The Structure Pattern Problem

Consumer brands set growth targets without aligning functions, roles, reporting lines, or decision making authority to deliver them. Owning the gap between ambition and structure unlocks growth through how the organisation is built.

‍What makes it harder: Consumer industries are absorbing an unusual volume of global and local change at once. Shifting demand patterns, trade and tariff pressure, new channel economics, technology reshaping how product reaches customer, and a macro environment where the only certainty is uncertainty. Most functions are adapting to their own slice of this, and that is the problem.

‍What the gap creates: Design is optimising for its own nuance. Commercial is optimising for its own. Supply chain, marketing, retail, digital, each is moving, but in silo. The connective tissue between them is weaker than it was five years ago. The result is an organisation where every function is busy and the business as a whole is out of sync.

‍The unsexy but measurable fix: Holding steady while the ground moves requires robust work. Audit the structure. Does every function and senior role have a clear mandate, defined authority, and aligned KPIs with cross functional synergy to the business model? The brands growing right now did that work before attempting scaled growth, and they did it across all functions, not just creative.

‍Where most organisations fall down: Then it becomes a question of skills and expertise matching. But here is where most organisations fall down. The vast majority of senior leaders have never been formally trained in how to make structured decisions about their own teams. They reward speed over clarity, default to pattern matching from previous roles, and treat hiring as a downstream task rather than a strategic one. When there is ambiguity in the brief, nobody challenges it because doing so carries political cost.

‍The questions to ask first: Before your next leadership appointment, get honest answers to two questions. Is the structure designed for where we are going, or inherited from where we have been and the familiar? And are the people making this decision aligned on what success actually looks like? If not, fix that first. Everything else is noise. When a search launches with misaligned stakeholders, the hire absorbs the consequences.