Complexity can be the natural consequence of a firm’s success, but, when not properly addressed, it makes firms slow to capture market opportunities, drives costs to higher-than-necessary levels and demoralizes employees. In many ways, increased organizational complexity is the silent killer of profitable growth. We work with companies to address the fundamental causes of organizational complexity, thereby clearing the roadblocks to growth and allowing them to make and execute decisions faster and more efficiently.

Organizational complexity is the new normal, driven by growth, globalization and disruptive technologies; properly addressing it requires time and focus. In order to do it decisively and sustainably, our holistic approach takes business fundamentals such as corporate strategy and operating model into account to ensure that we understand its root causes. We then address each one of these causes simultaneously with focused, practical recommendations and pragmatic incentives for both management and the frontline.

Our consultants team with clients to answer key questions about the complexity challenge:

• What issues are causing complexity? Tackling organizational complexity needs to be holistic and should begin with the fundamentals: a firm's strategy and operating model. Our approach to understanding the source of the complexity is supplemented by management interviews, targeted analysis and industry benchmarking.
• What actions will address complexity? Reducing complexity is about mobilizing properly and designing the right solutions for the long-term. We help clients build more efficient organizations while simultaneously cutting out redundant or unnecessary activity so that complexity doesn’t creep back.
• How do we achieve and sustain change? The only way to make complexity reduction sustainable is to ensure that the organization adopts, aligns and reinforces the right mindset and behaviors that allow it to operate more efficiently and effectively. This is a fundamental requirement that acknowledges that the behaviors and patterns of individuals across an organization are often major contributing factors to the complexity challenge in the first place.

Relying upon our broad organization consulting experience, we use our holistic approach to help companies identify and simultaneously address the fundamental drivers of complexity: an firm's structure, its people and their respective interactions.

In tackling complexity, we seek to put our clients on a path to long-term success by ensuring that its symptoms don’t creep back:

• Eliminate bloat: We work with our clients to right-size and right-shape the organization, to ensure the right structure, spans and layers and to adjust the mix of support to frontline resources.
• Ease congestion: We believe that time, like money, is a scarce resource that must be carefully managed. We help companies free up unproductive time by clarifying decision rights, roles and responsibilities, rationalizing initiatives and reports, removing low-value activity and duplication, streamlining and standardizing processes, improving decision effectiveness and increasing meeting discipline.
• Address dysfunction: We spell out the practical implications of an organization's most critical desired and problematic routines and behaviors and ensure that the right actions are reinforced with financial and non-financial mechanisms and fast feedback loops.

Our teams benefit from the input of specific experts and those with backgrounds in strategy, performance improvement, information technology and customer. Our Results approach also helps our case and client teams with change management to increase the odds of success. Along with our expertise on organization simplification, this forms the basis for collaborative, tailored, recommendations that suit each organization's unique needs.