[atoav]

If we talk about organizational structure, the one real question is whether you can just look at the structure and figure out a organisations success just based on that.

My feeling is that this could be a good way to filter out highly dysfunctional organizations. However I don't think you can find successful ones that easily, let alone come up with an magical organizational structure that automatically leads to success.

That might be because there are a lot of tiny details that might shape a organization much more than the pure structure of departments and roles. Let's say organization A and organization B have the same structure and do the same thing in the same field, but organization A has a good HR department which manages to attract good people and have them work for decades at the company, while organization B has a bad HR department, hires incompetent, fraudulent and downright nasty people, who don't stay on the job for long – wouldn't this make such a huge difference that differences stemming from the pure structure of the organization would be drowned out?

Of course you could now think about how a organizational structure could prevent this from happening, and maybe with the right structure and people checking each others decisions the likelyhood of such a bad outcome could be mitigated – but never fully.

[HappyDreamer]

You can look at a chain, and see: This link is broken, the chain is broken. But if it looks intact, you cannot just from looking at it, know how strong it is.