“Not to decide is to decide.” — Harvey Cox, Harvard Professor of Theology

This is a line that anyone who’s lived through unclear strategy or slow decision-making will recognise.

When your strategy looks like this pizza you can imagine the effect on the guts of the organisation.

Jay Galbraith, the godfather of modern organisation design, developed the Star Model in the 1970s which frames organisational design as not just boxes on an org chart but the alignment of strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people

⭐ Strategy — how you choose to win
⭐ Structure — where decisions live
⭐ Processes — how information flows
⭐ Rewards — what drives behaviour
⭐ People — the skills and mindsets you build

Each are equally important interrelated aspects of an organisation enabling it to compete and create value.

This piece of underutilised consulting gold, shows how strategy doesn’t sit in isolation — it ripples through. If the strategy itself is a muddled compromise, the organisation will never metabolise it without heartburn. Design is the mirror of strategy — and leaders must decide whether that mirror reflects clarity of purpose or the confusion of competing priorities.

I help leaders make the hard calls: deciding which customers and priorities to serve — and just as importantly, which ones not to.

Overcomplication is easy.
Simplicity isn’t about fewer ideas, it’s about the discipline to choose the right ones — and let go of the rest.