CASE STUDY · ORGANIZATIONAL ARCHITECTURE
They stood up the division.
Nobody agreed on who owned what.
A multi-brand restaurant company consolidated its company-owned operations into a single division. The structure existed. The clarity didn't.
THE CHALLENGE
The division was created to lift performance across that company-owned portfolio, and it was assembled by pulling people, processes, and decision-making out of the existing brand teams. Everyone arrived carrying the way their brand had always done things. Responsibilities overlapped, handoffs stalled, and because the division answered for company restaurant performance while still carrying obligations to brand and corporate innovation, no one could say which work came first. Leadership needed the division operating, not organizing itself.
THE APPROACH
Assess.
One-on-one interviews with division leaders and a series of working sessions to surface priorities, barriers, and where accountability was genuinely contested.
Design.
A charter defining the division's strategy and how it fits the wider company, plus functional charters for every team in the division and its dedicated shared services. Work was sorted into three categories: business as usual, immediate priorities, and backlogged initiatives.
Equip.
Decision rights documented with a single accountable owner per activity, a governance cadence for tracking initiatives, and the materials leaders needed to explain the new structure to their teams and peers.
The design choice that did the work was the negative space. Every functional charter had to declare not just what the team owned, but what it explicitly does not do. In a consolidation, overlap is the default failure — each team assumes it still holds what it held before. Forcing every function to name its boundary put those conversations in one room while leaders were sitting together. It landed without a fight precisely because they wrote it themselves.
THE IMPACT
The leadership team approved the charter and moved directly into operationalizing it.
What they had at handoff was the thing a reorganization announcement can't give you: a stated strategy, every function with defined boundaries, a named decision-maker for every activity that mattered, and an agreed order of work.
The organizing was finished. The operating could start.
Charter approved by division leadership at handoff.