure, the 100 people will not be able to start working at all. Without structure, without work packages, without any kind of organisation, all those motivated and skilled people are almost useless. It is structure that allows collaboration to start. It is structure that allows communication to be clear and understandable. It is structure that prevents your zoo from turning into a nightmare. Help the zebra. You can’t manage the zebra without structure.