Last week I wrote about the absent decision underneath most marketing problems. PR fails, briefs wobble, budgets get postponed. Almost always because the business hasn't made the call about what it's actually trying to be.

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A few of you wrote back. Same pattern, different layer. One head of marketing put it plainly. "The bit I'd add is the org chart. We move the people because we won't move the decision."

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That line has stayed with me. Because in the last seven days alone, three of the businesses I work with have restructured. Three different sectors. Three different sizes. Three completely different reasons. And only one of them actually chose to.

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A quick word on what I mean by restructure. The lazy version is org chart. New boxes, same problems. The version that actually unlocks scale is broader: the right people in the right shape, the processes that connect them, and the alignment between sales and marketing that turns the whole thing from a relay race into a team sport. Most "restructures" only touch one of those three. The ones that work touch all three.

When the structure follows the strategy

One of our clients runs a marketing function that used to look like one team serving every motion. New customer acquisition, existing customer growth, the occasional enterprise pursuit, all going through the same campaigns, the same nurture flows, the same content engine. Sales worked the same way. One pipeline, one cadence, one set of metrics for very different conversations.

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It worked, right up to the point it didn't.

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What the team noticed, slowly at first and then all at once, was that the acquisition motion needed volume and a constant top-of-funnel pulse. The customer growth motion needed account-level intelligence, internal champions and patience. Trying to do both inside one team meant doing neither well. So they split the function in two. New owner for new business, new owner for customer growth, a measurement model that made sense for each.

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Most restructures stop at the boxes. This one didn't. They redrew the handover process for each motion, agreed an SLA on what a qualified opportunity actually meant in each one, and rebuilt the weekly operating rhythm. Same headcount. Completely different machine.

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This was the calm version. Strategy moved first. Team, processes and alignment caught up together. Nobody left. Nobody cried.

When the team are doing the work, but not the vision

Another came from a senior leader who said it more bluntly than I would have dared.

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"Most of my team are doing a job. They're not executing on a vision."

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He'd noticed it across a few different functions. Heads down. Tickets cleared. Quarterly objectives more or less hit. But nobody in the room could tell him what the business was trying to become in twelve months, and certainly couldn't tell him what their role in that would be.

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His response was to split the business into two streams. Each with its own leader, its own commercial logic, its own process from first touch to renewal. Not because he wanted more org chart. Because he wanted somewhere clear to put the vision, and a process simple enough that the team could see how their work connected to it.

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This is the bit most restructures miss. New boxes don't fix old confusion. The structure works when the leader can say, in one sentence, what each box exists to do, and the people inside can describe the process they own and how it hands off to the next.

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If you can't, you've redecorated. You haven't restructured.

The pattern underneath

What makes a restructure work isn't speed or headcount or how clean the org chart looks. It's whether three things move together. The team shape. The processes that run through it. The sales and marketing alignment that turns the two into one engine.

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Most restructures move one and call it done. New head of marketing, same broken handover to sales. New sales leader, same marketing function measuring volume nobody can convert. The friction shows up again within a quarter.

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"Should I restructure?" is rarely the real question. The real question is what you've been avoiding making a call on, that the team, the processes and the handovers are now paying the price for.

If the answer is honest, the restructure usually writes itself.

The one thing to do this week

If you've been considering changing the shape of your team, or if a recent departure has tempted you to, do this before you do anything else.

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Open a blank page and answer these in plain language:

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• What the business is actually trying to be in twelve months, in one sentence
• Which two or three commercial moves matter most to get there
• Where each of those moves sits in the current structure, and which have no clear owner
• Where the handover between marketing and sales breaks today
• Which processes (lead routing, qualification, forecasting, weekly rhythm) were built for a business that no longer exists

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If the answers come quickly, you probably already know the call you need to make, and the structure is the easy part. If they don't, the restructure isn't ready yet. The thinking has to come first.

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A restructure that arrives as a decision lands. A restructure that arrives as a reaction creates the next one. A restructure that only changes the team without touching the process or the alignment is just a more expensive version of the problem you started with.

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Drop me a line if you're in the middle of one, or about to start one. I'm collecting these stories quietly, and the bit I'd most like to know is what triggered it.

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P.S. A few of you have already replied to last week's note about closed roundtables. The first topic that's emerging is hiring well at scale-up stage. Specifically, what a good brief actually looks like for a senior marketing or commercial hire, in a market where the candidate pool is noisier than ever. If that's a room you'd want to be in, hit reply. I'll send dates once we've got eight or nine confirmed.