The Architecture
Structural resolution sees how the pieces fit together. It’s where strategy becomes organization—the design layer between vision and execution.
Time Horizon: 1–3 Years (Long enough to restructure meaningfully, short enough to see results)
What Structural Resolution Sees
- Business Models: How value is created, delivered, and captured
- Organizational Design: Reporting structures, teams, decision rights
- System Architecture: Technical infrastructure, data flows, integrations
- Value Chains: Activities from input to customer value delivery
- Ecosystem Structures: Partners, suppliers, platforms, network effects
Questions Structural Resolution Asks
- “How should we organize to win?”
- “What’s our business model?”
- “How do the pieces fit together?”
- “What’s our competitive architecture?”
- “Where does value get created and captured?”
- “What capabilities do we need to build vs. buy?”
Key Characteristics
- Medium abstraction, emerging detail
- “How to win” decisions
- Organizational implications
- Resource allocation choices
- Difficult but not impossible to reverse
The Danger: The Consultant Trap
Beautiful designs that don’t work in practice.
People who live at structural resolution often:
- Create elegant org charts that ignore culture
- Design systems without operational constraints
- Confuse having a structure with having results
- Reorganize without changing outcomes
Structure without operation is theory. Architecture must translate to working processes.
This is part of a comprehensive analysis. Read the full analysis on The Business Engineer.
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